Since joining CKB Dev Rel (Developer Relations) in September 2024, I’ve tried several times to write some articles to get back into the habit of writing, but I’ve indulged in procrastination by saying that “I’m still figuring out what I’m going to write about”. It’s a good thing this procrastination didn’t turn into “stagnation” and I’m glad I didn’t have to start all over again.
The last time I tried to write something, I wrote:
I’m finally in a better position to try to “reflect on” ("to think carefully and consider the implications and effects ") this “journey”; it has already been two years since January 2023, when I got into blockchain by coincidence and left Creative Education in China.
First of all, the following is my personal experience, and I’m not involved in promoting any specific product. Since I’m a fifteen year depressed + adult ADHD survivor + sociology graduate + a bit of a narcissist, the writing style may feel a bit obsessive, so please bear with me. Thanks for reading!
I’ve thought long and hard about the blockchain journey over the past two years, and if I had to summarise the theme in one word, the most appropriate would be “liberation”.
This “liberation” is the most daily sense of liberation, not something too epic; to be more specific, liberation can be any form of greater freedom even if only a little bit: to be able to take the subway rather than a bus is a kind of liberation, to be able to use a dishwasher rather than only hand-washing is a kind of liberation, and to be able to read and understand the English article without translation is also a kind of liberation.
Of course, not having to go to work and being able to do whatever I want is also a kind of liberation, but I just can’t do it yet XD.
The liberation that blockchain has given me in these two years is not only the increase in income:
Because of blockchain, I have more choices of travel and residence, and I don’t have to choose to put up with the possible difficulties of my employer for the sake of my work visa, and there is less wear and tear on the international flow of money;
I found a direction that I can be the best of myself and somehow be relatively free from the waves of the times washing over me recklessly, so that I can have a new dimension of growth in my professional career;
my work allows me to jump out of the endless and despearte predicment of being a mediocre salaryman in China without the fear of being replaced at the age of 35 (which is a common Chinese myth);
my job allows me to be completely WFH and I can work at my own pace, so the typical symptoms of depression and ADHD won’t be affecting my performance too much;
To put it human words, more money, less drama, fun work, and a simple life.
Of course all of this liberation doesn’t come entirely from the blockchain, and a lot of it is highly correlated with my personal background, opportunities, community culture, connections, and support around me, as well as the fact that there are a lot of people who for a variety of reasons don’t have access to the blockchain at all, let alone benefit from it. But the fact that the impact it has already had (and is expected to have) is happening on levels that may be deeply rooted and long-standing makes me shy away from taking it for granted, and instead observing it with great prudence and try to understand it.
Every emancipation of any kind that I know of in history tends to have far-reaching effects that are specific to the era in which it takes place: the advent of household appliances, for example, has given progressive women throughout history more time and energy to devote to social movements and to fight for fair social rights.
I think the two most important realities in the historical context in which the blockchain has brought about, are AI and neoliberalism.
It would be too difficult to expand on these two, so I’d like to pick one point: liberation is getting harder and harder, the prerequisites of such liberation is more demanding than every, and it’s being held hostage by bigger players, which makes it even more obvious that this kind of liberation is no longer so simple and clear-cut.
AI, for example, has “liberated” the cost of employment, and finance, for example, has liberated liquidity. But for the vast majority of people facing these two forms of liberation, they mean a lot more as the fear of being replaced, the fear of being scammed, and the cost of learning AI or finance is far greater than learning to use a washing machine; when the liberation can only benefit a part of the people, or even kidnapped by this part of the people, for the whole society is a disguised further servitude.
The same is true of blockchain: arithmetic, the ability and cost of learning, connections, funding, policy, and even, say, Trump, can all be obstacles in some form.
It’s sad, but I think, and many other like-minded people like me feel, that the liberation that blockchain brings is unique: like so many other liberations, it spawns new industries and opportunities, and reduces the cost of social interactions, but the liberation that is at its core, is trust.
Space constraints make it difficult to explain in a single sentence where this trust comes from, but its impact is intuitive: people no longer have to need and rely on the assurance of an institution or a living person to believe in something; through knowledge and cryptographic algorithms, I can gain some mathematically reliable certainty in probability and game theory, giving me more resources and backbone to face " society" - a world where “uncertainty” is the only certainty.
This may sound convoluted, but the analogy can be made to the recent surge in gold: when Trump is messing around, people lost faith in stocks and the US dollar and chose gold because they believed that gold’s scarcity (at least in the distant reality of man-made gold) and universally recognized value could withstand the years and the waves.
For reasons that are well known, this aspect will not continue to be expanded upon. What I’d rather talk about is another one of the somewhat more meaningful liberation that blockchain brings - smart contracts.
In simple terms, smart contracts are programs that are executed automatically, but the execution of these programs on the blockchain has several characteristics: the environment and external data in which the program is executed are public and unforgeable, as is the specific logic of the program, so the results are also public, unforgeable, and irreversible.
Of course this is extremely simplified and based on a whole lot of premises; in the actual implementation, misdeeds in disguise are not uncommon, of which I may explore further in future articles.
Ideally, the mission of such a blockchain is to become the “public computer of mankind”, which is why the blockchain DeFi and BTC, ETH, SOL directly spawned a huge industry, because in the financial world, certainty is the most valuable thing.
But I think that beyond DeFi, the new paradigm of “trust” brought about by blockchain can bring about new changes in various scenarios throughout society.
One area I’ve been focusing on lately is zkLLM (Zero Knowledge Proof for Large Language Models): Suppose if we somehow run multiple large language models on the blockchain publicly, reliably, and efficiently, or prove that their outputs come from “a piece of deterministic input” and “a deterministic model state”, can we build a social insurance-like program on the blockchain with multiple big language models for arbitration? In that case, we may no longer need insurance companies, and we will not be in the same predicament as Luigi.
Of course, this is just a very naive idea: in fact, due to the lack of sufficient funding sources and human resources, these kinds of use cases are rare, and I can’t even cite a few decent examples. But I can sense that there are many people, including me, who are willing and able to explore this area to the best of their ability, and to realize their own value at the level of social well-being.
As I write this, I’d like to share with you my feelings about working at CKB DevRel in the last six months: I think that apart from the technical aspects, the culture and experience at CKB is very nourishing for a technical idealist (for a more specific discussion, you can Google “CKB Idealism”).
On the technical side, I probably won’t be able to stop talking about it once I start XD. To put it simply, CKB’s most distinctive feature is that it’s a UTXO chain with RISC-V as its base.
In human terms, it was built from the ground up on two things: a universal public computer architecture on which you can run any type of program, and a technical anchor to BTC, making CKB the Contract Kernel of Bitcoin.
A side note: the other day Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin posted a proposal to replace the existing EVM with RISC-V, mentioning that “the Nervos CKB VM has set a precedent for what is essentiallya RISC-V implementation.” But that’ s something he’s probably going to have to work on . "But this is something he estimates will take years to get going (and secretly, does that mean we’re way ahead of the game?).
In the last six months, I’ve put most of my effort into a project called SSRI: in short, it’s the last piece of CKB’s smart contract core, which allows for a higher level of abstraction in the interaction and programming paradigm of smart contracts. After this project, we at Dev Rel Team gradually felt that we have done enough infrastructure to invite more people to come to CKB to experience and explore blockchain and all the new possibilities it brings. My next focus will be on developer education, attracting and retaining more developers in various ways to bring more life to the CKB ecosystem.
I’ll continue to write articles based on my personal experiences and thoughts, and I’ll try to avoid the technical aspects (but feel free to leave technical questions, I’ll be happy to answer them!) So far I’ve been thinking about writing about how far it is to go from the traditional internet industry to blockchain (which may be a lot closer than you think), some of the projects I’ve been looking at lately, some of the views of Digital Nomads and WFH, and some of the views on switch to a programing career. Hopefully I don’t procrastinate too much!
Back on topic, I feel that blockchains of all kinds, including CKB, like all kinds of new information technologies, will bring all kinds of new liberation to humanity, but also new challenges; and among them, I feel that the most important on a practical level is that blockchains further allow us to test a new idea at low costs and low thresholds, to gather resources, and to bring about a new paradigm in information technology.
But in a deeper sense, blockchain is just a symbol. It symbolises that there is still some breathing room for some of us, amidst the unprecedented high pressure brought about by social unrest and the collapse of the social order in the context of neoliberalism. In the course of history, any form of social structure will always brutally and permanently confine a large portion of the population, leaving them to struggle all day long for only enough to eat. But if you are lucky enough to still have some room to spare, we can think about what we can do together, while taking care of ourselves.
)