This article was originally published here:
https://yakihonne.com/article/naddr1qq25ce6ff3ny7mm40ff42hmgfue52mn4244ngq3qarkn0xxxll4llgy9qxkrncn3vc4l69s0dz8ef3zadykcwe7ax3dqxpqqqp65wackq8r

This article has been translated into Japanese here: https://yakihonne.com/article/naddr1qq257w2t8qeksc6tdg6njnekdc6x55j0w56nvq3qarkn0xxxll4llgy9qxkrncn3vc4l69s0dz8ef3zadykcwe7ax3dqxpqqqp65wu2llgg

This article has been translated into French here: https://yakihonne.com/article/naddr1qq2h23jjwck4zajsv4485h68f5mj6c66vfmxuq3qarkn0xxxll4llgy9qxkrncn3vc4l69s0dz8ef3zadykcwe7ax3dqxpqqqp65wvsexdg

In this article we are going to explore the conceptual origins of the original metaverse called "cyberspace" and see how nostr finally enables it to exist as it was predicted in early science fiction. Then we will explore what cyberspace might be able to do for humanity and how you can contribute to this exciting new open-source metaverse project.

A Concept Obscured by Time

What is a "metaverse"? Ask 10 different people and you will get 10 different answers. Some will say that it is an online game where you can use and transfer crypto assets. Some will say it's a virtual reality experience with extrasensory input for things like smell and touch. Some will say that a metaverse is anywhere you can connect and express yourself digitally. And some may tell you the metaverse doesn't exist yet because we don't have the technology to make it happen.

It's hard to define what a metaverse is because nobody has convincingly built it yet. This is demonstrable by simply asking anyone to show you a metaverse. They may show you VR Chat, or Meta (Facebook), or the HoloLens or Apple Vision, or someone's Discord server or NFT ecosystem, or say "it's not real, and if it is it's probably stupid."

But how did we get here? Why do we all know about the metaverse but we can't define it and we don't even know what it looks like? Where did the idea of the metaverse come from? This answer will give us the conceptual background we need to untangle the question of "what is a metaverse" and see how cyberspace can exist today.

The word "metaverse" was first popularized in Neal Stephenson's 1992 book "Snow Crash", and he was in turn inspired by William Gibson's earlier 1984 book "Neuromancer" (and 2 other books in a trilogy called "The Sprawl"), which popularized the word "cyberspace" and "matrix" in reference to digital 3D spaces.

Accordingly, cyberspace preceded "the metaverse" by 8 years and serves as the foundation for our exploration. Gibson's cyberspace was a digital 3D world one could connect to via a cyberspace deck — a machine/brain interface — and interact with all the data in the entire world. Artificial Intelligences guarded data constructs and kept out intruders with lethal feedback programs that would fry human operator's brains. In the books, cyberspace is described as being used for pretty much everything: entertainment, education, communication, commerce, data storage, and crime, and it is used daily by billions of people throughout the world, including millions of people in orbital colonies.

Mysterious Properties

In Gibson's work, cyberspace has many fascinating qualities that, until nostr, remained very mysterious and seemed to be impossible. Here are some examples.

1. Cyberspace is Permissionless

Everyone can use cyberspace but nobody has full control over it; cyberspace seems to exist outside of every jurisdiction and system. It never goes down for maintenance or has connection issues or suffers security breaches. It seems to exist everywhere at once, even though it is explicitly stated that cyberspace was created by humanity. How can humanity create an uninterruptable, omnipresent digital system that nobody can control but everyone can use?

2. Power is Wielded Without Privilege

Certain people, corporations, and AI weilded greater levels of power in cyberspace than others, but the mechanism of that power was not derived from permissions or access levels or privileged administrator capabilities; rather, the power came from some mysterious other source that could not be granted, governed, or revoked by any law or system or authority. This power seemed also to be heavily influenced by...

3. Hardware and Skill

The hardware that people used to connect to cyberspace had a direct impact on their capabilities in cyberspace. There is a a specific example where a character uses a premium cyberspace deck and describes the speed and smoothness of their ability to fly through cyberspace. A short while later, this operator is captured and immobilized by another dangerously skilled operator, demonstrating that while the cyberspace hardware was top-tier, the operator's skill level was also a big factor governing interactions in cyberspace. This also demonstrates that conflict is possible in cyberspace. How is it possible that hardware directly correlates to your capacity for virtual action? How can someone else influence your actions against your will in this digital reality?

4. Space is Scarce

Bitcoin was the first scarce digital resource to ever exist, and having only been created 14 years ago, scarce digital resources are still a novel concept to humanity in 2023. In Gibson's cyberspace, territory was conquered, captured, and fought over, indicating that the space in cyberspace may be scarce or valuable in some way. How could it be possible to fight for digital territory or acquire it without any governing intermediary took keep track of who owns what?

5. Construction Has a Cost

Constructs, or cyberspace "buildings", required some kind of effort or cost to create, but it was not clear to whom this cost was paid or how the effort was expended.

The metaverse of Stephenson's "Snow Crash" shares many properties with Gibson's cyberspace, although Stephenson is somewhat opinionated with the literal shape of the metaverse. He depicts it as a street that wraps around a black planet, and the land off the street is where people build things and claim territory.

This metaverse similarly does not seem to be owned or controlled by any single entity, yet it is available to everyone in the world to connect, interact, and build in 24/7. It is not described as an application or piece of software, but rather a place that is the sum of other software created by many different parties with different interests and motivations.

Here are some mysterious traits of Stephenson's metaverse:

6. Rules without Rulers

The rules of the metaverse were never broken — not even by hackers or bad guys. How are rules enforced by a system nobody controls?

7. No Teleportation, Localized Rules

The metaverse had rules about where you could spawn in and how you move. Teleportation was not an option. Specialized vehicle software could make traveling easier. Rules for travel were enforced by the metaverse itself. Experiences in the metaverse were localized to constructs that implemented their own rules. For example, sword fighting was allowed in The Black Sun hacker haven because it was programmed to exist there; other places did not have such activities. How can certain places in cyberspace have unique rules separate from the rest of cyberspace? How is locality enforced in a digital system controlled by noone?

8. Customize Without Compromising Everything

People were able to customize how their avatars and constructs looked. How do you govern this so people don't abuse it? Without enforceable rules, one person could make their avatar be the size of the universe and ruin the metaverse for everyone.

9. Everything is Connected

Digital systems in the real world had a presence in the metaverse too, although they were far from commonly populated areas. How do real world systems relate to the metaverse?

I enumerate these points in order to provide some context for where the idea for "the metaverse" began. These two books were instrumental in originally defining what the metaverse was even though it raised many specific questions that naturally were never addressed. As I have said: if the authors knew how to build the things they wrote about, they might not need to sell any books at all! This is fiction after all. Specifics are not required, but I have been focused on uncovering these specifics in the context of new technologies such as bitcoin and nostr and I believe they may now be defined.

To summarize, here are the mysterious properties of cyberspace/the metaverse:

• Everyone can use it

• Nobody controls it

• It exists everywhere

• An individual's power is not granted by any system or authority but comes from their hardware and skill

• Individuals can weild their power against each other

• Territory is scarce and may be captured

• Constructs may be build on territory but have some kind of cost

• The system enforces rules on everyone, or somehow incentivises everyone to follow the rules — even bad actors

• locality is enforced and travel requires time

• certain localities have unique rules

• freedom to customize your avatar and constructs are bounded in some way to prevent total corruption and abuse of digital space

• there is some form of connection between real world digital systems and cyberspace

Nothing Like It

I want to make it very clear that no metaverse in existence today exhibits all of the above properties or even a few of them, and very few digital systems exhibit even one of these properties.

Before I discovered Neuromancer several months ago, my perception of "cyberspace" was that of a quaint, naive concept of what interconnected computer systems would become that never came to pass. I used to ironically refer to the internet as "cyberspace" when talking with other developers as a kind of humorous or self-important overemphasis. I thought that cyberspace was a cultural relic and a failed prediction of what the internet would be. The glossy, 3D wireframe neon world never materialized, and for this I've always felt a sense of loss of what could have been.

Why didn't cyberspace ever come into existence? As computers became more advanced and consumer-focused, they did not attempt to emulate a 3D space, but rather did the practical and sensible thing of emulating paper documents so people could get work done digitally.

As the internet became a household utility, centralized systems and applications were the first and only way that humanity knew to grow our collective capabilities online. Websites grew as they collected users and became behemoths. Ebay, Google, Amazon, PayPal. Although the internet itself was technically decentralized, decentralized systems and applications would come later when the problems with centralization became obvious as these internet giants started abusing their power.

As the internet continued to grow and resemble less and less the fictional worlds of cyberspace and the metaverse, these lofty ideas of digital 3D worlds turned into toys for most people — unnecessary but entertaining fluff. The notion of cyberspace faded into 80's retro culture and the word cyberspace was painfully repurposed to simply refer to the internet or networked systems collectively. This, however, is a terribly inaccurate use of the word. There is no space to speak of on the internet. But, sadly, the interet was the closest thing we have ever had to Gibson's vision of cyberspace, and it really wasn't close by any measure except that people all over the world use it for pretty much everything. All the other magical properties of cyberspace were simply forgotten. They were fiction. They weren't necessary. They weren't possible. There was no way to make it work and no reason to do so.

However, when reading these books from nearly 4 decades past, there is something poignant to me in the fact that across these various works by various authors, the metaverse (or cyberspace) posesses consistent properties that no author is willing to alter. What is so inviolate about a fictional concept that would make it so consistent across works? Perhaps there is a kernel of truth in what is imagined, and that truth is so compelling that it must be repeated until it crosses the veil between idea and reality.

Reality And Cyberspace

I have always been fascinated by technology's ability to improve our lives, and I have strived to create consequential software my entire life, like video games played via fitness watches and augmented reality navigation web apps, but it wasn't until I read Softwar that I realized something profound.

In reality, I am able to do anything I want as long as I have the thermodynamic energy to do it.

It may not be legal or socially acceptable, but if I have the energy to do something, I can. Likewise, if someone wants to stop me from doing something, they can't unless they also expend enough energy to stop me.

This means that reality is permissionless, because nobody can disallow my actions. It also means reality is thermodynamic, because every action has a cost that must be paid to the universe in the form of entropy.

Conversely, in digital systems, the amount of energy you have is irrelevant. The things you can do are only the things you are allowed to do by the permissioned system, or, the things you can trick the system into letting you do. This means that within a digital system, you always have a severely limited subset of available actions, and your ability to execute those actions has nothing to do with your thermodynamic potential and everything to do with the permissions you are granted by others. No matter how strong my muscles are or how clever I am, I can't do more than a digital system allows me to do, and even if I hack it, I still can't do anything I want — only more than I'm supposed to.

Almost all digital systems and software are permissioned and non-thermodynamic.

This is why, fundamentally, no metaverse that has ever been built actually matters. This is why no video game keeps you interested in it forever, because the actions that you can do and the extent to which you can do them are arbitrarily disconnected from your ability to act in reality. It's "just a game" — a limited subset of reality.

This isn't fundamentally a bad thing. Obviously, software has done a lot for humanity. And software-based rules have been used in many contexts to keep things fair for everybody. Except, unfortunately, digital systems are never truly fair. There's always a programmer who wrote the rules. There's always an admin above you. There's always a hacker. And there's always someone with more permissions than you who can restrict your potential. Compared to reality, this seems arbitrary and capricious. At least in reality, the universe to which you pay your entropy costs is truly, terribly impartial and unbiased. This is why thermodynamic systems are fundamentally fair; even though it may not seem fair to you it is truly fair to everyone.

Reality is a permissionless, thermodynamic protocol, and almost nothing in the digital world resembles this whatsoever.

Nostr, however, is permissionless. Until now you may not have considered this to be a fundamental property of our universe, but it is, and the fact that nostr exhibits this same property is quite compelling. In fact, any system that is truly permissionless (of which there are very few) seems to have the magic ability to capture people's imaginations in ways that no other digital system can. Things such as bitcoin, perhaps the most famous permissionless digital system, has such broad and profound effects on people who grasp it that they have been known in some cases (such as Andreas M. Antonopoulos') to stop eating, stop sleeping, research it obsessively, and completely change their entire way of life. How's that for consequential software?

Like bitcoin, nostr can also be thermodynamic via proof-of-work (NIP-13). And with the combination of these two properties, which are shared with reality, we are suddenly able to dispell every single mystery we've encountered regarding cyberspace.

Proof-of-work is the secret ingredient to dissolve the fiction in the science fiction of cyberspace.

A Mystery Solved About Cyberspace and Bitcoin

The reason that the properties of cyberspace and the metaverse are so mysterious is because they are actually properties of reality, but inside a digital system.

In reality, it is no surprise that your hardware and skill affects your ability. No surprise that your work determines your power. No surprise that you can't teleport and must travel using energy. No surprise that building constructs or customizing yourself takes effort and cost. No surprise that territory is scarce and must be defended. No surprise that conflict happens between people. All of this is so completely normal that it's easy to overlook.

The reason these things in Neuromancer and Snow Crash and other works about the metaverse seemed so mysterious is because they weren't possible to model in a digital space. These authors took properties of reality and put them in a digital space, and it seemed amazing because nobody knew how it could actually work.

This is how it is possible: you design a digital system that has the same fundamental properties as reality. It must be permissionless. It must be thermodynamic. Then you have a system wherein cyberspace can exist.

Nostr is the fulfillment of these requirements. Like bitcoin, nostr has captured the imaginations of thousands of early adopters and developers. The magic is there. But few may realize why it is feels so magical. The answer is that when you make a digital system that can model reality's own properties, you have created an extension of reality itself. This is one of the most significant discoveries in human history, because a digital extension of reality can allow humanity to connect, collaborate, and grow in a place where their physical diatance does not matter. Barring any major advancements in spacefaring technology, cyberspace will be the most significant departure from earth you may experience in your lifetime.

I posit that a virtual action which is permissionless and thermodynamic is as real as a physical action, except the consequences of that action happen in the digital space rather than the physical one. It's not quite reality, but it is like a mirror. It is a true extension of reality. Nothing in it is disconnected from the real world. And therefore, unlike any other digital system, it can be truly consequential.

Healthy Skepticism

Wait a minute, you may say. Cyberspace is still just a digital way of communicating. Isn't email and texting and video chat good enough? Why do we need cyberspace? How could it possibly be so important to humanity?

This is a great question.

One may ask similar questions about bitcoin. Don't we already have digital money? Why do we need absolutely scarce, decentralized censorship-resistant money?

Or about nostr: why do we need another way to transmit text? What good is it to be decentralized and censorship resistant?

Like bitcoin, cyberspace makes something digital into a scarce resource, but instead of enabling the capture of time (on a timechain) cyberspace enables the capture of scarce space (in a construct or your movement chain).

In the physical world, our movement can easily be censored. Our expression of power is censored. Our capture of space is censored. Not so in cyberspace. The only thing that matters in cyberspace is the thermodynamic energy you exert — just like in reality, but minus the permissioned (artificial) power structures of governments and laws.

Just as bitcoin doesn't care who you are or who you are transmitting value to, cyberspace doesn't care who you are or where you are moving to or where you are claiming space.

Consequences of Proof-of-Work in Detail

I'd like to enumerate the specific ways in which proof-of-work in nostr demystifies the mysterious properties of cyberspace mentioned earlier.

- Everyone can use cyberspace but nobody has full control over it.

Just replace "cyberspace" with "nostr" and the above statement is already true. If we build cyberspace on nostr, then cyberspace will inherit these properties.

- Certain people, corporations, and AI weilded greater levels of power in cyberspace than others

If we base an entity's power on their thermodynamic output via proof-of-work, then we have a permissionless way for cyberspace participants to enact their real thermodynamic potential in cyberspace to whatever degree they choose.

- The hardware that people used to connect to cyberspace had a direct impact on their capabilities in cyberspace.

If all actions in cyberspace are thermodynamic like in reality, then hardware capable of greater amounts of proof-of-work will enable more powerful actions. Mobile phone, desktop computer, or ASIC farm: take your pick.

- Territory in cyberspace was conquered, captured, and fought over, indicating that it may be scarce or valuable in some way. Constructing had a cost.

The territory in cyberspace is the maximum 3-dimensional coordinate space that can be represented by 256 bits. In cryptography, nostr, and bitcoin, 256-bit numbers are very commonly used along with mathematical functions like SHA-256 that process data in blocks of 256, so it is a good "round" amount of information to work with.

You can divide a 256-bit number into X, Y, and Z coordinates that are each 85 bits long. This leaves 1 extra least-significant bit from the 256 bits that is ignored.

This means that each axis of cyberspace is 2^85 units long.

Space can be claimed by publishing a construct event whose event ID is the coordinate. The event ID is obtained from hashing the event (standard process for all events in the nostr protocol). This means the event ID can be mined to obtain the coordinates you desire (or at least something close by).

If two constructs overlap, the one with the most proof-of-work wins. This is how territory can be contested in a permissionless way in cyberspace, as alluded to in Gibson's works.

The cost of construction is the proof-of-work, and the maintenance of that territory by proof-of-work is the digital analogy of either paying taxes to a government who will protect your land, or, protecting your land with your own thermodynamic energy. Notice how money, also known as time, is inextricably linked to the ownership of property in reality and now also in cyberspace. If property were free to own and maintain, would it be worth anything at all?

I have been presented with the argument that it does not cost you anything to hold bitcoin, so constructs or cyberspace real estate should be no different. To this I say that for you to hold your bitcoin, a tremendous amount of cost is expended by all the miners in the world. If not for them, your bitcoin would be double-spent or stolen by invalid transactions. The validity of your unmoving bitcoin requires the continual, perpetual operation of the largest computer network in the world. So, continual energy expenditure to secure your property is true with bitcoin, cyberspace, and all of your things in reality as well.

Unlike bitcoin, whose value lies in the entire network, constructs are valuable only to their owner. Therefore, it is the responsibility of the construct's owner to defend it.

More complex symbiotic relationships in construct defense may be borne out of the perpetual fight for survival inherent in any thermodynamic system. But this is only speculation.

Enforcing rules universally

As with any protocol, deviation excludes you from it and submission grants a share in its value. Forking the cyberspace meta-protocol, whether by disobeying its rules or rewriting them, results in an irreconcilable forking of digital reality. The value of cyberspace as a protocol depends on network effects like any protocol, and the first-mover has a strong advantage in any protocol war. Additionally, as all actions require proof-of-work and must be chained together, the sum of your history in cyberspace is put at risk of invalidation should you deviate from the protocol everyone else is following.

Ultimately I believe that the purpose of cyberspace should be to imbue humanity with new capabilities and opportunities, and I think that it will, simply by virtue of the fact that it is built on a protocol and interoperates with protocols that likewise imbue humanity with new capabilities and opportunities (notsr, bitcoin, and TCP-IP). I desire that cyberspace will be flexible and capable enough to support as many use-cases as possible as long as the fundamental properties are preserved as axiomatic non-negotiables. Cyberspace itself must be both permissionless and thermodynamic. Without these properties, cyberspace becomes just another digital illusion apart from reality.

Flexibility, locality, and customzation

With these axioms in mind, I think it would be very smart to create a method of defining construct-level rules that exist only within certain spaces. This would allow for custom interactions and systems to exist in the fabric of cyberspace, making it very flexible and local. Any such system or customization, even if cosmetic, must impose a fundamental thermodynamic cost. The details of how this could work are yet to be developed, but the blueprints of fiction, our axioms, and our ingenuity will lead us to it.

The metaverse of things

Because nostr is a web-friendly protocol, it is trivial to connect anything to cyberspace. I love to tell the tale of how I witnessed an early 2022 conversation between someone and (if I remember correctly) Will Casarin's smart dishwasher that was posting kind 1 status updates to nostr. If someone can talk to a smart dishwasher over nostr, then the Metaverse of Things already exists. However, the degree to which these things expose themselves to the metaverse should follow the same security model as for the internet at large. Unlike in fiction, I doubt anyone will allow sufficient proof-of-work be the only prequisite for commandeering a real-world system. That's ok. Ultimately, the relationship between reality and cyberspace isn't meant to be a 1:1 map. Digital systems only really ought to participate in cyberspace if they share the same properties as cyberspace. Most digital systems are permissioned and non-thermodynamic, and therefore do not have a compelling reason to exist in cyberspace. But anything is indeed possible.

Chasing a Ghost or Following a Blueprint?

I'd like to make the distinction that the purpose of a construct (and of most things) in the real-world cyberspace is not necessarily the same as in Gibson's literary cyberspace nor in Stephenson's literary metaverse. But the fundamental properties as depicted remain the same, and it is enabled by proof-of-work.

Remember, the remarkable thing about Gibson's cyberspace is that it is a digital world that functions like reality — there is egalitarian conflict resolution, scarce space, and universally enforced rules. The cyberspace meta-protocol likewise enables a digital system to function like space in reality. The motivations and reasons behind this digital system may be completely different than in the books, but that doesn't mean the mechanisms are any less accurate.

My goal is not to reproduce Gibson's and Stephenson's work in reality. The properties of this fiction are compelling, and the implementation and usage of cyberspace will completely depend on free market forces — exactly as it should be. It is not for me to decide. These works opened the conceptual pathway to creating this new thermodynamic digital reality. The human motivations and actions that shape cyberspace will undoubtedly cause it to look plenty different than depicted in the books, while the funamental properties remain identical.

Throughout the process of designing the cyberspace meta-protocol I have tried to keep it as simple and fundamental as possible, using these books as my guidepost. Whether these authors realized it or not, their depictions of cyberspace and the metaverse were extremely consistent and coherent, which makes not only for great fiction and believability but also for a great guide to follow in developing a real system.

Step Into Cyberspace

I'd like to provide some concrete examples of how cyberspace works so that the concepts presented herein are not without application.

NOSTR in 3 minutes

To interact with cyberspace, one must simply publish certain "kinds" of nostr events. If you are not familiar with nostr, here is a short explanation. Nostr is made up of people running clients, which are just apps like on your phone or desktop, and people running relays, which are like servers that store events. Clients download streams of events from relays in real time. Clients can also publish events to relays. Publishing an event is like sending a tweet. Clients normally publish the same event to many relays at once. As long as you send the tweet to at least one relay that your friend is connected to, they will see your tweet. Anyone can run a relay or build a client and connect to whichever relays they want. In this way, nostr is permissionless and decentralized.

A "kind 1" event is essentially a tweet, but there are other kinds of events, each represented by a number. A kind 0 event is what you publish when you update your profile with a new bio or screen name. Anyone may make up a new kind of event and assign it any number, except it would be poorly supported if you used a number that is already accepted as part of the nostr protocol for another purpose than you are using it for. Luckily, there are a lot of numbers to go around.

A private/public keypair is an anonymous cryptographic identity, and it can be used for secure communication, storage of bitcoin, and other various things. The keys themselves are just unfathomly large unguessable numbers represented in the hexadecimal number system which includes numbers 0-9 and a-f (base 16 instead of base 10). When you publish an event on nostr, it is signed by your private key, and the event contains your public key. This allows anyone to verify that the event is legitimately from that public key, which presumably only a certain person controls. In this way, nobody can forge or tamper with events without invalidating them, because the signature would not match the public key.

Meta-protocol

This is why I refer to cyberspace as a meta-protocol because it is simply a specific way of publishing and interpreting specific event kinds over nostr and visualizing them in a 3D space.

Drift

To move in cyberspace, you must publish a kind 333 event, referred to as a Drift event. This event contains your 3D cyberspace coordinates, your direction, your existing velocity, a reference to your previous Drift event, and proof-of-work to add velocity by your direction. The amount of proof-of-work on the drift event determines your acceleration. Proof-of-work can be added to any nostr event by choosing an amount of work, represented by the number of leading binary zeroes on the event's ID, and hashing the event with a different nonce until the target amount of work is reached. This process is specified in NIP-13.

Each Drift event may be validated by running the coordinates and velocity through a standardized cyberspace algorithm (currently being developed) to verify that the value changes from one drift event to the next are within a tolerable range of error. It is in effect a way of simulating the movement within a physics system in order to validate that the movements did not break the rules of cyberspace physics. In this way, every participant in cyberspace is a validator of everyone else they are physically near.

When a drift event is signed, the reference to the previous drift event is included in the signature. This creates, in effect, a personal verifiable hash chain history of your movements and actions in cyberspace that anyone else can verify.

Dishonesty and Punishment

In order to encourage people to be honest about their movement chains, anyone who finds an invalid — or "broken" — movement chain may punish its owner by publishing a Derezz event on it, which will invalidate all movement chains and proof-of-work owned by the victim and teleport them back to their home coordinate where they originally spawned when they first used cyberspace. This is effectively a respawn. You start from scratch, but you can keep your constructs.

One can easily lie about their movement chains and teleport anywhere at any time. But on nostr, for the most part, events cannot be deleted. Therefore, a cheater will leave a bright trail by which others may cyber-kill them via Derezz. A broken movement chain is like a ghost copy of the cheater that can't move. For deeper protocol reasons that the adventurous may explore in the spec, this makes the ghost copy extra vulnerable to Derezz.

A cheater may choose to ignore the Derezz attack and continue to teleport where desired. Nothing in nostr or cyberspace can stop this. But to everyone else who follows the protocol, this type of behavior can easily be ignored. The habitual cheater may as well be a ghost, as their thermodynamic actions will be ignored by everyone else who has chosen to obey the protocol. The cheater might redeem themselves by publishing a very long valid chain of events, but this probationary period may be too demanding for habitual protocol breakers. Other aggressive actions may be leveled against cheaters, making their operation in cyberspace unproductive, difficult, and dangerous.

A cheater in cyberspace is an easy target. As the punishment of cheaters is a noble act of justice rather than an evil act of predation, I expect cheaters in cyberspace to be punished with great swiftness and mirth.

Incentives for honest movement legitimize the spatial aspect of cyberspace. In cyberspace, space is real and consequential. Traversing it has a cost. No two places are funamentally the same because there is a real cost to visit them. And all space is scarce, because of the hard limit of the 2^85 coordinate system, which was chosen to be compatible with the most popular mining agorithm in the world, SHA-256.

Other actions

To read all about the different kinds of events one can publish to interact with cyberspace, check out (and contribute!) to the official cyberspace specification here: https://github.com/arkin0x/cyberspace

In this specification you will find technical implementation details for clients to interact with the cyberspace meta-protocol, including definitions of other actions that may be taken by operators, including:

• manipulating "gravity" to affect other operators

• creating proof-of-work armor against Derezz

• cloaking one's location with stealth

• and more!

Ubiquity and Omnipresence of Cyberspace

A very interesting recent development is an open-source project called nostrmesh by lnbits that enables anyone to host a nostr relay on a small mesh-networked device, such as an Arduino. Imagine a network of billions of these devices, scattered across the globe, running on battieries and solar panels, each contributing to the infrastructure of cyberspace — a decentralized, omnipresent digital cosmos, accessible from virtually anywhere. This level of ubiquity brings us one step closer to the vision of Gibson's work, where cyberspace becomes an integral part of our daily lives and can be found everywhere — even in outer space!

With such a ubiquitous and omnipresent network, the spatial limitations of cyberspace extend far beyond conventional digital boundaries, intertwining with our physical world in a way that was once the domain of science fiction. The implications of this development are enormous and lay the foundation for the potential uses and influence of cyberspace, which we will explore in the following section.

Consequences of Cyberspace

It is difficult to predict whether cyberspace will find its place in the daily lives of billions or be forgotten once again. However, the foundations of cyberspace are inextricably linked to technologies that have been developed and adopted for the sake of human freedom and personal rights: public key cryptography, hashing, proof-of-work, bitcoin, and nostr.

As one who takes science fiction seriously enough to remove the fiction from it entirely, I find speculation to be invaluable. One cannot go where the imagination does not first lead. Our entire perception of the world is parsed from an abstraction created by our minds. We automatically assign meaning to inherently meaningless things — symbols, patterns, etc. Fiction is our reality, and our perception of the world is the sum of logical patterns within this fiction. Therefore, let us do what we do best and create fiction, or speculate, without hesitation.

I personally envision cyberspace to be a place of commerce and social organization. Constructs enable people to claim cyber land. They can use this land to design interactive experiences that are governed by localized rules and thernodynamics. The Lightning network enables instant transfer of value through cyberspace, facilitating the transaction of information, services, cyber experiences, digital and physical goods.

Use cases include shopping, gaming, gambling, competitions, live cyber events, virtual-presence social gatherings, virtual protests, collaborative spaces, advertising, education, tourism, development of cyberspace-based applications, data visualization, research, social networking, and even more that we haven't imagined yet.

Conclusion

As we venture into the vast digital landscapes of cyberspace, we are not simply traversing through lifeless data, but immersing ourselves in a consequential world that reflects the order and complexity of our physical reality. This revolutionary approach to cyberspace isn't merely a mirage of science fiction, but a tangible exploration of its key principles, built on the bedrock of public key cryptography, hashing, proof-of-work, bitcoin, and nostr.

Through the implementation of a meta-protocol layered over nostr, cyberspace opens a myriad of opportunities – drifting through the boundless expanses of the digital cosmos, crafting personal domains, or engaging in vibrant social interactions. Just as actions in the physical world carry costs and consequences, so too does cyberspace enforce its own unique set of rules and repercussions, fostering a sense of shared responsibility, fairness, and cooperation among its denizens.

Envisioned as a playground for creativity, commerce, and social organization, cyberspace, in its current formative state, already shows tremendous potential for an expansive array of use cases. Its inherent thermodynamic properties and permissionless nature offer a groundbreaking amalgamation of digital and physical realities, poised to profoundly augment our capabilities, experiences, and opportunities in a dynamic, inclusive, global, and consequential realm.

However, the most exciting aspect of cyberspace is not merely what it currently offers, but its potential to continuously evolve and redefine itself. As more people engage with and contribute to its development, it's bound to expand and morph in ways we can hardly fathom today.

As we stand on the cusp of this digital frontier, we are not chasing after phantoms of fiction. Instead, we are architects and pioneers of a revolutionary new realm, where digital existence converges with physical principles. This remarkable blend of technology and human imagination sets the stage for an unprecedented era of exploration and innovation, signaling a future that is as exciting as it is unpredictable.

Join me on this grand endeavor to shape cyberspace, to mold this new frontier into a shared and diverse digital world that reflects the best of human spirit and ingenuity. Together, let's step into cyberspace, the frontier of the future.

Build with me

Cyberspace is for humanity, and therefore I desire as many humans to be involved in its construction as possible. I have created the following resources for anyone who wants to learn more or get involved:

Join the ONOSENDAI Telegram group: https://t.me/ONOSENDAITECH

I love answering questions! Please hop in and ask away!

Pull requests welcome on the spec: https://github.com/arkin0x/cyberspace

Check out the first cyberspace client, ONOSENDAI: https//onosendai.tech (thermodynamics still in development)

Pull requests welcome on ONOSENDAI: https://github.com/arkin0x/ONOSENDAI

whoami

My name is Nick. I go by arkinox. I have been making websites since I was 11 and designing games since I was 4. I've been the director of web for a midwest marketing firm for 10 years and the co-founder and senior vice president of an augmented reality company, innovatar.io, for 4 years.

Support FOSS

If you would like to support development of this protocol I would love for you to get involved. Also, I am accepting donations and looking for opportunities to pursue it full time.

Follow me on nostr: npub1arkn0xxxll4llgy9qxkrncn3vc4l69s0dz8ef3zadykcwe7ax3dqrrh43w

Zap me with Bitcoin Lightning: [email protected]

Soli Deo gloria