English Crusaderrr 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 ⚔️ Restore 🇬🇧

In WWII, air doctrine understood “the bomber will always get through.” Whatever your defences, expect to get bombed. AI is bringing that reality to the internet. Adversaries can deploy armies of minions to reverse-engineer unfamiliar systems and turn vulnerabilities into profitable attacks. An obsolete PHP box in a SaaS office in Idaho with $1k of extractable value is not worth a human’s time to attack. It is worth an agent’s time. The marginal cost of attacks is going to zero. This will break the internet. Blockchain was first in line as grist for the AI mill, but these economics are coming for every organization holding something somebody else wants. Getting hit first has forced blockchains to prepare for the conditions now coming for everyone else. The blockchains that survive 2027 will become safe havens for people's money to escape the AI attacks tearing through the rest of the internet. The conventional response to the Binance attack was to demand more controls and trusted operators when these are the exact literal problems. Having third parties that can hotfix and react to exploits quickly is as poor a solution as security through obscurity. AI swarms will have a latency asymmetry: by the time the defender realises something is wrong, the attacker thousands of agents crawling through their systems. Every added middleman increases the attack surface. There is no obscurity in the face of AI, and web2 is increasingly a collection of slop code thrown onto web servers without an understanding of the attack surface. Blockchains have lived in adversarial environments for years. Their protocols and code are open source, publicly scrutable and hardened through that scrutiny. They are leaders in adopting formal verification, mathematically proving that software satisfies its specified rules. The solution to the coming apocalypse is to reduce the number of third parties between your intents and your goals by moving more work into hardened infrastructure. Smart contracts let the settlement layer perform useful work. Permissionlessness lets users interact with these contracts directly and reduces custody risks. The bottleneck to moving more work on-chain is that often this work relies on sensitive data. This is why privacy-preserving smart contracts are so important. They allow for data to be encrypted on the distributed ledger, but queries and requests can act on that data as if it was not encrypted. The real data - that seductive nectar the AI swarms crave - never leaves the user’s device. Private smart contracts removes data custodianship from the application. Credentials, passport details, identities: these no longer need to be stored via a service. This is going to be a big deal when trust vanishes in the face of the coming AI attack swarms. On top of this all is censorship-resistance. If there is no operator that controls access to money or data, there is no operator that can be compromised. In 2027, economic activity will flow towards hardened networks that shrink the third-party attack surface. That means full decentralisation, privacy without backdoors and smart contracts that are general purpose but still can give you privacy for identity, data and which contracts/functions are being called. All without trusted hardware or a backdoor decryption key. Not coincidentally, this is what I have been building Aztec for. Is the only network that has these properties. I am being literal here - it is the only one. Private smart contracts are hard, decentralization is hard and nobody else has been able to put them both together. The world is not ready for what's coming next year. What looks like an ideological preference for cypherpunks is going to become an economic necessity.