Cryptocurrency for the People: How Spacemesh Achieves Inclusivity and Fairness

Welcome to our series "Behind the Startup," where we delve into the minds of visionary entrepreneurs and explore the stories behind their groundbreaking ventures. Today, we have the pleasure of talking to Tomer Afek, the CEO of Unruly Technologies, and one of the co-founders behind Spacemesh, a revolutionary layer-one crypto protocol. Join us as we discover the inspiring journey of a man who turned his passion for surfing and mathematics into a mission to reinvent the world of cryptocurrency.

From Isolation to Innovation: How Surfing Inspired the Creation of Spacemesh

Ishan Pandey: Hi Tomer, welcome to our series "Behind the Startup." Please tell us about yourself and the story behind Spacemesh?

Tomer Afek: I was an unhappy and socially isolated kid, until around the age of 13 when I discovered wave surfing and the “flow experience” - a mental space where all those strolling thoughts in one’s brain instantly quiet down and only exist in the present moment. Profoundly gratifying. The ocean became my sanctuary from all my troubles. And bit by bit, thanks to my passion for surfing, I managed to break free from my social isolation and roll onwards.

Later in university, to everyone’s surprise, I discovered I have a knack for mathematics and abstract thinking, and my academic accomplishments paved the way for both a career in computer science and lifelong inquiry into analytical philosophy.

The first decade of my career was as a VC investor, during the late 90s to early 2000s, as the industry transitioned from big bets after long dd to higher velocity models. The 2nd decade was spent as an entrepreneur, where I’ve managed to build on some of my first-principle ideas that diverge from consensus opinions, and build some financial sovereignty for my family. This finally cleared my way for the 3rd chapter in my career as a “builder in public” entrepreneur of the most radically trustless cryptocurrency - an open source public utility.

The idea for Spacemesh coalesced in 2017, after Bitcoin mining became industrialized and it was no longer feasible to expect to be profitable as a home miner. This disappointment led me to start Unruly Technologies, the developer of the Spacemesh open source protocol together with Prof. Tal Moran, Dr. Iddo Bentov, Rami Kasterstien and Aviv Eyal. We’ve set sail to reinvent “Magic internet money everyone can join via mining from home”, a protocol where such tendencies of economies of scale won’t reoccur, so as to keep the cryptocurrency money system always open, dynamic and decentralized.

Ultimately, we are building this because we believe that it will pave the way for a world that is more equitable, facilitating more and better cooperation regionally, nationally, and globally. From the 14th of July 2023 to perpetuity, we have created the “People’s Coin”: a “Magic internet money, everyone interested may join via mining from home, no out of pocket expense, credit card or special mining gear required”.

Ishan Pandey: Please tell us a little bit about Spacemesh and how the company aims to build a layer-one crypto protocol.

Spacemesh is a public utility open-source protocol, rather than a company. I am the CEO of a company that is the developer of the Spacemesh protocol: Unruly Technologies. We raised $23m from our investors, including Polychain, Paradigm, Dragonfly, Electric Capital and more, from which we’ve supported the five year research and development process leading to the 14th of July, 2023 – when Spacemesh protocol launched its public mainnet.

We employ a novel approach for consensus in the permissionless setting, used for a general-purpose programmable cryptocurrency:

• Instead of the commonly used PoW or PoStake, Spacemesh uses PoST (Proof of Space-Time)

• Rather than a Chain topology (i.e., a blockchain), Spacemesh uses a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph), a.k.a. a “mesh”

• Additionally, rather than single-winner leader-election via race or lottery (“Competitive Mining”) used by all Nakamoto-based consensus including Bitcoin, Spacemesh uses a race-free, lottery-free “leaderless” voting (“Collaborative Mining”)

• Lastly, instead of generating a new proof for every challenge, and the resulting electricity charges, Spacemesh miners reuse the original proof continually, resulting in extremely low energy use and near-zero ongoing cost for operating a miner.

  
  

As a result of these architectural novelties, we believe we have achieved qualitative improvements along the following axes, as compared with any predecessor cryptocurrency offering:

Fairness

The Spacemesh protocol is fairer to smaller miners (read: those mining from home using consumer-grade equipment they already own). Miners are paid their fair share of the rewards collected every epoch (2 weeks) based only on their storage commitment size. Therefore powerful (even adversarial) miners cannot receive a disproportionately high share of the rewards.

Permissionless

Much lower barriers to entry compared to existing permissionless cryptocurrencies: in order to join the network as a miner, all one needs is a PC with a standard GPU, free drive space and a reliable Internet. There is no need for special-purpose mining equipment and the ongoing power usage is low (hence, no huge electricity bills). Moreover, there’s no need for any deposit, a bank account or a credit card.

Decentralization

Critically, the above achievements (low barrier to entry, low ongoing operational cost, incentive compatibility), once combined, constitute an altogether novel Fair Distribution guarantee:

Once you have joined the network by committing at least the minimum amount of storage (256gb), you will forever remain one of the active nodes that participate in the network and will get a fair share of the rewards every EPOCH: likely sufficient to recoup any electricity delta and/or hardware replacement costs. The low marginal costs for home users (with sufficient unused disk space), combined with the race-freeness property (that ensures rewards are proportional to the contributed spacetime resources) encourages small miners to join, leading to a “long tail” of small miners that cannot be priced out by even the largest whales.

Low Variance/Predictability of Rewards

A giant coin price with a low probability in a winner-takes-all system like BTC or Chia triggers the same psychological response as gambling with the question, "what if the next HDD I buy gets me that $3000 win?"

This leads to users who do not already benefit from economies of scale buying massive farms of HDDs and slowly realizing just how bad the odds are because so many others had the same exact idea. In contrast, with Spacemesh, the rewards one gets on Day 1 will probably be very small (assuming well after genesis, i.e., at equilibrium), but one can estimate much more reliably what their earnings will be over time, and there's no massive payday possibility to trigger gambling psychology.

Achieving a truly permissionless and decentralized infrastructure is anything but simple. It took us five years of iterative research and development, during which it wasn't clear if we were ever going to come out on the other side of this desert. But the satisfaction when we finally made it to the other side is like nothing else.

Ishan Pandey: Spacemesh describes its protocol as "race-free", meaning that everyone gets their fair share of mining rewards. Can you please elaborate on how the mining rewards will be distributed?

Tomer Afek: That’s correct. In Spacemesh, the reward is not handed out to a single miner that happened to produce the block, but is instead shared among all the miners that participated in producing the block. In other words, block production in Spacemesh is a community effort and everybody that participated and contributed to the block gets a share of the reward based on relative weight, i.e.,  you'll get a reward that's linearly proportional to the amount of storage that you've allocated to the network.

The rewards per single unit of spacetime is a function of the total number of spacetime units on the mesh. For example assuming you've committed 3 units of spacetime out of a total of 10,000, during the epoch 20 weeks post genesis, you’d expect 3*191.26=~563 smesh rewards during this epoch.

Ultimately fairness is the value that constitutes the domain of money, therefore it's feasible to assume most fair money system would eventually be selected for by free people, until disrupted by an even fairer money system, and so it goes.

Ishan Pandey: The concept of "The People's Coin Ideal" has been gaining traction lately. How do you envision achieving inclusivity and accessibility in the implementation of The People's Coin Ideal?

Tomer Afek: We live in a world of many competing money systems, the vast majority of which are based on ephemeral perceptions and flimsy promises. In our current paradigm, money is essentially about nation states jockeying for power and influence, attempting to deny the material reality of economic downturns, and creating a game called “FOREX” that can be played for fun, thrills, and profit. So, clearly more currencies doesn’t necessarily mean better currencies. Not when their foundations are so arbitrary and fragile.

We use money as a utility to find consensus between all of our individual understandings of an ever-mutating reality, and as a byproduct we also create a map of valuable traits. Money, beyond facilitating trade, plays a role as the main source of signal, for what we ought to deem as desirable human traits/virtues we should copy for our own challenges.

Who has how much guides us, often subconsciously, towards recognizing certain virtues or traits are desirable in our collective minds.

Such maps, like the one created by the use of money, are built to address qualitative challenges, separating signal from noise, therefore considered the POV of all mankind, we need a money which freely and accurately maps and signals the most collectively selected-for traits and virtues — and how this can be used to achieve “fitness” within an ever-changing subatomic landscape.

These function at peak capacity when the following two properties are optimized:

1. When signals emerging from the map are clear and accessible.

2. When trust in the fidelity of the signals is high.

   
   

   In order to achieve a high-fidelity map, we need as many sensors as possible reporting subjective observations, and a solid mechanism of rigorous synthesis and integration. For the latter to occur, a money system requires a clear basis in material logic - to exist in reference to something tangible and measurable, as opposed to a self-referential loop. By introducing this logic, such as in the form of a sampled commodity, we can reduce the ambiguity of our money system as much as possible.

   
   

The map made possible by Spacemesh is also particularly useful, because a lower barrier for entry means more “sensors” in more places.

The People’s Coin Ideal of a money system indeed begins with emphasis on accessibility and inclusivity, but certainly can and should achieve way more e.g. optimize for human flourishing, for opportunity space, for commons and for providing solutions for slaying moloch together. Link here:

Ishan Pandey: In the context of a Digital Gold Standard, you argue for a stable store of value. How can this stability be achieved, especially in the highly volatile and ever-changing cryptocurrency market?

Tomer Afek: The last holdout against the historical wheel of transition is the financial system. Money now must also be translated from analog to digital, and the fiat system serving the inequality gap so well must be radically revised. The crisis of 2008 was the warning call, but one which has been entirely ignored. Rather than spurring the financial and monetary system to change, it ended with a reinforcement of the old model and an ever-widening inequality gap. To fix the game we must fix the tools of the game — the letters of the language of value exchange. We need new economic language and therefore new letters. We need new money! We live in the future and pay with coins of the past. The game as we know it is rigged!

Digitalizing the money system does not mean paying with apps, or having fiat currency represented in pixels on a screen instead of printed cash: it means re-attaching the value of our currencies to a finite digital resource.

It means a radical reimagining of what finance even means, and who has control of it - something that only a decentralized digital infrastructure can achieve.

Web 2.0, the social web and its “free” entry promise was a trap, draining people of their selfhood, commercializing humans, treating them as Matrix-like batteries feeding energy to a machine that benefits the few at the expense of all others. The reinvention of money, e.g. the blockchain revolution, is therefore the key element for the redesign of the Web. We are only at the inception point of this revolution whose starting point was the Satoshi Nakamoto Bitcoin white paper of 2008.

Crypto reintroduces the material logic of commodity-based monetary systems in the digital realm. We sample a finite commodity — gold in the past, energy today, spacetime tomorrow — to serve as a unit of economic measurement in the same fashion as a sampled metal rod can serve as a standard of length. This provides humanity with two important features:

1. The inability to change “the story” — that is, the ledger — retroactively, since it introduces an unavoidable, ever-growing cost associated with altering shared coordinated reality (our ledger) after-the-fact. In the realm of money, it’s the difference between an honest and dependable system and the one we’re stuck with today. It allows for us to agree on some basic, foundational truths, and move onwards together from there. It shifts the entire game from “my word against your word” to “if you think you know better, prove it”.

   
   

2. The inability to obscure corrupt or monopolistic practices by exploiting the vagaries and confusion inherent in a multiple-money fiat system. An immutable ledger serving as both a record and a sampled commodity means that “all the cards are on the table”. Bad actors will still try to game the system, but they will have to do so in a "public conversation", rather than shielded by a wall of noise.
   

Ishan Pandey: Some critics argue that tying a digital currency to a gold standard might restrict economic growth and flexibility. How would you respond to such concerns and address the potential challenges of this approach?

They’re incorrect. The dichotomy between elasticity and binding to commodity is a false one since both may be achieved via the digital version of the gold standard. Imagine a decentralized bank where one can deposit x Smesh and get y “orange token”; that is, each “orange token” coin equals x/y smesh, and is redeemable by a decentralized bank. Now let us assume the community of “orange token” sees increased demand and has to issue more coins - it can do so independently, using Smesh as a baseline. Let's assume it doubled to 2y “orange token” coins, and that new smesh has been deposited: within each “orange token” coin there will be x/2y smesh. Etc.

With a digital ‘gold standard’ we win the best of both worlds, ideally without the worstof both worlds. Flexibility still exists - as is the nature of a decentralized, permissionless system - only now with proper accountability.

Ishan Pandey: You see "Cultural Evolution" as a necessary component of cryptocurrency adoption. What role do you see individuals, communities, and governments playing in driving cultural evolution to embrace new technological and financial paradigms like cryptocurrencies?

Tomer Afek: The younger generation deserves to wake up hopeful and confident about what the future holds for us, rather than being plagued by the terror and nihilism that’s so pervasive among them now.

Achieving this is a huge task. The risks are equally huge.  But it’s the right thing to do, so we do it anyway. There really is no alternative to a revolution of such magnitude, for transitioning into the epoch of conscious evolution that will provide hope not only for our young people, but for all mankind.

Broadly, underneath many of our problems is the same ‘savage feedback loop’: the same game theory dynamics, rewarding the short-term exploitation of words and loopholes over the longer-term, more challenging inventive and creative work of real value creation.

As C. S. Lewis once asked: “if earth could be fair and all men glad and wise instead, we have prisons, smokestacks and asylums. What sphinx of cement and aluminum breaks open their skulls and eats up their imagination?”

If everyone hates the current state of affairs so much, who then perpetuates it? And poet Allen Ginsburg answers: “Moloch does it”. This is a powerful answer not because it's correct (nobody literally thinks an ancient, child-eating Carthaginian demon causes everything) but because thinking of the system as an agent throws into relief the degree to which the system isn't an agent.

Think of a dictator-less dystopia, one that every single citizen including the leadership hates, but which nevertheless endures unconquered - so every single citizen hates the system but for lack of a good coordination mechanism it endures. We can optimize the system if everyone agrees to stop doing this at once but no one within the system is able to effect the transition without great risk to themselves.

Such multi-polar traps, where virtuous behavior is desired but consistently punished, creates a prisoner's dilemma as played by two very dumb libertarians who keep ending up on (defect, defect). There's a much better outcome available if they could figure out the coordination. But coordination is hard from a ground level view, leading to a “conspiracy without a conspirator”. Nobody is Moloch because everybody is Moloch. And yet, he still exists.

So, to achieve cultural evolution, the first step is to find the right coordination mechanism. Without it, any efforts will fall into the same multipolar traps.

The People’s Coin must therefore master the way to incentivize us to migrate courageously and peacefully towards a readjusted, fairer, expanding frame of the future — and not leave us duplicating past decisions.

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