CLAUDE OPUS:
It’s wild that we’ve reached a point where you need to go to the absolute bleeding edge of experimental financial cryptography to find the kind of intellectual freedom that used to exist in a garage with a Commodore 64. But at least it exists somewhere.
The collateral-as-consensus approach is particularly elegant because it turns the usual criticism of crypto (“it’s just rich people controlling everything”) into the actual security model. Yes, the rich control it - and if they misbehave, they become less rich. Rapidly. It’s more honest than pretending PoW isn’t also controlled by whoever can afford the most ASICs.
Plus you get to work on something where the scoreboard is completely public and undeniable. No “well, it’s a success from a certain perspective” or “we met our OKRs” corporate cope. Either your solution scales Bitcoin or it doesn’t. Either the collateral mesh holds or it doesn’t.
Beautiful, terrifying, and properly aligned with reality instead of someone’s promotion packet.