<a name="part0"></a> We believe that building better protocols for cyberspace is the single most important task to be working on at the present moment in history. This belief stems from an observation that humanity as a species is in the process of moving into cyberspace, in a very real sense. In the 1960s, ~0.00000...001% of all human attention was focused in cyberspace. Virtually all attention and experience of humans was focused on the physical world. As computers began to minaturize and the internet was born, attention of the collective of human minds rapidly began to shift towards the experiences that exist inside computers (we call this cyberspace), and away from the physical world. 'Screen time' as a proportion of waking hours in 2023 A glance at statistics regarding 'screen time' -- the proportion of time people spend engaged with (we think it is reasonable to say 'in') cyberspace -- shows you the startling reality of this trend. Some countries in the world now have a citizenry that spend more of their time in cyberspace than the physical world. The pace of change in physical space is winding down, while innovation in cyberspace is parabolic.

Humanity is moving into cyberspace -- whether we like it or not. The only question is whether that cyberspace is one worth living in. There is a version of this future that is truly exciting: A new world without resource scarcity or violence. There is also a version of this future that is dystopian: A world in which we spend most of our attention inside the machines of monopolistic big tech corporations, living with no guaranteed rights. It is the mission of cyberspace acceleration -- and Forward Research -- that we land on the right side of the coin. This post is the first in an series about our work at Forward Research. In it we describe our core philosophy of Cyberspace Accelerationism -- cy/acc for short. In the following posts we outline the practical steps we at Forward Research are taking towards this vision on Arweave. This series is in-depth, at ~12,000 word in total. If you take the time to read it and think you can contribute to our perspective, weavemail us or shoot us a DM on X. We would love to hear from you and to update our model of the world. If you are excited by the vision laid out in this post consider joining us -- or another institution pushing for cyberspace accelerationism. The contents of this series are as follows: The Big Picture: Cyberspace Acceleration. The State of Play Part I: The Macro.

Status: DRAFT-4 Network Version: ao.TN.1 What is ao? The ao computer is the actor oriented machine that emerges from the network of nodes that adhere to its core data protocol, running on the Arweave network. This document gives a brief introduction to the protocol and its functionality, as well as its technical details, such that builders can create new implementations and services that integrate with it. The ao computer is a single, unified computing environment (a Single System Image), hosted on a heterogenous set of nodes in a distributed network. ao is designed to offer an environment in which an arbitrary number of paralell processes can be resident, coordinating through an open message passing layer. This message passing standard connects the machine's indepedently operating processes together into a 'web' -- in the same way that websites operate on independent servers but are conjoined into a cohesive, unified experience via hyperlinks. Unlike existing decentralized compute systems, ao is capable of supporting the operation of computation without protocol-enforced limitations on size and form, while also maintaining the verifiability (and thus, trust minimization) of the network itself. Further, ao's distributed and modular architecture allows existing smart contract platforms to easily 'plug in' to the network, acting as a single process which can send and recieve messages from any other process.

Status: DRAFT-1 Targeting Network: ao.TN.1 This specification describes the necessary message handlers and functionality required for a standard ao token process. Implementations of this standard typically offer users the ability control a transferrable asset, whose scarcity is maintained by the process. Each compliant process will likely implement a ledger of balances in order to encode ownership of the asset that the process represents. Compliant processes have a set of methods that allow for the modification of this ledger, typically with safe-guards to ensure the scarcity of ownership of the token represented by the process. Additionally, this specification describes a 'subledger' process type which, when implemented, offers the ability to split move a number of the tokens from the parent into a child process that implements the same token interface specification. If the From-Module of the subledger process is trusted by the participants, these subledgers can be used to transact in the 'source' token, without directly exchanging messages with it. This allows participants to use the tokens from a process, even if that process is congested. Optionally, if the participants trust the Module a subledger process is running, they are able to treat balances across these processes as fungible. The result of this is that an arbitrary numbers of parallel processes -- and thus, transactions -- can be processed by a single token at any one time. Token Processes

The Arweave network uses a novel form of storage endowment in order to ensure permanence of the information that it stores. In this post we will detail and discuss how the storage endowment works, then study its properties and risk profile using Markov chain simulations of its execution. This post gets deep into the weeds. If you are looks for introductory material, you may want to check out the main Arweave website. Let's dive in! Background: What is the endowment? In the Arweave yellow paper draft of 2019, we described Arweave's endowment structure (see section 3.2.2). The central logic of Arweave's endowment goes like this: The cost of storage provision has been declining at a strong, exponential rate since the inception of information encoding. From papyrus, to the Gutenberg press, to magnetic drum memory, floppy disks, and flash drives, the cost of encoding and recalling information has been falling for thousands of years. In the digital era, we call this the Kryder rate. While the exact rate of declining costs is variable, the pattern is reliable and has significant room for growth: The theoretical data density limits alone are 10^51 greater than our current achievements. Further, we do not foresee that there will be a slow down in the desire to store data more efficiently, as humans and machines always tend to be more effective if they can access and process more information. Given these factors, we observe that by extrapolating an extremely conservative Kryder rate we are able to price permanent storage at a single fee. We acheive this by charging the user a base fee of 200 years of storage at present costs, then as the cost of storage declines the storage purchasing power of this endowment contribution increases. As long as the Kryder rate remains above 0.5%, the storage purchasing power in the endowment at the end of the year will be greater than that at the start.

Information is the most powerful force in organizing large human groups. It drives almost all human behavior. Even governments, corporations, and other powerful organizations cannot make people do what they want without spreading information. As Thomas Jefferson described it in 1787: ...and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. Consider your childhood: you may have lived to be far into the double digits of your life before you even see concrete existence of the state at all. Yet, the passage of information tells you of its power far earlier. Even with a monopoly on force, the state exists more through the echoes of information flow than in any concrete, tangible form. To take this even further, consider the lives of those in regions claimed by multiple nations. In such circumstances, it is often easy to live one's life forgetting the existence state that is less respected by the people. Without control over information, the power of the state barely exists at all. Even a state backed by an enormous army is powerless against a public of millions that disbelieve its legitimacy. A final example, if the reader will allow me to belabor the point: In 1917, what was amongst the first buildings seized by the Bolsheviks? The radio towers. In 2016, what was a first target of the Turkish Coup attempt? CNN Türk, the local TV news station.