d/acc: One year later

About a year ago, I wrote an article on technological optimism, outlining my overall enthusiasm for technology and the immense benefits it could bring, while also expressing a cautious attitude towards certain specific issues, primarily focusing on superintelligent AI and the potential extinction risks it may pose, or the risk of humanity losing power irreversibly if not constructed properly.

A core idea of that article is to advocate for a decentralized, democratic, and differentiated defensive acceleration concept. It is necessary to accelerate technological development while selectively focusing on those technologies that enhance our defensive capabilities rather than offensive ones, and to strive for the decentralization of power, rather than allowing it to concentrate in the hands of a few elites who judge right from wrong on behalf of everyone. What we should pursue is a defensive model like that of democratic Switzerland and the historically quasi-anarchistic Zomia region, rather than the model represented by lords and castles under medieval feudalism.

In the year that followed, these ideas and concepts underwent significant development and maturation. I shared these thoughts on the "80,000 Hours" platform and received a lot of feedback, most of which was positive, though there were also some criticisms.

This work itself is also continuing to advance and has achieved tangible results: we have seen progress in the verifiable open-source vaccine field; awareness of the value of healthy indoor air is continually increasing; community notes continue to play a positive role; prediction markets have ushered in a breakthrough year as an information tool; zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge ( ZK-SNARKs ) are being applied in government identification and social media ( and ensure the security of Ethereum wallets through account abstraction ); open-source imaging tools have been applied in the fields of medicine and brain-computer interfaces ( BCI ), and so on.

Last autumn, we welcomed our first major d/acc event: the "d/acc Discovery Day" held at Devcon ( d/aDDy ). The event brought together speakers from various pillar fields of d/acc including biology, physics, networking, information defense, and neural technology (, and lasted an entire day. People who have dedicated years to these technologies began to learn more about each other's work, and outsiders became increasingly aware of this grander vision: the same values that drive the development of Ethereum and cryptocurrencies can be extended to a broader world.

![Vitalik's new article: How Decentralized Accelerationism connects cryptocurrency and AI?])https://img-cdn.gateio.im/webp-social/moments-160f74295ba6e4b4e0353b0c4e25a386.webp(

The Connotation and Denotation of d/acc

It is the year 2042. You see a report in the media stating that a new epidemic may break out in your city. You have become accustomed to such news: people often overreact to every mutation of animal diseases, and in most cases, these mutations ultimately do not lead to an actual crisis. The previous two potential epidemics were detected early through wastewater monitoring and open-source analysis of social media, and were successfully contained at the bud stage. However, this situation is different; prediction markets show that the probability of at least 10,000 cases appearing is as high as 60%, which makes you deeply worried.

Just yesterday, the genetic sequence of the virus has been identified. A software update for the air tester in your pocket was promptly released, enabling the tester to detect the new virus ) either through a single breath test or by detecting ( after being exposed to indoor air for 15 minutes. Meanwhile, open-source instructions and code for generating vaccines using devices available at any modern medical facility worldwide are expected to be released in a few weeks. Most people have not yet taken any action, as they primarily rely on widely adopted air filtration and ventilation measures to protect their safety.

Due to your own immune issues, you act more cautiously: the open-source locally run personal assistant AI you use, in addition to carrying out routine tasks such as navigation, restaurant, and activity recommendations, also takes into account real-time air testing data and carbon dioxide data, thereby only recommending the safest places to you. This data is provided by thousands of participants and devices, and with the help of ZK-SNARKs and differential privacy technology, it minimizes the risk of data being leaked or misused for other purposes ). If you intend to contribute data to these datasets, there are other personal assistant AIs that will verify whether these cryptographic tools are indeed effective (.

Two months later, the pandemic miraculously dissipated: it seemed that 60% of people followed the basic epidemic prevention protocols, which included wearing masks when the air testing device sounded an alarm indicating the presence of the virus, and isolating at home if an individual tested positive. This measure was sufficient to further reduce the transmission rate, which had already been significantly lowered due to passive and forceful air filtration, to below 1. A simulation indicated that a disease potentially five times more severe than the COVID-19 pandemic from twenty years ago has not caused significant impact.

![Vitalik's new article: How does decentralized accelerationism relate to cryptocurrency and AI?])https://img-cdn.gateio.im/webp-social/moments-e42a1dcd075fe6d525b3fa2ccbe6aa27.webp(

The d/acc event organized by Devcon has achieved a very positive outcome, which is that the d/acc concept has successfully brought together people from different fields and has truly sparked their strong interest in each other's work.

Holding an event with "diversity" is not difficult, but allowing people from different backgrounds and interests to truly establish close connections is quite challenging. I still vividly remember being forced to watch lengthy operas during middle and high school, which I personally found dull and boring. I knew I "should" appreciate them, because otherwise, I would be seen as an uneducated computer science sloth, but I failed to resonate with the content of the operas on a deeper level. However, the atmosphere of the d/acc day event was completely different: it felt like people genuinely loved to learn about various jobs from different fields.

If we aspire to build a brighter future than domination, stagnation, and destruction, we must necessarily engage in this extensive alliance-building. d/acc seems to have achieved significant results in this regard, and this alone is enough to demonstrate the valuable worth of this concept.

The core idea of d/acc is simple and clear: decentralized, democratic, and differentiated defensive acceleration. It builds technologies that can tilt the balance of offense and defense towards defense, and does so without relying on transferring more power to central authorities during implementation. There is an inherent close connection between these two aspects: any decentralized, democratic, or free political structure tends to thrive when defense is easy to implement, and faces severe challenges when defense is fraught with difficulties— in those situations, the likely outcome is a chaotic period of mutual confrontation among all, ultimately reaching a balance dominated by the strongest.

![Vitalik's new article: How do cryptocurrencies and AI relate to decentralized acceleration?])https://img-cdn.gateio.im/webp-social/moments-cf3127f9a06cb15023ddeba35b9b2ad9.webp(

One way to understand the important significance of attempting to achieve decentralization, defensiveness, and acceleration simultaneously is to compare it with the ideas generated by giving up any one of these three aspects.

Decentralized acceleration, but neglecting the "differentiated defense" part

Essentially, this is similar to becoming an effective accelerationist ) e/acc (, while simultaneously pursuing decentralization. Many people adopt this approach, some of whom call themselves d/acc, but they beneficially describe their focus as "offensive." Additionally, there are many others who show a more moderate enthusiasm for "decentralized AI" and similar topics, but in my opinion, their focus on the "defensive" aspect is noticeably lacking.

In my opinion, this approach may help avoid the risk of a specific group imposing a dictatorship over humanity as a whole, but it fails to address potential structural issues: in an environment favorable to aggression, there is always a persistent risk of disaster occurring, or someone may position themselves as a protector and permanently occupy a dominant position. As for AI, it also cannot adequately address the risk of humanity's overall power being diminished in relation to AI.

Differentiated defense acceleration, but ignore "decentralization and democracy"

Accepting centralized control to achieve security goals has always had a certain appeal for some people. Readers are undoubtedly familiar with numerous such cases and the drawbacks they bring. Recently, some individuals are concerned that extreme centralized control may be the only way to cope with extreme technologies in the future: for example, imagine a hypothetical scenario where "everyone wears a 'freedom tag'—a successor to today's more limited wearable surveillance devices, similar to ankle tags used by several countries as alternatives to prison... encrypted video and audio are continuously uploaded and interpreted in real-time by machines." However, there is a degree problem with centralized control. A relatively mild form of centralized control that is often overlooked but still harmful is reflected in the field of biotechnology ), such as the resistance to public oversight regarding food and vaccines (, and the closed-source standards that allow such resistance to go unchallenged.

The risks of this approach are evident, namely that the center itself often becomes a source of risk. We witnessed this during the COVID-19 pandemic, where functionally gain-of-function research funded by multiple major world governments may have been the root cause of the outbreak. Centralized epistemology led the World Health Organization to deny for years that the coronavirus was airborne, while mandatory social distancing and vaccine mandates triggered political backlash that could last for decades. Similar situations are likely to occur again in any risk scenario related to AI or other risky technologies. In contrast, a decentralized approach would more effectively address risks emanating from the center itself.

Decentralized Defense, but Excluding Acceleration

Essentially, this is an attempt to slow down technological progress or promote economic recession.

This strategy faces dual challenges. First, overall, technological and economic growth is extremely beneficial for humanity, and any delay in this will incur immeasurable costs. Second, in a non-totalitarian world, stagnation is unstable: those who "cheat" the most and can find seemingly reasonable ways to continue advancing their development will gain an advantage. Degrowth strategies can work to some extent in certain specific contexts: for example, European food is healthier than American food, which is one illustration; the success of nuclear non-proliferation so far is another. However, these strategies cannot work indefinitely.

Through d/acc, we are committed to achieving the following goals:

• Upholding principles in today's increasingly tribalized world, rather than blindly building various things—on the contrary, we hope to construct specific things to make the world safer and better.
• Recognizing that exponential technological progress means the world will become extremely peculiar, and humanity's overall "footprint" in the universe will inevitably continue to grow. Our ability to protect vulnerable animals, plants, and populations from harm must continuously improve, and the only way forward is to move boldly ahead.
• Build technologies that can effectively protect us, rather than relying on the assumption that "good people ) or good AI ( control everything." We achieve this goal by creating tools that are naturally more effective for building and protecting than for destroying.

![Vitalik's new article: How Decentralized Accelerationism Unites Cryptocurrency and AI?])https://img-cdn.gateio.im/webp-social/moments-7ebae4f7e715feb6063c7ff4e321b245.webp(

Another perspective on d/acc is to return to a framework of empowerment from the late 2000s European Pirate Party movement.

Our goal is to build a world that preserves human agency, achieving negative freedom, which means avoiding active interference in our ability to shape our own destiny by others, whether they are ordinary citizens, governments, or superintelligent robots, while also achieving positive freedom, which ensures that we have the knowledge and resources to exercise this ability. This echoes a continuity that has lasted for several generations.