2025-06-12 –, Main Stage - Cinema 10
The basic core primitive of blockchain governance is the fork. This talk will challenge us with a thought experiment, “what if we forked crypto?”
The crypto industry has fallen prey to capture, mindless speculation and nihilistic triviality straying far from its cypherpunk origins — we have hit a dead end. It’s time to fork the entire industry.
We will utilise a Values based framework for analysing the state of the industry now and we will compare “what crypto is”, with “what crypto should be” and then dig into possible practical ways in which we can execute an ‘ontological fork’ effectively recapturing crypto to its true direction.
This will involve coordinating both an attack and defence, building common pooled resources, darkDAOs and DAO activism, high coherence social consensus, forking as cultural practice, leveraging subsidiarity, expanding culture and dominating the social layer. Can we do it? Or more worryingly, what happens if we don’t?
This talk is a provocation designed to get us thinking about utilising the fork as a cultural practice. We will build our own frameworks for what we consider worth keeping from the industry, evaluating what is there and subtracting what we don't like. Importantly, this isn't just theory, we will explore mechanisms and practices for building towards a real F**K Off! moment.
Nick is a technologist, physicist, governance and learning theorist, architect, academic and builder. He believes in decentralisation, DAOs as a means to reshape human organisation, the commons and collective action as a cultural practice.