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It's kinda wild to me that Stross literally wrote about cryptocurrency, smart contracts (the legal corporations in Accelerando written in Python 3000, AKA what

It's kinda wild to me that Stross literally wrote about cryptocurrency, smart contracts (the legal corporations in Accelerando written in Python 3000, AKA what is now called Python3) and cryptocurrency thefts (the robbing of a decentralized bank due to a bug at the beginning of "halting state"). All of this was years before Bitcoin, not to mention Ethereum, which is where most of that smart contract stuff started.

Rhapso 2y ago
He stopped the trilogy after rule34 because it was coming true... He has done a wonderful job of speculative fiction. Exposure to his work when i was a teenager definitely set me on my course to be who i am now.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  Me too. Especially Accelerando. I didn't think it was formative until I read it again as an adult.
  - amonon 2y ago
    I should read it again in light of that. I did find that Stross's early work (Accelerando, Singularity Sky, Iron Sunrise, Colder War) heavily influenced my worldview and path in life. I haven't touched Accelerando in over a decade although I go back to the other novels on occasion.
    - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
      It may have been the timing of it, but whatever the cause I've been trying to find my way into the Free Intellect Foundation ever since.
  - greesil 2y ago
    For me, I've found his series the Laundry Files to be formative. And yes I'm worried about the proliferation of too many computational devices in the world. Also, interdimensional elves.
  - throwanem 2y ago
    I'm finding this inclines me to class it with The Fountainhead in the category of books I'm glad found me at the wrong time. Nothing against you, the work, or the author -- who, by all accounts including my own, deserves to be found in much better company than I have just implicitly placed him! Only that in both cases I think I would not much like the person I might have become for the radical influence of such a work.
ttepasse 2y ago
Stross has a talent for keeping an eye on the weirdos of the net without necessary sharing their belief, so I'm rather sure he was aware of the Cypherpunks of the 90s where a lot of this stuff originated.
- sangnoir 2y ago
  He also was a SWE at an online payment processor startup during the dotcom boom.
alecco 2y ago
> All of this was years before Bitcoin, not to mention Ethereum Cypherpunks were working on this since the 90s (or even 80s). There was a very active mailing list way back then with experiments and a lot of discussions. Bitcoin was revolutionary but it was built on top of a lot of existing work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk
zitterbewegung 2y ago
You can write smart contracts in a Python inspired language also https://github.com/vyperlang/vyper https://github.com/vyperlang/vyper
kragen 2y ago
that smart contract stuff did not start with bitcoin and ethereum; i think the term 'smart contract' was coined at agorics inc. in the early 90s, and was in common use among cypherpunks (the folks that gave you openssl, pgp/gnupg, bittorrent, wikileaks, tor, and, as it happens, ecmascript 4) throughout the 90s, when 'know your customer' still sounded like dystopian future science fiction rather than a widespread international treaty obligation for some of the history, i suggest reading markm's eulogy for norm hardy: https://erights.medium.com/norm-hardys-place-in-history-cecf191df641 https://erights.medium.com/norm-hardys-place-in-history-cecf... and this other bit of oral history: https://community.agoric.com/t/agoric-privacy-aspirations-how-do-we-get-there/244 https://community.agoric.com/t/agoric-privacy-aspirations-ho.... also, this oral history interview with ann hardy, rip, who was the ceo of agorics and wrote the operating system that preceded keykos at tymshare: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIWMvtM02NA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIWMvtM02NA (594 views) the difficulty with smart contracts was figuring out how to decentralize them, and in particular how to decentralize payment, because an insecure smart contract isn't really a contract at all. previous efforts using centralized authorities (digicash, e-gold, peppercoin, mojonation, agorics itself, arguably tymshare) largely collapsed trying to negotiate the regulatory environment, though some failed in more conventional ways, like due to the innovator's dilemma. bitcoin found an inefficient but practically workable solution to the problem, which many of us had speculated was inherently unsolvable. satoshi's insight was to find a way to redefine the problem into something solvable, something many of us rejected for a long time. len sassaman famously rejected it until his death like stross, i became disenchanted with the libertarian vision starting in the 90s, and abstained from bitcoin because i theorized that, if it worked, capitalism would destroy civilization. since then, my point of view has shifted due in part to moving to argentina, where i've been experiencing alternatives to capitalism, which make capitalism look pretty good by comparison
- abecedarius 2y ago
  Oh, thanks for that agoric.com link, new to me. I think Nick Szabo coined 'smart contract' in his 1996 Extropy paper. He had worked at Agorics and I don't know how much of it is their influence; from my pov the agorics papers were extraordinary, while I kind of bounced off that particular Szabo paper. Before Agorics, there was Amix which MarkM called something like the first smart contract platform, retrospectively. (I visited the Amix office during an 80s visit to SF, btw, but I didn't know anything about them then. Current DeFi people might see it as a stretch to apply the same term.) Speaking of Extropy, Accelerando's universe owes a whole lot more to the extropians list.

Rhapso 2y ago

He stopped the trilogy after rule34 because it was coming true... He has done a wonderful job of speculative fiction. Exposure to his work when i was a teenager definitely set me on my course to be who i am now.

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
Me too. Especially Accelerando. I didn't think it was formative until I read it again as an adult.
- amonon 2y ago
  I should read it again in light of that. I did find that Stross's early work (Accelerando, Singularity Sky, Iron Sunrise, Colder War) heavily influenced my worldview and path in life. I haven't touched Accelerando in over a decade although I go back to the other novels on occasion.
  - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    It may have been the timing of it, but whatever the cause I've been trying to find my way into the Free Intellect Foundation ever since.
- greesil 2y ago
  For me, I've found his series the Laundry Files to be formative. And yes I'm worried about the proliferation of too many computational devices in the world. Also, interdimensional elves.
- throwanem 2y ago
  I'm finding this inclines me to class it with The Fountainhead in the category of books I'm glad found me at the wrong time. Nothing against you, the work, or the author -- who, by all accounts including my own, deserves to be found in much better company than I have just implicitly placed him! Only that in both cases I think I would not much like the person I might have become for the radical influence of such a work.

ttepasse 2y ago

Stross has a talent for keeping an eye on the weirdos of the net without necessary sharing their belief, so I'm rather sure he was aware of the Cypherpunks of the 90s where a lot of this stuff originated.

sangnoir 2y ago
He also was a SWE at an online payment processor startup during the dotcom boom.

alecco 2y ago

> All of this was years before Bitcoin, not to mention Ethereum Cypherpunks were working on this since the 90s (or even 80s). There was a very active mailing list way back then with experiments and a lot of discussions. Bitcoin was revolutionary but it was built on top of a lot of existing work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk

zitterbewegung 2y ago

You can write smart contracts in a Python inspired language also https://github.com/vyperlang/vyper https://github.com/vyperlang/vyper

kragen 2y ago

that smart contract stuff did not start with bitcoin and ethereum; i think the term 'smart contract' was coined at agorics inc. in the early 90s, and was in common use among cypherpunks (the folks that gave you openssl, pgp/gnupg, bittorrent, wikileaks, tor, and, as it happens, ecmascript 4) throughout the 90s, when 'know your customer' still sounded like dystopian future science fiction rather than a widespread international treaty obligation for some of the history, i suggest reading markm's eulogy for norm hardy: https://erights.medium.com/norm-hardys-place-in-history-cecf191df641 https://erights.medium.com/norm-hardys-place-in-history-cecf... and this other bit of oral history: https://community.agoric.com/t/agoric-privacy-aspirations-how-do-we-get-there/244 https://community.agoric.com/t/agoric-privacy-aspirations-ho.... also, this oral history interview with ann hardy, rip, who was the ceo of agorics and wrote the operating system that preceded keykos at tymshare: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIWMvtM02NA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIWMvtM02NA (594 views) the difficulty with smart contracts was figuring out how to decentralize them, and in particular how to decentralize payment, because an insecure smart contract isn't really a contract at all. previous efforts using centralized authorities (digicash, e-gold, peppercoin, mojonation, agorics itself, arguably tymshare) largely collapsed trying to negotiate the regulatory environment, though some failed in more conventional ways, like due to the innovator's dilemma. bitcoin found an inefficient but practically workable solution to the problem, which many of us had speculated was inherently unsolvable. satoshi's insight was to find a way to redefine the problem into something solvable, something many of us rejected for a long time. len sassaman famously rejected it until his death like stross, i became disenchanted with the libertarian vision starting in the 90s, and abstained from bitcoin because i theorized that, if it worked, capitalism would destroy civilization. since then, my point of view has shifted due in part to moving to argentina, where i've been experiencing alternatives to capitalism, which make capitalism look pretty good by comparison

abecedarius 2y ago
Oh, thanks for that agoric.com link, new to me. I think Nick Szabo coined 'smart contract' in his 1996 Extropy paper. He had worked at Agorics and I don't know how much of it is their influence; from my pov the agorics papers were extraordinary, while I kind of bounced off that particular Szabo paper. Before Agorics, there was Amix which MarkM called something like the first smart contract platform, retrospectively. (I visited the Amix office during an 80s visit to SF, btw, but I didn't know anything about them then. Current DeFi people might see it as a stretch to apply the same term.) Speaking of Extropy, Accelerando's universe owes a whole lot more to the extropians list.