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Guest Talk with Jason Morton | Unpacking Money as a Protocol

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Guest Talk with Jason Morton | Unpacking Money as a Protocol

Jason Morton, a researcher working on zero-knowledge proofs (via his project Ezekiel/EZKL), argues that money-as-ledger is a leaky, obsolete abstraction and proposes three reframings: bank balances as a one-dimensional zero-knowledge proof compressing all past favors; money as 'fuzzy ownership' modeled via Dirichlet/beta distributions that let communities tune ambiguity versus precision in claims on shared resources; and balances as an impossible projection of 3+1 dimensional Minkowski spacetime onto a single global zero-dimensional ledger, which breaks down given compute speeds now rivaling light-speed limits. He floats speculative alternatives—an 'AI St. Peter' judging favors without money, a Dirichlet-distribution-based ownership pool, and an urn-based 'Archer net' protocol using randomized balls to achieve statistical indistinguishability across unsynced nodes—as thought experiments rather than finished proposals.

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