The Value of the Past

If one grants that markets can be made on anything, a first relative nucleus that could be a zero-knowledge proof of your Urbit’s event log (if that Urbit could be trusted with your corpus of human activity, as we now do with our smartphones); your Urbit could take that information and combine it into a vision for the future that reminds you of the past for the betterment of yourself. It can be a protected, sensitive proof of who you are.

This could also take place in a marketplace of ideas and predictions for the future that promote the best and most true version of sovereign individuals, free from the market mechanics of nefarious outsiders. Then, a reputation for doing so will become valuable in a necessarily cryptographically verified world. With %alphabet’s technology and vision, as well as moral integrity and drive to make the world a beautiful place, this will become possible.

%alphabet is a market making function. The company aims to drive new forms of consensus in the broadening web3 and decentralized computing world. These forms of consensus will generate truth and reward a reputation for generating truth. %alphabet generates truth.

For Socrates, the discussion of the past is vital for improving into the future. As Plato describes through the mouth of the famous Greek general Nicias in his dialogue Laches,

I delight, Lysimachus, in conversing with Socrates: and I don’t see anything wrong with being reminded of what we’ve done that hasn’t been done beautifully (καλῶς) or isn’t being done so; for it’s imperative for one to always keep foresight (προμηθέστερον) in mind for the life that’s to come, and to not run from these things, but rather be eager to approach them, in the way Solon describes it being “necessary to learn as long as one lives.”

“χαίρω γάρ, ὦ Λυσίμαχε, τῷ ἀνδρὶ πλησιάζων, καὶ οὐδὲν οἶμαι κακὸν εἶναι τὸ ὑπομιμνῄσκεσθαι ὅτι μὴ καλῶς ἢ πεποιήκαμεν ἢ ποιοῦμεν, ἀλλ᾽ εἰς τὸν ἔπειτα βίον προμηθέστερον ἀνάγκη εἶναι τὸν ταῦτα μὴ φεύγοντα ἀλλ᾽ ἐθέλοντα κατὰ τὸ τοῦ Σόλωνος καὶ ἀξιοῦντα μανθάνειν ἕωσπερ ἂν ζῇ…” Plato, Laches, 188c-b.

That word “promethesteron,” (προμηθέστερον), “to be more thoughtful of oneself,” comes from προμηθής. Readers might recognize that Prometheus’ and Epimetheus’ names reflect their similar nomination: one is forethought, the other is afterthought.

There is a special value to the ability to assess the past to predict the future. This inspection sometimes angers many of Socrates’ interlocutors (for instance, see these passages in the Apology: 21d1, 21e1-2, 22e6-23a2, 23c7-d2).

Markets can think of truth-finding on three distinct timeframes: the future, the present, and the past. The first is the one we generally think of prediction markets accomplishing: that is, in the pursuit of future truth, one “bets” that something will happen. However, considering truth in the past is where these markets have traditionally thrived.

This is principally because all “present” markets are actually past markets. The very conversion of present information into a fiat or communicated form of it implies that the “present” is no longer persistent. Beginning with this assumption, we can begin to classify what data about the past is valuable, and think of how to renovate and resolve access to past data with novel technologies.

For instance, oracles like Redstone, UMA, and Chainlink are not oracular in the sense that they have “seen what’s happened,” the classical definition of what an “oracle” does; rather, they claim to give an accurate and extremely swift report of what has happened, in a generally accepted “present.” There are examples of these oracles outside of web3 too. In the clearweb, our financial system relies on one particularly valuable oracle, Bloomberg LP. But even Bloomberg and similar entities operate on an infinitesimal delay.

These oracles are still considering the past. They are just considering it faster, and with greater authority, than any other source.

Even the word for “present” itself is derivative of the latin praesens, which is an expansion of “prae” and “esse”: before, and to be. The market for being best and most reliable at presence is a salient one. Some quantitative hedge funds famously place their offices as closely as possible to the origin point of signal from Wall Street in order to act on the stock exchange’s fluctuations faster than competitors can.

There is value in determining the truth of the past in as quickly and as truthfully a manner as possible, and many companies and infrastructural tools take advantage of this. But outside of highly regulated abstract systems, these oracles fail to meaningfully intersect with quotidian human activity.

This is changing. If you use a smartphone, it’s like that that some sort of oracular process is happening to you in your daily life. It is not uncommon for users to report that as soon as they think of something, that very item, errand, or a company otherwise tangentially related to it appears in a feed of theirs, as if the applications they were using were reading their minds.

This is because these applications are acting as oracles. They are functionally identical to Bloomberg LP: inspecting what has happened and making judgments based on it, because someone is paying them to do so. In this case, they do so for marketing agencies, and the Megacorp apparatus.

There is a reason why this last example of oracular intent feels wrong. These reads of the past are affronting, invasive, and offensive to what we might rather declare private. This is because deliberation on the past is a very special human art. There was a reason why temples with oracles in the Greek world were religious, holy areas immune to the volatile fluctuations of the outside world.

It’s also why prediction markets (such as %alphabet’s beta product) often get eschewed from discourse. They tell truths about thinking about the past when asked for future determinations on a subject. But more and more, markets for truth are the only thing that people care about. Prediction markets, especially today’s failed media landscape, are perhaps the only way we can accurately discern truth. The efficacy of markets will only grow in a data rich world.