d/acc: A Year in Review

Written by: Vitalik Buterin

Compiled by: Leek

About a year ago, I wrote an article on technological optimism, outlining my overall enthusiasm for technology and the tremendous benefits it can bring, while also expressing a cautious attitude toward certain specific issues, mainly focusing on superintelligent artificial intelligence and the catastrophic risks it could pose if this technology is built improperly, or the risk of humanity irreversibly losing power.

One of the core points of the article is to uphold a philosophy: decentralized, democratic, and differentiated defensive acceleration. It is necessary to accelerate technological development while distinctly focusing on those technologies that can enhance our defense capabilities rather than inflict harm, and to strive for the decentralization of power rather than allowing it to concentrate in the hands of a few elites, thus avoiding these elites representing everyone in determining right from wrong. The model of defense should be like the democratic Switzerland, and the historically quasi-anarchist region of Zomia, rather than the model represented by lords and castles under medieval feudalism.

In the year since then, these ideas and concepts have undergone significant development and maturation. I shared these thoughts on the "80,000 Hours" platform and received numerous responses, most of which were positive, though there were also some critical voices.

The work itself has been continuously advancing and achieving tangible results: we have witnessed progress in the field of verifiable open-source vaccines; people's awareness of the value of healthy indoor air is deepening; "community notes" continue to play a positive role; prediction markets have had a breakthrough year as an information tool; zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge ( ZK-SNARKs ) have been applied in government identity verification and social media (, and account abstraction has ensured the security of Ethereum wallets ); open-source imaging tools have found applications in medicine and brain-computer interfaces ( BCI ), and so on.

Last autumn, we welcomed the 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, networks, information defense, and neurotechnology (, and lasted a full day. Over the years, those dedicated to these technologies have increasingly come to understand each other's work, while outsiders are also becoming more aware of a larger vision: that the shared values driving the development of Ethereum and cryptocurrencies can extend to a broader world.

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

) The connotation and denotation of d/acc

Time flows to 2042. You see a report in the media stating that there may be a new outbreak 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 do not lead to an actual crisis. The previous two potential outbreaks were detected early through wastewater monitoring and open-source analysis of social media, and they were successfully contained in their infancy. However, this situation is different; the prediction market indicates that the probability of at least 10,000 cases occurring is as high as 60%, which makes you 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 ### whether through a single breath test or by testing ( after being exposed to indoor air for 15 minutes. At the same time, open-source instructions and code to generate vaccines using equipment available at any modern medical facility worldwide are expected to be released in a few weeks. Most people have not taken any action yet; they mainly 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 running personal assistant AI you use not only undertakes routine tasks such as navigation, restaurant and event recommendations but also takes into account real-time air testing data and carbon dioxide data to recommend only 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, other personal assistant AIs 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 involved wearing masks when the air tester sounded an alarm and showed the presence of the virus, and isolating at home if an individual's test result was positive. This measure was sufficient to further reduce the transmission rate, which had already been significantly lowered due to passive strong air filtration, to below 1. A simulation showed that a disease potentially five times more severe than the COVID-19 pandemic from twenty years ago has not caused serious impact.

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

Holding an event with "diversity" is not difficult, but fostering genuine connections among people from different backgrounds and interests is quite challenging. I still vividly remember being forced to watch lengthy operas during middle and high school; at that time, I personally found these operas tedious and boring. I knew I "should" appreciate them, because otherwise, I would be seen as a cultureless computer science slacker, but I was unable to resonate with the content of the operas on a deeper level. However, the atmosphere of d/acc day was completely different: it felt like people genuinely loved to learn about various work in different fields.

If we aspire to build a brighter future than domination, deceleration, and destruction, we must inevitably engage in such extensive alliance building. d/acc seems to have achieved significant results in this regard, and this alone is enough to highlight the precious value 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 toward defense, and does not rely on granting more power to central authority during implementation. There is an inherent close relationship between these two aspects: any decentralized, democratic, or free political structure tends to thrive when defense is easy to implement, while facing severe challenges when defense encounters significant difficulties—in such cases, the likely outcome is a chaotic period of mutual confrontation among all, ultimately reaching a balance dominated by the strongest.

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

Decentralization accelerates, but overlooks the "differentiated defense" aspect

Essentially, this is similar to becoming an effective acceleracionist ) e/acc (, while simultaneously pursuing decentralization. Many people take 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 artificial intelligence" and similar topics, but in my view, their focus on the "defensive" aspect is noticeably lacking.

In my opinion, this approach may be able to avoid the risk of a specific group imposing a dictatorship over humanity, but it fails to address potential structural issues: in an environment conducive 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. Regarding artificial intelligence, it also cannot properly address the risk of humanity's overall power being diminished in relation to artificial intelligence.

Differentiated defense accelerates, but ignores "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 have expressed concerns that extreme centralized control may be the only way to respond to extreme technologies in the future: for example, envision a hypothetical scenario where "everyone wears a 'freedom tag' -- a successor product to today's more limited wearable monitoring devices, similar to ankle tags used as alternatives to incarceration in several countries... encrypted video and audio are continuously uploaded and interpreted in real-time by machines." However, there is a degree issue with centralized control. A relatively mild form of centralized control, which is often overlooked but still harmful, is reflected in the field of biotechnology ), such as the resistance to public oversight over food and vaccines (, as well as allowing this resistance to go unchallenged through closed-source standards.

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 pandemic. Centralized epistemology led the World Health Organization to refuse to acknowledge for years that the coronavirus was airborne, while mandatory social distancing and vaccine mandates sparked political backlash that could last for decades. Similar situations are likely to occur again in any risk scenario related to artificial intelligence or other risky technologies. In contrast, a decentralized approach would more effectively address the risks stemming from the center itself.

Decentralized Defense, but Exclude 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 regard would incur incalculable costs. Second, in a non-totalitarian world, stagnation is unstable: those who "cheat" the most, who can find seemingly reasonable ways to continue advancing 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 an illustration; the success achieved so far in nuclear non-proliferation is also such an example. However, these strategies cannot work indefinitely.

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

• In today's increasingly tribalized world, we uphold principles rather than blindly constructing various things—instead, we aspire to build specific things that 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 expand. Our ability to protect vulnerable animals, plants, and people from harm must continuously improve, and the only way forward is to move boldly ahead.
• Build technology that can effectively protect us, rather than based on the assumption of "good people ) or good artificial intelligence ( controlling everything." We achieve this by constructing tools that are naturally more effective for building and protecting than for destroying.

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

Our goal is to build a world that preserves human agency, achieving negative freedom, which means avoiding positive interference from others ), whether from ordinary citizens, governments, or superintelligent robots (, in our ability to shape our own destinies, while also achieving positive freedom, which ensures that we have the knowledge and resources to exercise that ability. This resonates with a classical liberal tradition that has persisted for centuries, encompassing Stewart Brand's focus on "access to tools" and John Stuart Mill's emphasis on education and freedom as key elements of human progress—perhaps also adding Buckminster Fuller's vision of a participatory and widely distributed process for solving global issues. Given the technological landscape of the 21st century, we can view d/acc as a means to achieve these same goals.