Most data sources report that home prices in Florida rose between 35% and 43% from 2021-2023. Wages in that same timeframe rose little more than 10%. Florida also now leads the nation in rent burden reporting in 2025 with more than 30% of renters spending over half of their income on housing.

It’s simple supply and demand. Miami has the tightest rental market in the nation with 21 applicants for every single listing. That’s a lot of upward pressure on home prices

There is admittedly a nation-wide shortage of on-market homes, but the disparity between economic growth and home affordability is sharpest in Florida for a few unique reasons: state leaders have prioritized attracting the “golden goose” of high-wage jobs over education and infrastructure needs for decades. Companies that offer high-wage jobs plant in Florida with lavish incentives, but the state’s workforce, shaped largely by a considerably lower-wage tourism industry, is not qualified for those jobs. This brings an influx of high-skilled talent from everywhere but Florida.

Local high school grads have been set up for failure against incoming homebuyers in an under-supplied market. Florida politicians are going to be blindsided by how sharp of an issue that is. Talking about ending property taxes is great if you are a homeowner, but it will not purchase with the incoming electorate.

It should not be too much to ask that corporations setting up shop in Florida be required to invest in the local community and train their workforce here, especially when we are providing economic incentives to attract them. We are essentially paying them to outsource the wealth they generate in our economy and price native Floridians out of their home state.

It is going to be a difficult situation to fix, but we can start by fixing the economic incentives. Florida jobs should go to Florida high school graduates.

Today marks the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, which produced the Nicene Creed. This ancient “statement of faith” was, and is, an expression of unity among believers who hold to a common faith.

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Unity is an essential aspect of what it means to be the Church, and it’s what Christ prayed for in John 17:

“I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word; that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us.”

The world before Christ, and the world today outside of Christ, is fractured by countless divisions. In the book of Ephesians, St. Paul lists several, including men and woman, jew and gentile, and master and servant.

But in Christ Jesus, all divisions are reconciled. When a believer enters into the faith, they are joined to the One Body of Jesus Christ—the “New Man” that Paul describes in Ephesians:

“For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility… that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace…”

This new man, His Body, is the Church:

And yet, despite this calling, the Body of Christ is tragically fragmented in our present day. A house divided cannot stand, and our disunity weakens our witness and undermines our mission perhaps more than any other obstacle.

Christ said, “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples: if you have love one for another.”

Our unity is our witness. The reconciliation of all men and women in the one Body of Christ, the Church, is our mission. This is the good news that Christ has called us to bring to a fallen world.

Perhaps today, on this 1700th anniversary, you can take a moment to reflect on the creed that unified our forefathers in the faith, and pray for unity in our time.

Over Easter, I attended vigil at the Cathedral Church of Saint Luke in Orlando. The stunning Gothic Revival church founded by Thomas Jefferson’s grandson has a rich cultural heritage in pioneering Florida. Today, it is among the last conservative holdouts in a denomination many consider a lost cause.

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The Easter vigil is a traditional service in Christian practice held on Holy Saturday in anticipation of the resurrection of Christ on Sunday morning. It is the culmination of the Paschal Triduum services, including Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, which follow the last moments of Christ’s betrayal, death, and resurrection and capstones the Lenten season.

In the video I’ve included, you can hear the moment the vigil “passes.” The crowd rings bells and the organ launches into festive music, celebrating the resurrection of Christ. (Other scenes depicted include the lighting of the Paschal Candle, left, and a Holy Week service in the adjoining chapel, right).

Following the Resurrection celebration, the Rev. Jonathan Turtle, rector of Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Audubon Park, delivered the evening’s sermon. “Jesus Christ really did live and die before being raised from the dead…” he said. “That’s the hope of Easter—that something can happen in this life to make you a truly new person.”

Saint Luke’s is the Cathedral Church for the diocese of Central Florida and is the see (or “seat”) of Central Florida’s Episcopal Bishop, Justin S. Holcomb. Bishop Holcomb presides over 15 counties in Central Florida.

The now-Cathedral was built as a mission church in 1881 thanks to the effort of Wayles Eppes—the grandson of Thomas Jefferson. “They purchased this site at the corner of Jefferson Street, so named after Eppes’ grandfather, in 1882 for $300 and built a small wood frame church” the historical marker outside the church reads.

The current cathedral sits on the same property and dates to 1925. It was designed by Phillip H. Frohman, who was also the architect of the National Cathedral in Washington. In the photos, you can get a taste of the ornate wood, stone, and glass work throughout the sanctuary.

The Episcopal Church, a member of the worldwide Anglican Communion, has a long heritage in the United States, and much of the nation’s early Christian history finds roots in Episcopal worship. Over half of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were Episcopalians along with the nation’s first President, George Washington.

But today the Episcopal Church is largely considered a liberal denomination after a long slide in orthodoxy that has been mirrored across mainline denominations. The Church’s liberalization has resulted in its fracturing, with breakoff denominations forming that hold to varying degrees of conservative doctrine. These splinter churches often brand themselves as Anglican, a term that refers to churches that find heritage in the tradition of the Church of England, to differentiate themselves from the Episcopal Church.

Most recently, in 2018, the Episcopal Church mandated the availability of same-sex marriage rites church-wide under Resolution B012. Prior to the resolution, the canons of The Episcopal Church allowed local bishops to make their own policy within the bounds of their diocese.

As a conciliatory move, the resolution did provide a compromise for conservative Bishops who cannot in good conscience authorize same-sex marriage rites, allowing them to defer oversight of any requested marriages to another bishop outside of the diocese.

Central Florida, then under Bishop Gregory Brewer, was one of only eight out of 111 dioceses that opposed Resolution B012. Today, under Bishop Holcomb, it is one of just six that continue to uphold a conservative stance on marriage, restricting rites to the traditional union of one man and one woman (the other five conservative dioceses at the time of writing are Dallas, Tennessee, Springfield, the Virgin Islands, and the Diocese of Florida, based in Jacksonville).

The Episcopal Church in Central Florida represents 23,000 Christians worshipping in 81 congregations across 15 counties—all, save one (Saint Richard’s in Winter Park requested same sex marriage rites under the compromise in 2018 and was referred to Bishop Terry White of Kentucky), adhering to a traditional, conservative marriage doctrine against the pressure of a near-overwhelming liberal consensus within the historic church body.

For conservative Christians outside of the Episcopal Church, these happenings may seem inconsequential. Out of sight is out of mind, and closer congregational needs and denominational battles take precedence. Greater still, historic theological differences may cause some to reason that The Episcopal Church deserves to fall.

Perhaps so, but the loss of the Episcopal Church in Central Florida would deal a significant blow to Christian faith formation in a diocese that sits at the epicenter of the space industry. That loss would affect not only what is taught from the pulpit, but also what is taught to children in the diocese’s 17 schools—children who will grow to see humanity take to the stars and be recruited by the companies sending it there as the industries of the future continue to plant roots on its shores.

Are these young minds something we can afford to lose?

In addition to commemorating Christ’s resurrection, for Americans, the Easter season also marks the discovery of the land we now call home.

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This Easter, 512 years ago, Ponce de León first sighted the Eastern Coast of Florida. On that day he is quoted to have said, “Thanks be to Thee, O Lord, Who hast permitted me to see something new.”

Ponce and his crew were Spanish Catholics, and exactly one week after Easter, on Divine Mercy Sunday, they became the first Christians to ever set foot in the present-day United States when they landed in the vicinity of Melbourne Beach. They christened the land “La Florida” in tribute to Spain's Easter celebration, Pascua Florida, or “Feast of Flowers.”

While there are no surviving records of the day’s events, Spanish voyages to the new world were often commissioned with priests, and some have speculated that a Mass would have been given on the land before Ponce and his crew set sail to their final destination of Hispaniola.

From the time of the discovery until the mid-18th century, there were several missionary trips conducted by the Spanish to bring Christ to the Native Americans of La Florida (La Florida was used to refer to the entire continental American territory at that time). Most ended in failure, and many ended in the martyrdom of the Christian Missionaries.

Ponce de León himself was killed in 1521 during a failed missional settlement attempt. At the voyages commission, King Ferdinand V instructed the expedition: “Treat [the Indians] as best you can… seeking in every possible way to convert them to our Holy Catholic Faith.” The 1521 failure would be the first of 6 failed settlement attempts by the Spanish Crown until the founding of St. Augustine by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés in 1565.

It is interesting to reflect half a millennium later that the landing site of these early Christian pioneers would come to be known as the Space Coast, and that the very same beaches would be home to a new generation of pioneers who would carry their spirit of exploration and discovery to the stars.

Editors note: originally published in the November 2024 BTCTKVR Magazine: Privacy Edition—bitcoin-takeover.com

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Launched in 2019 by a team of developers led by Roman Semenov & Roman Storm, Tornado Cash is an Ethereum-based privacy tool for anonymizing on-chain wallet transfers through zero-knowledge proofs. The depositor generates a zk-SNARK secret, consisting of a commitment and a proof, at the browser level and sends the commitment with their deposit to a Tornado Cash pool. Each pool is a unique smart contract designed to accept deposits of a uniform currency and denomination. The depositor can then track the number of deposits in the pool (the anonymity set) along with the number of deposits made since their initial deposit and, once a suitable level of anonymity is reached, request a withdrawal to a new wallet by supplying the previously generated proof.

As an additional layer of privacy, users can request withdrawals through a third-party relayer. Relayers help users withdraw directly to a fresh wallet without having to potentially compromise anonymity by funding the wallet for contract gas fees. Relayers charge a small, agreed upon fee for their services and deduct the expense directly from the user’s withdrawal.

To facilitate relayer services and provide user experience benefits, developers created a layer of proxy contracts maintained by a community DAO. All transactions made via the official UI pass through the proxy to their appropriate pools. However, users can choose to bypass the proxy and interact with Tornado Cash pools directly using their own or a third-party UI.

A Brief Outline of Events

Following a special zk-SNARK Trusted Setup Ceremony audited by the NCC Group, Tornado Cash was made fully trustless on May 20^th, 2020. The Trusted Setup Ceremony involved setting the operator address for all pool instances to the null address (0x000…), making the core contract pools for Tornado Cash unmodifiable. In a Medium article published after the ceremony, a Tornado Cash contributor wrote, “From now on, Tornado.cash is largely living by the precepts that code is law. The Tornado.cash smart contracts are running on Ethereum and the community has the decision on whether or not to use our tools” [1].

On August 8^th, 2022, the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Tornado Cash as a virtual currency mixer, alleging ties to the North Korean Lazarus hacking group [2]. Forewarning the decision, OFAC had previously sanctioned Bitcoin mixer Blender.io on the grounds of similar ties to North Korea. In the Blender.io statement, OFAC promised it was “committed to exposing components of the virtual currency ecosystem, like Blender, that are critical to the obfuscation of the trail of stolen proceeds from illicit cyber activity” [3].

Conventional entities, including traditional mixers such as Blender.io, invite little confusion as to who or what is being sanctioned. But Tornado Cash represents autonomous code, and the interconnected nature of blockchain infrastructure prevents straightforward interpretation. Under the ambiguous language of the OFAC sanction, potentially every Ethereum user, node operator, and block validator could be held liable for propagating Tornado Cash.

The months following proved to be a trial-by-fire for claims of uncensorability made by Tornado Cash, Ethereum, and blockchain technology broadly. As a case study, Tornado Cash can help developers think through the design problems and tradeoffs that censorship-resistant building requires—especially privacy building, which, above others, can be expected to attract the scrutinizing eye of censoring forces.

What Tornado Cash Did Right

At the protocol level, censorship happens when a design feature or bug is exploited to prevent users from interacting with the protocol (design failure), or when the protocol is “captured” through a governance or hardware take-over (decentralization failure). Protocols that are built to effectively mitigate these failures are said to be permissionless and decentralized respectively, and their resilience to censorship attacks can be evaluated on the basis of these two axioms.

Following are permissionless design decisions made by the Tornado Cash developers that helped the protocol survive OFAC censorship pressures:

- Locked, autonomous core contracts

By locking the core pool contracts, the developers ensured the primary functionality of Tornado Cash could not be compromised. This critical foresight is the principal reason Tornado Cash is still operating today despite the failure of several second-layer functions.

- Decentralized file storage frontend hosting

The official Tornado Cash UI was hosted on IPFS: a decentralized peer-to-peer file sharing protocol. Content uploaded to IPFS cannot be edited and is given a unique hash code that identifies its location on the IPFS network. While the original domain, Tornado.cash, was revoked by the domain registrar and is no longer accessible, users could still access the official UI frontend via the IPFS hash.

- Limited upgradeability through proxy contracts

By limiting upgradeable features of Tornado Cash to a second layer proxy, Tornado Cash avoided the trap of favoring decentralized governance over permissionless design while also providing an avenue for DAO efforts to continue improving and maintaining the protocol.

Decentralization is accomplished by distributing influence over product vulnerabilities as maximally as possible. Effective decentralized design decisions made by the Tornado Cash developers include:

- Limited DAO bound by a coded constitution

DAOs in practice have notoriously underdelivered on their theoretical promises. Coded constitutions, like Tornado Cash had, force rules, such as on-chain voting and a monetary lock-up requirement for submitted proposals, to be followed programmatically. Amidst a contracting environment of DAO participation, these limiting features prevented Tornado Cash contract changes from being exercised by a minority coalition of compromised voters.

- Vesting control of frontend UI assets in a DAO

Maintaining the UI required centralized security of Tornado.cash and the Ethereum native tornadocash.eth. The DAO was charged with securing current registration on both these domains and protecting their redirect destinations. While Tornado.cash did not withstand censorship, tornadocash.eth proved to be an invaluable asset for providing users trusted access to a reliable UI amidst a minefield of scams. Maintaining the integrity of tornadocash.eth despite a rapid drop-off of DAO participation is a notable success of the DAO as a decentralization effort.

What Went Wrong

Despite best efforts, the government sanctions tested both the strength of the protocol’s permissionless design and the resilience of its decentralization efforts in a variety of ways:

- Censorship by domain name and hosting providers

Least surprising, frontends prove to be a critical failure point in censorship-resistant building. While still accessible via IPFS, the official UI could not be called via traditional web browsers within hours of the sanction announcement.

- Loss of human capital

The Tornado Cash DAO all but dematerialized as longtime developers fled in the face of legal threat. In one instance, a multisig wallet holding tornadocash.eth along with DAO treasury funds was briefly in peril as elected multisig stewards scrambled to sever ties. (By August 14th the governance contract was in full control and no assets were lost.)

- Loss of DAO communication / collaboration channels

If the loss of core contributors wasn’t enough, critical DAO collaboration channels including the DAO forum, Discord server, and Github were all swiftly taken offline. Committed contributors worked without financial incentive on Telegram and, later, an Element server to keep the project alive; a testament to their commitment, but not the financial participation incentives of the DAO, which proved entirely unreliable and a brutal flaw in censorship-resistant building.

- Ethereum network censorship

An RPC endpoint is required for the browser-based Tornado Cash UI to interact with on-chain content. By default, the UI employed two popular Ethereum RPCs: Infura and Alchemy. Both censored calls from Tornado Cash following the sanction. Finding alternative RPCs that supported Tornado Cash became increasingly difficult as censorship pressures spread.

An even greater threat: Ethereum edged dangerously close to ecosystem-wide censorship of Tornado Cash due to the functional design of its block approval process, which relies on block builders, relayers, and validators to choose the transactions that are finalized in a new block and, by extension, the transactions that are not. In November 2022, block censorship reached its highest point when a record 78% of Ethereum blocks were reported to be OFAC compliant [4].

- Censorship by dependent third parties including The Graph

To build a cryptographic withdrawal, Tornado Cash requires the assembly of a Merkle tree of all previous contract transactions. The tree is generated at the UI level and provides part of the zero-knowledge proof contract pools require to tie a withdrawal to a deposit. For building efficiency, Tornado Cash relied on a cache of indexed transactions from another supposedly decentralized protocol: The Graph. By mid-September, it became apparent that The Graph was censoring Tornado Cash indexing. This move that broke the UI and halted withdrawals for weeks while independent developers rebuilt the UI without the dependency.

Takeaways for Future Developers

Tornado Cash serves as a valuable case study for developers who prioritize privacy preservation and censorship-resistant code. While not perfect in every way, it is worth noting that Tornado Cash is still a working, privacy-preserving protocol on Ethereum despite massive, social and legal pressure. This is a testament to the foresight of the original developers and those who, despite potentially devastating legal and reputational risk, contributed to updates that ensured its survival through a wave of dependency failures.

Various lessons can be taken from the trials of Tornado Cash. Here are three:

First, decentralized governance cannot replace the security offered by permissionless design. The failures of the Tornado Cash DAO and the near-failure of the entire Ethereum protocol illustrate that social pressures will challenge decentralized models in ways that permissionless code is immune to.

Second, frontend user interfaces remain a significant vulnerability in censorship-resistant design. Builders should use all the options available to them, including browser-accessible decentralized file storage protocols such as IPFS and decentralized identity alternatives to DNS. However, further research and development in this crucial area is urgently needed.

Finally, contrary to typical thinking, freedom of choice is not always conducive to censorship-resistant building. In the case of Ethereum, providing block builders the option to pick and choose which transactions end up in final blocks implies a responsibility for the transactions chosen. A scenario where block builders cannot choose the transactions that make it into final blocks would remove the layer culpability social censorship requires.

Privacy is a human right says the Tornado Cash slogan [5]. For all who agree, happy building!

Figure 1 Tornado Cash v3 Contract Flow

Sources:

1. “Tornado.cash Is Finally Trustless!,” Available at: https://tornado-cash.medium.com/tornado-cash-is-finally-trustless-a6e119c1d1c2

2. “U.S. Treasury Sanctions Notorious Virtual Currency Mixer Tornado Cash.” Available at: https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0916

3. “U.S. Treasury Issues First-Ever Sanctions on a Virtual Currency Mixer, Targets DPRK Cyber Threats,” Available at: https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0768

4. MEV Watch, Available at: https://www.mevwatch.info/

5. Current Tornado Cash protocol information available at: https://tornadocash.social/

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This really isn’t surprising. Christians are uniquely conservative. The history of the west is Christian history. Conservatism is concerned with preserving traditional values, and the traditional values here that conservatism is concerned with preserving are defined by Christianity.

The world should be explored, and scientific innovations should be encouraged, but goodness isn’t something to be discovered. Progress unbounded by virtue is a euphemism for evil.

Liberalism elevates progress above traditional concepts of virtue, proposing that virtue is an open-ended question that reason and science must prove. Society is subjected to endless experiments in its pursuit.

Christians don’t need the experiments. We already have a standard of goodness. It was given to us by God, and that standard is immutable.

So it’s not surprising that Christians are suspicious of new innovations. Especially technology marketed to replace not just the value of human work, but also the human mind. If we’re building the tower of babel, it would be in our best interest to call off the work.

However, that doesn’t mean that Christians oppose all innovations. Many of history’s greatest scientific minds were Christian. Many scientific innovations have improved society’s well-being, and Christians throughout history have been at the forefront of that.

But AI is an unknown. In an ideal world, massive changes with unknown effects like this would be undertaken carefully over time with ample moderation to control for adverse consequences. Unfortunately, we don’t live in an ideal world, and it’s unlikely the brakes will be applied by anyone anytime soon.

There are hills to die on, and sometimes clasping our arms together and refusing to participate is the best course of action. However, this is not always the case. The Church was historically slow to adopt the internet, and in the meantime, the developers became corporations which became powerful gatekeepers that punish Christian thought in the online public square today.

Instead, I think it’s possible that our best course of action might be to — not necessarily embrace AI — but to build it. We need more Christians developing the technology that society will be bounded by in the future. We need more Christians influencing the discussion on, not just what gets built, but how it’s built and what values get built into its operating rules.

We need Christians building AI precisely because it’s scary. Unlike some, I’m not convinced that what we are dealing with is inherently evil, but I do recognize that is has great potential for evil. I also think it has great potential for good, not by replacing human effort, but by accomplishing work that would otherwise not get done.

In the past, “barn raising” was a communal event. We can imagine the benefits of such a practice for the social fabric of small communities, but we can likewise recognize the benefits the invention of cranes provided for those unable to enlist a communities’ help. The social benefits of barn raising enjoyed by some was not a universal experience.

This isn’t an argument for unbounded scientific pursuit. Gothic horrors like Frankenstein barely scratch the surface of dark worlds that can be imagined due to humanity’s lust for knowledge. However, I don’t believe that closing the rhetorical Pandora’s box is going to stop what’s already been unleashed. So where does that leave us?

In a 2018 appearance on Joe Rogan, Elon Musk issued intense warnings about the development of AI. It should seem contradictory that he’s been at the forefront of AI development for years with Neuralink, AI robots, and his coming rival product to OpenAI (a company he cofounded).

Elon isn’t a Christian, and I don’t have something resembling faith that what he’s building will turn out for the best. But I think I understand why he’s doing it: because he knows that if he doesn’t someone else will. I think the question is, who do we as Christian’s trust most to build with an applied ethic for the common good? Ourselves or the unconverted?

Editor’s note: originally published on Staseos.com January, 2023.

Informality is the status quo in a fast-paced world where young talent would rather be building the next industry-disrupting technology than courting social approval. Nevertheless, the crowd of developers filing into the Sheraton Valley Forge in Pennsylvania this past November was notably well-dressed–as much could be expected from a gathering of Catholics. The conference was the first of its kind, bringing together key leaders within the Catholic Church and what is broadly referred to as crypto, blockchain, or web3 to discuss important questions regarding the intersection of faith and the burgeoning industry: How can the Church leverage the new tools provided? What dangers does the new technology provide? What could the future look like and how can the Church secure a seat at the table?

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Spurred by a belief that the Church should put a “hopeful ear” to all new technological advancements, Matthew Pinto organized the Catholic Crypto Conference to start the conversation. Pinto is the founder of Ascension Press and has been involved in numerous Catholic initiatives since the early 1990s. In his opening remarks, Pinto pointed out the use of the Alpha and Omega in the conference's logo design and declared that “God is the Lord of All,” and the blockchain is not beyond his reach.

Industry experts brought to speak on the topic included longtime industry advisor Chris Tyrrell (previously of Blockchain.com), Brian Brown, president of the International Organization for the Family (IOF), economist Stephen Barrows of the Acton Institute, and web3 builders such as Ben DiFrancesco, founder of crypto consultancy company Scopelift , and Brantly Millegan of the Ethereum Naming Service. Other speakers represented Catholic and non-Catholic thinkers in the fields of moral theology, church leadership, economic theory, and of course, blockchain technology.

That the emerging industry could be deemed worthy of an intentionally Christian perspective is not insignificant. The current paradigm of web2 has come to define the modern age and, increasingly, the limits of free speech and expression in a world where the de facto public square has moved online. Once envisioned as an open-source platform where information could be shared and accessed without censorship, the world wide web of today is largely monopolized by big tech arbiters who in all respects have shown themselves to be hostile to the Christian worldview.

Web3 and its associated technologies promise to restore a neutral vision to the infrastructure of the internet and may come to define the playing field of the future, and it’s being built today. Christians cannot let this crucial moment find us unprepared. Blockchain technology presents many hopeful opportunities for the Church, but its promises are not guaranteed, and without a strong ethical voice the hopeful vision of a censorship-resistant web could be coopted once again. It was both the hope for a better future and the fear that things could go awry that drove the conversation at the inaugural Catholic Crypto conference.

The Problem with Web2

I was able to sit down with Pinto for a short one-on-one conversation during the busy events of the two-day conference. While open about the fact that he is no subject-matter expert on the technology of web3, Pinto considers himself a loyal son of the Church and has spent the greater part of his life spearheading Catholic ministry and educational efforts. Upon learning about the developing world of blockchain technology, Pinto was struck with a sense that these new advancements could have far-reaching ramifications for the future of society, and that the Church, with its mission to lead, teach, and sanctify in Christ’s name, must have a voice.

Pinto opened our conversation with a prayer before describing his vision for the conference in poignant words: “I've had this image that if someone had grabbed me by the lapels in 1995… and said, ‘you don't understand what's coming with the internet,’ I think the church would have done more. A lot more it's possible.” Pinto hopes the Catholic Crypto Conference can be exactly that: a “grabbing of the lapels” for the Church regarding the new world of crypto. He believes we could be looking at a “sizeable technological shift” with the potential for both great good and great ill. But Pinto’s first instinct, and the instinct he believes all Christians should have towards any new technological advancement, is to have a hopeful expectation that God is doing something new and creative for the good of humanity.

“Anytime there's a new creation, I think we Catholics would say, we Christians would say, it's an element of the spark of the divine…. And so, so I think the proper response of Christians, therefore the Church, is that anytime a new gift or a new creation, comes our way that we need to give at least an attentive ear, and more presumably a hopeful ear” (Pinto)

For Christians with a hopeful ear, the new decentralized technologies made possible through blockchain sound like an answer to prayer. The current playing field of the web is rife with abuse by centralized powers, and conservative Christians have found themselves to be prominent targets. Christian doctrine is considered hate speech, and those who dare submit their beliefs to public scrutiny are punished with social exile – no exaggeration in an age when the global banking and communication systems required for day-to-day life are run through these centralized, digital arbiters.

In addition to his non-profit activities with the IOF, conference speaker Brian Brown runs a for-profit company involved with bitcoin mining in Eastern Europe. Detailing his own experience with the coercive powers of big tech on the Free Speech panel hosted by Lorraine Ranalli, Brown described waking up one day in 2017 to find donations for the IOF were no longer being processed. In a seemingly arbitrary decision, Stripe, the IOF’s payment processor at the time, found the organization’s social views in conflict with Stripe’s terms of service and terminated the contract without warning. To make matters worse, due to regulatory compliance, payment processors maintain sole custody of donors’ personal details. The IOF lost not just a payment processor, but vital information for all their reoccurring donors.

Financial censorship, often referred to as de-banking when including the closure of personal and business bank accounts for non-criminal activity, has quickly become a first line of attack against conservative organizations. There is no way to buy, sell, or receive donations in the traditional digital economy without passing through a payment processor. Loss of this critical function can leave an organization dead in the water for days or weeks until a new processor is sourced. In extreme cases, there may be no alternative solution available as tight regulation in the industry limits competition. According to at least one 2021 census, there were only 66 industry participants and effectively fewer considering the interlacing nature of payment ecosystems (Rej).

Other examples of conservative organizations facing payment censorship have included the Christian crowdfunding platform GiveSendGo, which lost support from Paypal and Visa in early 2016, the NRA, conservative social media platform Gab, and WikiLeaks along with many other, smaller conservative organizations that do not make headlines (Terr). In the IOF’s case, they were able to source a new payment processor and Stripe did eventually transfer their donor information upon threat of a lawsuit, but the fear of financial censorship remains constant, and it’s not the only threat conservatives face in the digital age. Other vulnerabilities targeted for censorship include web hosting services, content delivery networks, domain name registrars, app store listings, and numerous other side services that can immediately impair an organization’s digital operations or remove its presence from the internet at any given moment. “The power they [big tech] hold in something that should be the digital public square is not a digital public square if you punish, repress, and marginalize all of the opinions that you don’t like,” Brown said. “It’s not freedom. It’s an attack on freedom.”

“If the infrastructure of the internet, if cloud computing, servers, are turned off on us, you can’t just go somewhere else. And the market share of AWS, of Azure, of all these big cloud service providers is so huge. Very difficult to find something else” (Brown)

A Hopeful Opportunity: Can the Church Benefit from Web3?

Speaking on the Free Speech panel alongside Brown, Michael Mathison Miller, senior research fellow at the Acton Institute, proposed that our ignorance of the regulatory power of code is what led to our failure to secure critical web2 infrastructure. “…we’ve been operating, understandably, on this idea that code is neutral, and all these things are neutral, and we’re just users of it,” Miller said, “but what we’re finding out is that there’s an underlying philosophical worldview that shapes not just the code but shapes the people who are making the code.” Speaking on Building a Parallel Polis, Miller argued that the Church must now move its interests into securing its own alternative infrastructure. Miller believes that offline associations of banks, insurance, and educational institutions that enshrine Catholic doctrine in their legal status are critical to the parallel polis, but the decentralized ledger technologies of web3 could be a powerful infrastructure play for the online world. “We cannot build functional, autonomous, decentralized associations on centralized technology, because they will shut you down,” Miller maintained. “Google is not your friend.”

In the paradigm of web3, the arbitrary decision-making of current, centralized gatekeepers such as Google will be replaced with autonomous protocols that operate according to the principle of “code is law.” First proposed by Lawrence Lessig in 2001, the regulative nature of code is not a new concept, but the invention of blockchain and smart contract technology introduced a new dimension to the conversation. Unlike web2, code written to a blockchain is by nature open source and cannot be edited or deleted, even by its own creator. Many believe web3 has the potential to provide a more equitable playing field by creating an internet free of human bias and authoritarian gatekeepers.

Conference speaker Brantly Millegan, the former director of operations for the non-profit developing the popular ENS identity protocol, believes web3 is far bigger than the tech industry. “I think web3, crypto, blockchain, this is going to be a massive, massive part of our world going forward,” Millegan said. “The way I think about blockchain technologies, it's like electricity or something. Every company uses electricity. It's just like it's assumed. And blockchain technology I think is going to eventually become like that.”

To the hopeful ear, decentralized ledger technologies sound like they could be highly advantageous to the Church should it embrace them. If web3 fulfills its promises, Christians will be able to act according to the dictates of conscience without impediment from outside regulators. At the very least, it would be remiss for the Church to not at least approach the conversation at this critical stage in the industry’s development.

“We might have a new technology here that that unleashes authentic abilities for personal freedom, in a peer-to-peer type manner, without any mediators who could give a thumbs up or thumbs down, whether it's to one's finances or one’s own messaging” (Pinto)

Critical indeed given the rapid pace at which the industry has been growing. While the market has fallen significantly in the recent economic downturn, crypto adoption has outpaced many other disruptive technologies. Bitcoin alone reached a $1 trillion market cap in 2021 just 12 years after its invention–a milestone that took Amazon 24 years to reach. The industry’s growth is hard to ignore, so it’s not surprising to see major institutions making plays in the space, including Facebook’s investment in the metaverse and Twitter’s investment in decentralized social via BlueSky.

For Millegan, the alignment between the mission of the Church and the opportunities afforded by blockchain technology is too great to ignore. “Blockchains are global organization mechanisms and the Church is a global organization,” Millegan said in his keynote address, Called…Canceled…and Called. “The institutional Church should be making use of blockchain technology. Absolutely they will, in fact, it’s inevitable that they will, it’s a question of just when.”

The Sacred and the Profane

The rapid growth of the industry alone should attract the attention of any Catholic who “cares about the trajectory of culture,” Pinto remarked in a pre-conference interview with Legatus magazine (Roberts). Nevertheless, Pinto did have worries about possible objections to the conference from those who might protest the combining of Catholicism with crypto. “You more often get that with conservative, Catholics and Protestants, that we’re sooner, quicker, to be nervous about the world,” Pinto said. “We are very quick to eschew the world or think that it's totally corrupt.” While agreeing that careful discernment is needed, Pinto ultimately believes that such objections of this kind are ill-founded. “When God became man in the incarnation it was somewhat of an affirmation that the created world is very good,” Pinto explained, leaning on CS Lewis’ idea of the world as being “bent” rather than totally corrupt. “Therefore, if it's not totally corrupt it can be sanctified. It can be used, not simply for pragmatic reasons, but can actually be noble in itself.”

The Church’s comfortability with the created world may have ebbed and flowed over time, Pinto suggested, but ultimately it will, and has, found its proper equilibrium. The sacred and the profane, or the ordinary, are not in opposition to each other, but rather cooperate in the properly ordered world. Nature is marred, but it is not annihilated, and Christians ought not to fear the created world or new technological developments (excluding the overtly evil) so long as we do not uphold created things as idols.

I asked Pinto what he hoped would come out of the conference. “A lot of discernment, first and fertility, second,” Pinto responded. “Fertility meaning projects and initiatives – either secular projects, where the owners of them can then bless humanity with their wealth, or projects specifically within the church.” Regardless of one’s viewpoints on Crypto possibilities for moral good, a conversation needs to happen. It was this need that lead Pinto to host the Catholic Crypto conference despite potential pushback.

A Defensive Position: Providing the Church a Seat at the Table

The question of when the church will enter web3 is not just a question of how far behind the Church might set itself, but a question of what sort of web3 the Church will enter, because a web3 that grows and develops without input from the Church will invariably be a different web3 than one where the Church’s voice is heard. That the industry is in a crucial, developmental stage where it is much more easily molded by environmental influences compounds the urgency of the Church to find a seat at the table sooner than later.

For a case study of the dangers of arriving late to the game, Christians need to look no further than the present failures of web2. While our problems can be partly attributed to inferior technology that relied on centralized server space and other single points of failure that could and have been compromised by powerful players, in greater part, the failure of web2 can be attributed to a failure of its users to demand ethical architecture that preserved individual sovereignty. What web2 and web3 share is the architecture of code; code written by real humans with real values and philosophical leanings. When Lessig warned about the regulatory power of code in the early 2000s he was warning about precisely the situation we now find ourselves in: where the coded architecture of the internet has become so institutionalized in a complex system of overlapping services that we have all but lost the ability to critique our regulators: the code itself (Lessig).

“We should interrogate the architecture of cyberspace as we interrogate the code of Congress. Unless we do, or unless we learn how, the relevance of our constitutional tradition will fade…. The law of cyberspace will be how cyberspace codes it, but we will have lost our role in setting that law” (Lessig).

Web3, with all its promise, is just as much at risk of subversion as web2 was before it. For Pinto, the danger of Christian’s arriving late to the game is not insignificant. “We forfeit a piece of land that Jesus would normally want for himself. He claims every inch of the world and the universe” Pinto said. The forfeiture of a part of creation to the secular world is certainly bad in and of itself as it represents a failure of Christians to properly steward creation, but the results of a forfeiture in what could become a crucial industry should compound concern. Pinto continued, “And so if we do not have, at least a presence, we run the risk of forfeiting something to, potentially as bad as the devil, but at least to people who are just living a secular existence, and not only not contributing to good, but maybe accidentally contributing to the bad.”

Barrows warned in his presentation Sound Money and Society of the danger that blockchain becoming a “globalist project” that “insufficiently respects human freedom and privacy and could be weaponized by the state at the expense of a free civil society.” Tyrrell agreed, making the case that crypto ironically runs the risk of enabling over-centralization through the permanent storage of mass information and needs to be tempered by an “applied ethic of the common good.” “We believe that we’re put on the earth for a particular purpose: to know, love, and serve God with all our minds, all our heart, and all our strength. And that infuses everything. And that needs to infuse these new technologies in order for them to truly lead to human flourishing,” Tyrrell remarked in his keynote address, Blessed Are the Blockchains!?!.

Perhaps the most prominent Catholic in the web3 world, Milligan’s keynote was highly anticipated by conference attendees. It would be the first time the former director of operations for True Names Ltd., the non-profit developing ENS, had spoken publicly since he was ousted in early February 2022 for espousing Catholic doctrine on Twitter. ENS, and the .eth identity standard it maintains, is a major player in the developing web3 ecosystem, and Millegan was its de-facto public face. His cancellation and the ensuing Twitter drama were felt industry-wide. As Millegan relayed in his keynote address, his story became a symbol for many that “the culture wars have come to crypto.”

I was able to sit down with Millegan for a few moments before his keynote to inquire about his thoughts on the industry and what part Christians have to play in it. Explaining his thinking, Millegan described web3 as a stack that includes the code running on the Ethereum blockchain, the people who are writing and maintaining the code, and the communities of people surrounding and influencing web3. “So here's what matters,” Millegan concluded, “the people in those groups of developers and the social climate around them determine what gets built in the first place, and how they're built — with what values. And so, it's extremely important that Christians are involved, particularly in those layers, because it determines what…what gets built in the first place and what trajectory it goes.”

Millegan has been in the industry for many years. Writing for ChurchPOP (a publication he founded that was acquired by EWTN), Millegan was urging Catholics to take Bitcoin seriously as early as 2015. He was also an early adopter of Ethereum and an investor in the notorious project known as ‘The DAO’ that was famously exploited in 2016. Millegan is a firm believer that web3 will reface the landscape of the internet, and as a protestant convert to Catholicism who has done doctoral work in moral theology, Millegan believes Catholics must have a stake in that future.

“We are setting the trajectory for the future of the world right now. It’s happening right now. People are building dapps [decentralized applications], writing code, setting up DAOs [decentralized autonomous organizations], setting up… the voting structures. All these things that will set the world on a trajectory for good or ill,” Millegan explained, “and if we want the future, that future, to reflect our values then now is the time to be involved and make that happen. You can't be like, ‘I'm not going to be involved,’ and then other people build the future, [and then say], ‘oh, I didn't like the future.’ Well, you didn't do it.”

Millegan said that the ousting took him by surprise as he had prior good relations with the ENS team and community. But the events are reflective of a general shift in the culture of web3 that has taken place in the last few years. “Early crypto was very, like, libertarian. Both left and right-libertarian… people were very freedom-oriented,” Millegan explained in his keynote. “But what happened is, as crypto’s gotten a lot bigger, particularly in the last two years, more people have come in and there has started to be some people who are more like woke minded… they’re more authoritarian… It was sort of a generational fight in the crypto industry.”

“I absolutely encourage… lay Catholics who have competency to get involved in the crypto industry; to help shape the future of the world that we are building right now. Because if we don’t, somebody else will” (Millegan)

The generational fight is much bigger than the events of ENS, it is a war over the trajectory of web3 and the values it will embed in code. If Christians shrink from this fight we can expect that, what currently offers the promise of great good, can equally enable great evil. Pinto remarked to me on the idea that “nature abhors a vacuum” attributed to Aristotle. “Voids get filled,” Pinto said. “And the question is, what is it going to get filled with? Is it going to get filled with a purely secular worldview that might actually encroach and be evil? Or is it going to be imbued with the hope and promise that rests in the hearts of believers?”

The Church, Catholic: Networking and Final Conclusions

Over 250 in-person attendees and more streaming online made the first Catholic Crypto Conference a success. For the first time Catholics in the industry had the opportunity to network with industry peers who shared their faith, and the conversations both in session and in the hallways were enthusiastic. In his closing comments, Pinto described his vision that the conference would bring moments of “combustibility,” where putting the right people in the right room would spawn ideas and friendships that would have a lasting impact.

There are many traps laid for those navigating the industry, from financial scams to the ever-mounting threat of big tech, governments, and the “woke mob.” In Tyrrell’s words, “we can’t do this alone. We need a framework of the common good; we need a conversion to fight the enemy, but we also need a community of people to do it with—to hold us accountable, and whom we will hold accountable…. This conference is the first gathering of this community.”

Christians can participate in the conversation in a variety of ways, but one of the most important ways we can contribute is by building. Brown exhorted, “we need a lot of smart people, we need a lot more people who are Catholic, evangelicals, whoever, that realize the importance of this… to get out there and be vocal advocates, and learn about this, and be able to let other people know what great solutions this technology offers for us in the future. And people got to start building. We got to build.”

“We need… Catholics with a deep, rich understanding of the goodness of being, and that we’re embodied, embedded persons to write good code that serve[s] human flourishing” (Miller)

Brown is currently a partner in a venture building AlternCLOUD, an alternative hosting solution for conservative organizations at risk of de-platforming. Other builders who spoke at the conference included Millegan, who continues to advocate for ENS as a top delegate in the ENS DAO, and Ben DiFrancesco who has contributed to multiple decentralized blockchain applications through his company, ScopeLift, including UmbraCash, a privacy protocol for Ethereum.

The crypto industry is wide with opportunities for a diverse range of skills, but for those who are not builders or seeking work in the industry a great way to get involved in the conversation and advocate for Christian values is by participating in online DAOs. A DAO is a form of web3 governance that typically uses a mix of traditional, democratic voting mechanisms and automated features controlled by code. A DAO may be organized when human oversight is required for critical functions or when developers wish to “future-proof” the protocol through ongoing maintenance.

Often in DAOs, voting is tokenized, meaning developers will create a governance “coin” that can be purchased on the open market for voting power. The exact mechanics of a governance token including how tokens are distributed and how voting weight is assigned will vary from DAO to DAO and are hotly debated in the industry. In any case, token holders can influence the development of core protocols directly by participating in DAO conversations and submitting, commenting on, and voting on governance proposals. The enormity of this power should not be overlooked considering a potential future where web3 gains mass adoption and these core protocols dictate the landscape of the internet.

In the current market, many governance tokens have crashed in value from bull market highs and are selling relatively cheaply. Millegan believes this presents a significant opportunity. “There’s this massive reshuffling of governance power over critical infrastructure of the future of the world. It’s happening right now. People are selling tokens, buying tokens, and there are people who are smart enough to know what's going on, and they're saying, ‘hey things are cheap let’s quietly accumulate.’” Millegan believes this quiet accumulation race could set the trajectory of web3 for “decades to come.”

In any case, the future of web3 and the internet will be determined by those who show up. Christians are called to be salt and light in the world, and that calling does not end in cyberspace. If web3 is truly setting the trajectory for the future of the world, the need for Christians who advocate for Christian values in the code is not small. “We know what the human purpose is in the world, and we want everyone to live in and flourish in it,” Tyrrell said.

“…we believe that we’re put on the earth for a particular purpose: to know, love, and serve God with all our mind, all our heart, and all our strength, and that infuses everything. And that needs to infuse these new technologies in order for them to truly lead to human flourishing. That’s what’s different about this conference – it’s not just the suits and the dresses” (Tyrrell)

There will be pushback; there already is. Regarding his own experience with those who oppose Christian values in web3, Millegan described seeing “terror on the faces of grown men” that would have supported him but were otherwise afraid of losing their jobs. “It’s pathetic, but it’s the reality. But if you don't back down there can be a lot of power in that,” Millegan said. Brown similarly exhorted that “the one thing we need, is we need men and women like you who are willing to stand up and have the courage to take some punishment, to not be silent.”

In my final moments with Pinto, I asked if he was primarily hopeful for the industry or fearful that things could go wrong. “I think anytime we have a new, big, tech change that God is doing something creative.” Pinto responded. “His passive will is at least allowing it, but I think maybe even His active will is initiating. If I were to speculate, I think this is a new gift to humanity, and the question is, will we lose it to innocuous or evil purposes? That's the question that remains.”

Originally published in Staseos in January, 2023.

References

Pinto, Matthew. Personal interview. 18 Nov. 2022.

Terr, Aaron. “PayPal is no pal to free expression.” Fire News, 30 Sep. 2022.

Rej, Matt. List of Credit Card Processing Companies 2021 | Merchant Cost Consulting, 4 Mar. 2021.

Millegan, Brantly. Personal interview. 18 Nov. 2022.

Lessig, Lawrence. “Code Is Law.” Harvard Magazine, 1 Jan. 2000.

Roberts, Judy. “Crypto, blockchain, web 3.0: what Catholics need to know.” Legatus Magazine, 1 Nov. 2022.

On an otherwise peaceful Saturday, a corner of Twitter populated by a fringe collection of developers, day traders, digital artists, and political theorists was abruptly disturbed by a heated exchange of tweets. Unremarkably, the altercation was sparked by a statement that had, also unremarkably, been dug up for renewed scandal. However unfortunate for those who find themselves suddenly under prosecution with little more than the right to a speedy trial, in our present time such events have become commonplace; worth little more than a passing shake of the head, or a bullet pointed rundown such as the one provided by Coindesk a few days later (Reynolds). Nevertheless, the events of February 5, 2022 have ramifications far beyond simple Twitter controversy that everyone concerned with the future of alternative tech and free speech on the internet should understand. The infrastructure is not yet built, but the conversation on how to build it is taking place now, and if we hope to preserve our future on the web we must make our voices heard.

Brantly Millegan, the subject of attack, was director of operations for True Names Limited — a non-profit behind the creation of the Ethereum Naming service (ENS), a key player in the growing conversation regarding web3, an evolution of web infrastructure which claims the ability to decentralize the web and do away with big tech content aggregators such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon through blockchain based systems. As Forbes writer Charles Silver explains, “Decentralized infrastructure and application platforms will displace centralized tech giants, and individuals will be able to rightfully own their data” (“What is Web 3.0?”).

ENS set its sights on creating a fully decentralized web3 protocol to replace the domain naming system of the traditional web. Towards that end, True Names Ltd. established a governing DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) in November of 2021 to maintain ENS and allow token holders the ability to control its future through democratic government. While in the process of ceding full control of ENS, True Names Ltd. maintains a quasi-bipartisan relationship with the DAO. Millegan, as an active stakeholder in ENS, held leadership within the DAO in addition to his role at True Names Ltd.

Anonymity is a respected value in the web3 space, and many choose to act behind assumed twitter names, gamer tags, and faceless avatars. But, as the de-facto spokesman for ENS, Millegan made no secret about his public identity, including his devout catholic faith. Before coming to True Names Ltd. Millegan had completed doctoral work in Moral Theology following his conversion as an undergrad. His twitter bio reads simply: “Catholic, father, husband.”

Catholic doctrine is public knowledge, but in the current cultural climate it’s no surprise that putting it into words would spur controversy. Such was the case when a 2016 tweet surfaced wherein Millegan outlined catholic teaching on homosexuality, transgenderism, abortion, and other contentious issues.

The immediate demands were varied. Many were calling for ENS to disavow and distance from Millegan. Others, among them many who had been involved with ENS for years and knew Millegan as an active and respected community leader, appealed on Millegan to publicly recant his beliefs. However, on a public Twitter space hosted by Morgan Taylor of OnChainTV later that night Millegan reaffirmed his adherence to Catholic doctrine while expressing a belief in tolerance for all people.

“Web3 is for everybody; I really believe that… I really believe in tolerance. I’m willing to work with anybody regardless of who they are, what their beliefs are. But, the idea that like, adherents to the world’s largest religion are not welcome in the web3 industry I think is an extreme position” (Millegan, 2:24).

Some of Millegan’s friends and coworkers vouched for his character and right to his personal views outside of his duties to ENS. Notably, in the face of calls for his dismissal from True Names Ltd., the protocol’s founder and lead developer, Nick Johnson, spoke positively regarding Millegan’s ethical conduct while acknowledging that Millegan’s views were not his own or representative of ENS.

On February 6, Millegan was suspended from Twitter for violating rules against “abuse and harassment.” In a post on Discord, Millegan reiterated his belief that web3 should include tolerance for a wide diversity of beliefs.

A few hours later, Millegan’s fellow community stewards voted to oust him from his role within the DAO. The DAO had been organized into four working groups of five stewards each to facilitate the growth of ENS. For the first term, True Names Ltd. appointed two stewards to each working group. The remaining three had been elected by the DAO. After a five-week appointment, Millegan was removed from the Community Working Group by a majority vote of three stewards. Nine hours later, True Names Ltd. terminated Millegan’s employment.

For the following month, the DAO would continue to debate the future of Millegan’s role in ENS, including his remaining official position as one of three directors of the ENS Foundation (an entity formed to act as the real-world arm of the DAO largely as a shield against legal liability). But beyond ENS, a greater discussion regarding the narrative of web3 and how the ecosystem can and will develop has been taking place. The ENS controversy shines a light on growing disagreement over the meaning of core web3 talking points, including decentralization, DAOs, immutable code, censorship, and regulation.

Since its earliest days, web3 developers have spoken of a revolution to replace established Silicon Valley technocrats and government regulators with decentralized infrastructure and consensus-based decision making. But can we trust that the narrative will develop as originally intended, or should we fear that web3 can, or perhaps already has, been co-opted by those with other designs?

The Importance of ENS to Web3 Architecture

To understand the significance of the ENS controversy it is crucial to recognize the inherent threat web3 poses to established powers. Web3 is not simply proposing a new type of internet platform, but an overthrow of the centralized web in favor of a radically new paradigm. Behind the glitz and glamor of the modern web experience lies a base infrastructure that allows front-end user platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and eBay to function. Using blockchain technology, web3 aims to rebuild this infrastructure with decentralized, parallel services that would lay the foundation for decentralized applications (dApps) that directly compete with big tech platforms.

ENS is essentially a dApp built on top of the Ethereum blockchain that allows users to register names (or identities) by interacting with coded smart contracts. The ENS protocol owns the .eth top-level domain and issues users second-level domain names (any name followed by the .eth suffix) as NFTs tied to a user’s Ethereum wallet address. This is similar to how the DNS system issues domain names for websites on the traditional web. For example, if Elon Musk were to create a personal website, he might request the second-level domain name elonmusk.com from a DNS compliant registrar. In the same way he can request an identity in the form of elonmusk.eth from the ENS protocol. The protocol will simply ensure no existing name has been registered before and then issue elonmusk.eth in the form of an irrevocable NFT directly to Musk’s crypto wallet.

There are many things that can be done with an ENS identity, including pointing it to a decentralized website hosted on a blockchain based storage service, such as IPFS or Arweave. Since the .eth top-level domain is not recognized by ICANN (the managing non-profit of the DNS system), ENS names cannot resolve to websites on the traditional web, but it is possible to import a traditional DNS domain name to the ENS protocol to get the enhanced benefits of an ENS identity. Imported domains will still resolve to traditional websites, but they are not censorship-proof like .eth names as ownership of DNS regulated domain names are ultimately controlled by the associated domain registrar and ICANN itself.

Some workarounds are available for .eth name holders who wish to link their names to a traditional website, but ultimately there are other decentralized protocols, such as Handshake, that intend to compete more directly with ICANN. ENS was designed primarily as an identity service for the web3 experience.

Identity is an interesting concept in web3. In web2, platforms usually require users to submit to some form of identity verification to interact with their services. In most cases a simple phone or email verification is enough, but more sensitive platforms may require users to provide stricter legal identification such as a photo ID. Identity verification is necessary to ensure users are who they claim to be and to prevent the creation of spam accounts, but it raises privacy concerns and has undoubtably enabled the creation of the data farming industry.

Beyond privacy concerns, the current identity verification model of web2 has balkanized the internet into platform-specific silos. Since each platform conducts their own identity verification, users can’t carry their online identities (including followers, digital clout, content, reputation, etc.) from one platform to another. Worse, users are increasingly forced to self-censor and stay ahead of ever-changing and sometimes morally questionable terms-of-service or risk losing accounts they have spent years building. Even users with the best intentions can find themselves suddenly suspended due to seemingly arbitrary decisions. In the web2 paradigm, users don’t own their own data; platforms do.

Identity verification is begging for an innovation, and ENS is seeking to do just that. Names registered with ENS are designed to act as a universal passport for all web3 based apps. An ENS name will be a singular identity for the web that allows users to carry their reputation and credentials with them wherever they go. If ENS succeeds, users will be able to verify their identity across web3 simply by linking their associated Ethereum wallet.

In the decentralized thought-space ENS inhabits, web users should own their own identities. A cohesive identity provider such as ENS would allow web3 users full control of their identities without fear of de-platforming.

“That is why we believe that Ethereum key-based accounts are the future of authentication…. They provide a unified online identity for users, where instead of holding platform-specific accounts, they could authorize platforms to connect to their unified pseudonym” (“Why ENS Names Are Much More than Domains”).

Web3: Code vs. Decentralized Governance

The vision of a fully decentralized web free from regulatory control has been going mainstream amid growing concerns of political censorship and collusion between big tech and government agencies. Free speech advocates, cultural dissidents, political protesters, and technological revolutionaries all have a stake in the developing narrative known as web3. As the social environment grows increasingly polarizing, the pool of web3 believers only grows larger. In many circles, talk of web3 takes on utopian overtones; an unstoppable force destined to re-build a fairer internet on the pillars of equal opportunity and self-determination.

“Web 3.0 will bring us a fairer internet by enabling the individual to be a sovereign. True sovereignty implies owning and being able to control who profits from one’s time and information. Web 3.0’s decentralized blockchain protocol will enable individuals to connect to an internet where they can own and be properly compensated for their time and data, eclipsing an exploitative and unjust web, where giant, centralized repositories are the only ones that own and profit from it” (Silver).

But the wheel of progress is still in spin, and narratives can quickly change. Behind the promise of web3 lies a battle between competing conceptualizations of the decentralized web and the ways in which it can and should solve web2’s problems. Of these competing narratives, two rise to the forefront: the idea of a web built on uncensorable protocols, locked in immutable code through the power of blockchain; and the idea of a web built on decentralized governance where protocols ultimately answer to the will of their users through DAOs.

The idea of uncensorable protocols has been spinning its narrative since the advent of Bitcoin in 2008; the first implementation of blockchain theory. Without a single overseeing administrator, the bitcoin protocol has been processing transactions as programmed ever since it was released to the internet by its anonymous creator. The protocol accepts and rejects transactions according to strictly coded rules verifiable via a public ledger.

Lawrence Lessig coined the phrase “code is law” to refer to the regulatory power of code to establish norms and values on the internet. Code can be changed, but it’s much harder to enact changes once the infrastructure is in place. Blockchain takes this concept a step further with the principle of immutability

Blockchains are distributed ledger systems that rely on a decentralized consensus network of computers, or nodes, that provide computational power and validate work completed on-chain. Once a node validates a change to the ledger it communicates changes to other nodes on the network. Each node will independently verify the communicated changes before adjusting its internal copy of the ledger. The entire network stores the ledger separately, preventing an unauthorized change to the ledger on one node from affecting the greater network. Code is law, and the immutability of blockchain coding theory means, once created, laws cannot be broken.

“Web 3.0 allows a global commons for state. Rather than state (meaning our data) being held by companies, we create a decentralized network where trust is established at the protocol level. It comes from mathematics and cryptography baked into the protocol. The protocol is broadly called blockchain…” (Brennan).

The idea of an internet running on pure code with no human oversight might sound scary, but that characterization is really only half the story. Behind these computers are very real human actors who choose to provide computing power in exchange for crypto rewards built into the protocol. At any time, a validator can choose to run their own network with an edited protocol, but they will lose out on the network effects of the greater blockchain. This concept of immutable code that relies on decentralized consensus is the heart of web3.

Highlighting blockchain’s immutability, in 2016, when an early Ethereum based dApp simply called “The DAO” (an investing fund utilizing an early iteration of decentralized governance) was hacked and drained of over $50 million of invested capital, Ethereum developers chose to effectively re-start the blockchain rather than let the hacker keep the stolen funds in a move known as a “hard fork.” The hacker had exploited a vulnerability in The DAO’s programing that was code-legal and therefore could not be reversed. A hard fork essentially splits the blockchain into two; a potentially disastrous move as it relies on users jumping ship on the old protocol. In the case of the 2016 hard fork, the community was small enough and the consensus was broad enough that the fork met with little resistance.

The fallout of the hack was overwhelmingly negative for Ethereum’s budding reputation. Some viewed the hack as proof that blockchain systems were unreliable and prone to bugs. However, contrary to popular reporting, Ethereum itself was never hacked. As an application built on top of Ethereum’s base layer, the dApp’s vulnerability affected investors of The DAO fund, but Ethereum holders at large were safe. Risks associated with using on-chain applications are arguably no different than risks associated with any other tech (even Twitter and Facebook have fallen victim to hacks).

More poignant criticism challenged the fundamental claims of Ethereum towards decentralization and immutability if a small handful of core developers could hard fork and essentially “reverse” transactions at will. While this debate continues today, counter arguments point out that the original blockchain still lives on. Validators who disagreed with the decision could, and did, choose not to update their code and instead continue validating the original chain. The Ethereum developers could not reverse transactions on the original chain due to fundamental blockchain mechanics, therefore proving immutability.

“Blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum allow people to conduct financial exchanges digitally and almost instantaneously, today, without banks. They do this by creating the global state that is secured not through social trust (accrued over hundreds of years to the third party institution of banks), but in code, through a protocol. In the same way we no longer have to speak to an operator to connect a phone call, blockchain makes financial transactions into a peer-to-peer protocol. Crucially, though, the protocol is decentralized and distributed — involving a global, public chain secured by the entire network of people running it” (Brennan).

As Ethereum grows it will only become increasingly more difficult to gather enough consensus to justify a hard fork for reasons of “reversing” executed code in the future as a split community will be detrimental to all. At least in theory. To echo the words of Lessig at the dawn of web2, to push the anti-big tech button “is not to teleport us to Eden,” and no utopian promises are fulfilled until the code is written (Lessig).

The truth is decentralized governance is much harder to achieve than the decentralization of physical data. While democratic forms of government arguably allow for greater decentralization than is possible in centralized governance, the idea that all participants are acting entirely independent of each other is naïve. Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin questioned the efficacy of blockchain to withstand collusion attacks as early as 2017:

“Many communities, including Ethereum’s, are often praised for having a strong community spirit and being able to coordinate quickly…. But how can we foster and improve this good kind of coordination, but at the same time prevent “bad coordination” that consists of miners trying to screw everyone else over by repeatedly coordinating 51% attacks?” (Vitalik, “The Meaning of Decentralization”).

Buterin concluded that there is no easy answer to this question and that “tradeoffs are unavoidable” His concession echoes that of political theorists before him such as Alexander Hamilton who, although staunchly opposed to the development of political factions, contended in The Federalist №26 that “the spirit of party, in different degrees, must be expected to infect all political bodies” (Hamilton). As evidenced by Buterin’s reiteration of the problem in a more recent 2021 podcast, there have been no new developments to change his opinion.

“Once you drop the assumption that every single participant is making decisions independently and once you realize that in any kind of system people are going to form subgroups, people are going to talk to each other, people are going to collude with each other… there is no governance system that is completely robust against attacks” (“Vitalik Buterin “Spiritually, I Really Love DAO,”” 16:33).

Still, blockchain governance has advantages over traditional governance structures. Keeping a public ledger of all transactions, contracts, and operations executed on-chain certainly makes it more difficult to cut back-room deals and hide sensitive information. While some decry its lack of anonymity, blockchain protocols are transparent for this very reason. The public ledger allows us to trust the protocol to act as the third-party arbiter in a peer-to-peer network that has no governing authority.

But ultimately democratic governance is nothing new, and a web3 that promises to re-invent the internet on the back of an old horse can hardly be considered revolutionary. Nevertheless, that’s where web3 discourse has shifted in recent years. An outsider stumbling into a late-night crypto twitter space or discord channel might get the idea that DAO governance is inseparable from web3. Every dApp has its own DAO. The idea of building a dApp that doesn’t require a DAO is a seeming foreign concept.

The best methods and practices for running a DAO is a topic of ongoing debate, but most projects issue governance tokens that are bought and sold on coin exchanges. Theoretically, the more tokens a voter holds the greater their economic incentive to vote in the best interests of the project’s success, and granting users a voice in the decision making of the platforms they use is considered a more ideal arrangement than web2 currently affords. Whether or not current DAO structures are truly that superior is debatable, but regardless, shifting away from a narrative of immutable protocols that rely on decentralized consensus to a narrative of flexible protocols that can be modified at will by token holding community members is a significant shift.

The origin of this change in narrative is hard to pinpoint. In early theory, DAOs were thought of as organizations that could run “autonomously” on code without human direction. Whereas traditional corporations rely on a board of directors and managers to plan for the corporation’s needs, a decentralized corporation would theoretically be coded with the ability to analyze its own systems and incentivize help to support its needs through built in economic controls.

“But what if, with the power of modern information technology, we can encode the mission statement into code; that is, create an inviolable contract that generates revenue, pays people to perform some function, and finds hardware for itself to run on, all without any need for top-down human direction?” (Vitalik, “Bootstrapping a Decentralized Autonomous Organization: Part 1”).

However, this is not the narrative driving DAO theory today. The shift in narrative from autonomous code to democratic token governance is likely due to several factors: the recognition that blockchain-based consensus mechanisms are susceptible to the same faction forming tendencies of other, more organized communities, the desire to provide a level of decentralization while a dApp is still under development, and the desire to future-proof a dApp by allowing upgradeability without resorting to centralized ownership.

Future proofing a dApp that has no overseeing administrator is a difficult dilemma. Granting a DAO administrative rights to “update” the dApp’s smart contracts is a solution that provides some decentralization, but the unfortunate tradeoff is that future DAO leadership could potentially alter the code to the harm of its users. No matter how decentralized the DAO is, structured governance introduces new risks (collusion, powerful entities buying votes, hostile takeovers, etc.). Alternatively, since on-chain code is inherently open source, it’s always possible for future developers to create a “better” version of a dApp and, in theory, users will naturally migrate to the new “updated” version. In practice it is much more difficult to migrate users to a new platform, but arguably allowing users the choice to “update” or not is more aligned with web3’s values.

As to the other factors driving the narrative shift, it’s not clear that current DAO theory provides a real solution. Decentralized consensus is fundamental to blockchain design and may always be susceptible to collusive influence, but so is organized governance. Worse, organized governance may provide greater opportunity for controlling powers to exert negative influence than is typical in decentralized consensus models, especially if a DAO can alter a protocol’s code. It’s understandable that developers would want to delay locking the code until all kinks have been worked out, and vesting power in a DAO does at least provide a level of decentralization during these developmental stages, but the end form of a dApp would ideally be an un-updateable smart contract.

At least that would logically be the ideal if web3 is about building an un-censorable internet, and maybe this is where the real shift has occurred. We are not merely witnessing a war over the means to a common goal, but a war over the goal of web3 itself. To many, web3 is about realizing the original vision of the internet as conceived by Tim Berner-Lee of an open-source platform where information could be freely uploaded and accessed without censorship. But to others, web3 is about building a decidedly inclusive space on the internet by shifting power structures into the hands of the underprivileged. Both use the same terms, but their definitions can take on very different characters depending on the values one subscribes to.

There is a silent war between the balance of web3’s reliance on immutable code and decentralized governance, and it’s a war over the values of its developing populace. At the advent of web2, Lessig warned that the finality of coded architecture will decide the values of the new cyberspace (Lessig). It did, and those who fought for an uncensorable web found themselves on the losing side. The code of web3 is still in flux and its final values are yet undecided, but it won’t be that way forever. One narrative will win. We cannot be lulled into false irenicism, or else our peacemaking will allow for subversive interests to overtake the web3 narrative for their own purposes.

“Our choice is not between “regulation” and “no regulation.” The code regulates. It implements values, or not. It enables freedoms, or disables them. It protects privacy, or promotes monitoring. People choose how the code does these things. People write the code. Thus the choice is not whether people will decide how cyberspace regulates. People — coders — will. The only choice is whether we collectively will have a role in their choice — and thus in determining how these values regulate — or whether collectively we will allow the coders to select our values for us” (Lessig).

ENS: A Case Study in Party Spirit

The collision of these two, competing web3 narratives is at the heart of the ENS DAO controversy, and Millegan was caught in the middle. If there was no organized collusion against Millegan at the start of the controversy, the events certainly consolidated forces with a dogmatic vision for web3 diametrically opposed to Millegan’s.

While community stewards within the ENS DAO voted to remove Millegan from leadership, other influential members from across the web3 ecosphere held court on Twitter. The Twitter space, hosted by another employee of True Names Ltd. who goes by the pseudonym Alisha.eth (Twitter handle: @futurealisha) included leaders from web3 projects including Meta Mask, Entropy, Rainbow and Wonderverse. All speaking participants either identified in categories denounced by Millegan or showed support as allies. Throughout the nearly 4-hour discussion held on February 6, the alliance of web3 leaders outlined their future vision for ENS and the whole of web3. A selection of statements from that twitter space is included (“ENS Is for Everyone”):

“I think it’s a great show of true decentralization and the use of a DAO. Whatever happens moving forward here is really just going to be the blueprint moving forward in the space, and for things that just aren’t allowed. While we can all be pro freedom of speech and stuff like that I do feel that everything just does not need to be said” (@izzyalright, employed by MetaMask, 6:40).

“This for me is a test of, you know, DAOs, digital organizations, D-orgs as I’ve been calling them. This is a test of web3 technology. This is a test of our collective, like, humanity, really… This is a test of like what really is web3…. What we’re doing here is historic. There’s never been like a global and deeply diverse space created like this” (@cult_leader_en, employed by Wonderverse, 7:28).

“This is this new world that we’re in right now. This is the test y’all. This is the test; here it is! Because is it going to work? Is the DAOs, is the rules, is the things we have decided at this point, is this really what’s going to happen. So I’m really more excited than ever to really, really see if this new world is going to work the way we want it. Because if it does, I’m really excited because this is the way it should be. (@Swopes, 45:46).

“Web 3 is inherently queer is inherently tran[s], is inherently women is inherently sex work is inherently, you know, indigenous. It’s inherently those things, so there is no, there is no web3 for Brantly…. You can be in crypto, you can be in the blockchain world, but you are not a part of web 3” (@cult_leader_en, 1:30:41).

“When we talk about making space for people… what people don’t understand is that space is zero-sum. That, when you take away from some… you give it to someone else. When you take away voices from trans and queer people and you support…hate speech, you know, it makes it such that it’s much more difficult for trans and queer people to be involved in those spaces altogether…. its’s just a zero-sum game, that’s all it is. That’s all making space is” (@__tux, founder of Entropy.xyz, 2:13:00).

“…it has come at a cost, but we are here, and we can build something that is in the image of ourselves, and that is historic… That opportunity to be the first, to be the innovator, to be the one who’s voice is the loudest is such a blessing” (@cult_leader_en, 2:38:33).

Web3 as defined by Alisha.eth’s Twitter space doesn’t ultimately care about censorship or free-speech. These are the concerns of blockchain or are so malleable as to mean very little. To them, web3 is a means to end: the transfer of power from oppressor to oppressed. In their web3, Millegan must not hold power, delegated or otherwise.

“All I want to know is what is the method to remove them… I don’t need to hurt Brantly Millegan, I just need him removed so we can move on, and learn how to do it so that when we encounter this situation again, and we will, that we know how to do it next time” (@MikeMongo, 1:09:47).

Of course, rhetoric alone, however alarming, is simply hot air unless it can be implemented. Thankfully, True Names Ltd. made the decision sometime prior to lock the .eth root domain smart contract, meaning that not even the controlling owner (currently a multisig wallet controlled by 7 “trustworthy individuals in the Ethereum community,” but eventually the DAO) can edit its contents (“Frequently Asked Questions”). If future ownership wanted to edit the .eth root (even to fix a bug in the coding) they would have to create an entirely new protocol with a new ENS token, and even then the original protocol would remain in operation so long as the Ethereum blockchain exists. In effect, .eth names are irrevocable.

But what of the termination of Millegan’s employment by True Name Ltd.? Bowing to social pressures sets a dangerous precedent for web3 companies, but ultimately the private interest of a corporate entity is its own regardless of how much we might question undue influence. What’s important for the traditional vision of web3 is that the architecture of the code remains resistant to censorship in all its forms. Still, the power of centralized companies and the danger of their manipulation by external forces in these crucial development years for web3 should not go unnoticed.

The real danger is in the ability for collusive forces to exert power over the decisions of a DAO, especially in a web3 where DAOs are granted wide powers over coded architecture. Although the ENS DAO will never be able to alter the .eth root, other contracts, such as those managing pricing and registration for .eth names, are still under the control of the multisig and may one day be within the hands of the DAO. Some of these contracts may be locked in the future after bugs and future compatibility features have been worked out. Other contracts may never be locked, such as those that rely on changing oracles (information provided from outside the blockchain).

In the fallout of the Millegan incident, it was clear that the DAO was ill-prepared to deal with a divided community. In the weeks that followed and leading up to the first time the DAO would have an opportunity to weigh in on the issue through a public vote (by determining whether Millegan would keep his position as a director of the ENS foundation) discussion ensued over the DAO’s code of conduct, bylaws, steward appointment processes, and, perhaps most importantly, potential powers the DAO could wield against protocol users. Some were interested in identifying potential threats, others in potential opportunities to punish Millegan and use the DAO to enforce their own vision of web3.

The DAO cannot revoke .eth names, but a DAO seeking to punish specific ENS users could potentially affect the ENS protocol in other ways. For example, the DAO could raise registration/renewal fees to the point where ENS names become too expensive to maintain. It could also modify contracts through a controller that would allow for the refusal of any name’s renewal. It is also seemingly possible that the DAO could create address allow/block lists for name registration. These measures go against the DAO’s constitution, but they are code-legal in the protocol’s current form.

If a DAO can exert so much control over a protocol’s code, the security of the voting process becomes a primary concern. Like many DAOs, ENS relies on tokenized voting where each ENS token essentially equals one vote. To vote, token holders must go through a delegation process where they can choose to either delegate their tokens to themselves or another trusted party to vote on their behalf. Millegan is the largest delegate representing approximately 1.5% of all currently delegated ENS tokens and therefore also holds the largest vote within the DAO. Millegan’s voting power could be adjusted higher when accounting for the fraction of ENS delegates that actively participate in the DAO, but it would be a mischaracterization to attribute this power to failure of decentralization considering his vote represents token holders who entrusted their vote to him and are free to redelegate as they see fit.

Still, as the DAO prepared to vote on Millegan’s position as director of the ENS Foundation, questions were raised regarding whether Millegan’s conflict of interest should disqualify him from voting on the measure. Suggestions to nullify Millegan’s vote were ultimately rejected on the grounds that there was no conceivable way to do so without disenfranchising voters who delegated to him, but many still found the issue along with the DAOs unpreparedness for the situation problematic.

More concerning were discussions regarding how the DAO could deal with such issues in the future. Vocal DAO contributor Avneet Singh (posting under the username inplco), a PhD astrophysicist at the Albert Einstein Institute in Germany who was running to replace Millegan as director of the ENS foundation, suggested that it may be possible in the future to sanction targeted accounts by releasing delegated votes back to their original owners or blacklisting targeted addresses along with their delegated voters entirely. In response, ENS Founder Nick Johnson clarified that forcibly un-delegating votes will never be code-legal due to the .eth smart contract lock. Other sanctions against delegate voting power may be possible, but Johnson maintained he would “sooner leave the ENS DAO than see this implemented” (“Open Letter to Brantly Millegan”). While the strength of Johnson’s personal conviction is reassuring, it is concerning that there are many in the ENS DAO and web3 more broadly who do not feel the same. Singh for his part, maintained earlier in the topic that “Absolutist ideas like free-speech and right-to-associate (general absolutism) are arcane.”

The proposal to remove Millegan itself, which was incidentally drafted by Singh, moved on with just under three weeks of deliberations before the community agreed it was ready for vote. Although early drafts included two separate proposals (one to remove Millegan and another to replace him should the first proposal pass) the decision was made to create one proposal for a new director, giving voters the opportunity to vote for Millegan to continue in the role or for any of four DAO members running to replace him. A combined proposal was deemed simpler and shielded current ENS directors from legal liability resulting from a potentially vacant directorship position. Questions were raised regarding the appropriateness of forcing Millegan to essentially re-run for a position he was never removed from before his term-of-service was up, but the DAO bylaws had little to say on the matter and legal counsel found no technical issue.

Nevertheless, it could be argued that the combined proposal put supporters of Millegan at a disadvantage as they would be forced to decide if they could safely vote for Millegan or if their vote would be better spent ensuring a “next best” applicant is elected, effectively splitting the vote. Some candidates may not even have run if Millegan’s position were not in danger. In explanation of his candidacy, daylon.eth stated “I don’t want the position but I more don’t want it to go to someone that just showed up because of drama” (daylon.eth).

Whether it was apathy or ulterior motives on the part of the proposal’s writers isn’t clear, but the fact that DAO official discussion is dominated by a handful of reoccurring usernames doesn’t help. It is difficult to fault ENS for the low participation (DAO participation is notoriously low across web3), but the result is that the active contributors drafting proposals have a significant level of soft power over ENS. In such a small echo chamber it’s easy for groupthink to drive out contrary opinions, especially when those contrary opinions come from those without “active contributor” status. This is especially problematic considering the informal nature of the DAO’s proposal process. Whereas traditional democratic systems often require a specified number of signatures to put a proposal out to vote, no such requirement exists within the ENS DAO.

Yet another concern is the security of discourse in the public square. Communication regarding the ENS DAO currently takes place on Twitter, in the official ENS Discord, and the official Discourse forum. Millegan was suspended from Twitter following the controversy and disappeared from the ENS Discord server for the duration of the debate (as of recent he is back on Discord and the nature of his disappearance is unclear). Millegan was never banned from the ENS Discourse forum, but it is a possibility, especially now that the DAO has taken up a proposal for an official code of conduct. What are the consequences for web3 if the DAO, a rogue mod team, or even unaffiliated tech services have the power to silence DAO members?

In short, even if a DAO were to ensure the security of the voting process itself, the security of the proposal drafting process, including what proposals make it to vote and in what form, and the security of a public square free from undue censorship are significant concerns for a web3 that relies upon decentralized governance. At the very least, the events of the ENS controversy exposed vulnerabilities in current DAO systems open to exploitation. Is this the status quo we can come to expect from web3?

“…I would strongly say I think it’s a bad precedence for the DAO [voting to remove Brantly], but really web3 broadly speaking, that we’re going to exclude people who hold positions that are held by huge swaths of the world even if you think it’s wrong. I think that is a very narrow-minded position. I don’t think it’s practical. I think it would lead to the failure of web3” (Millegan, 33:45).

Which Way Web3?

For uncertain reasons, just days before the proposal was scheduled to go to vote several DAO members expressed concern over the proposal in its consolidated form. While concerns were initially rebuffed, it was eventually decided that the proposal would again be split. In response, Singh withdrew his candidacy. Two new proposals were quickly drafted (without the involvement of Singh) and went to vote on February 28: Proposal EP6.1 to remove Millegan from his directorship and proposal EP6.2 to elect a replacement dependent upon the results of EP6.1. The proposal to remove Millegan failed with a majority of 1.6 million ENS tokens, or 43.39% of the vote (19.1% abstained), including Millegan’s delegation of 363 thousand votes, and the results of EP6.2 were nullified.

The outcome was reassuring and is evidence that many in web3 still hold to its traditional principles, but it does not guarantee that the processes were secure or that decentralized governance will ever be a substitute for immutable code. The only way to ensure a protocol remains accessible to all without discrimination is to lock its code. To the extent that a protocol cannot be locked due to development or design, we must be realistic about the threats and set up governance accordingly. Fostering a sense of community spirit can help drive the success of a developing protocol, but unity at the expense of robust defenses against collusion are simply no longer viable. Whatever unanimity web3 may have enjoyed prior, it’s clear that there is now an ideological divide.

In a 2020 podcast with Palladium Magazine, Buterin hypothesized that U.S. tech companies benefited in early years from a level of public “goodwill” simply for being separate from government interests. Heavy regulation stifling innovation as well as general corruption in the lawmaking process was public enemy number one, especially in post 9/11 America. On the other hand, the internet itself was seen as an unregulatable force for liberation, and companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google, now pejoratively referred to as “big tech,” benefited from their association with it. Today that goodwill has by and large been lost amid privacy and censorship scandals.

“… I think that US tech platforms benefited from a lot of goodwill kind of in part because they were… not really touched by the government much, especially internationally, and now of course that’s changing… centralized tech ecosystems are definitely not going to be capable of… being independent from the political environment they’re based in. But people definitely do see blockchains as basically being… the last hope for an alternative in some sense” (Vitalik Buterin: Mechanism Design in Political Theory,” 16:33).

Buterin’s analyses confirms Lessig’s early warning that the removal of government regulation without an equal scrutiny of developing code would not guarantee a free web. “…so obsessed are we with the idea that liberty means ‘freedom from government’ that we don’t even see the regulation in this new space. We therefore don’t see the threat to liberty that this regulation presents” (Lessig). Blockchains have been described as trustless systems due to their decentralized consensus models that remove third party arbiters, but we must actively audit the code and the intentions of those writing the code the same way we would audit any other institution. For our own good, we cannot allow our common goal to free the web from corporate powers to blind us to other threats, even from within our own camp.

Today, as web3 overtakes web2 with new architecture, and therefore new regulation, we are at a critical junction point. We must interrogate our new regulators and ensure the architecture provides for the freedoms and values we desire. Web3 is still being written, and one day it will either free us from the shackles of big tech oligarchs or deliver us into the hands of new masters.

Which way web3?

Works Cited

Reynolds, Sam. “Ethereum Name Service Removes Core Team Member Brantly Millegan Over 2016 Tweet.” Coindesk, 7 Feb. 2022.

Silver, Charles. “Council Post: What Is Web 3.0?” Forbes, 6 Jan. 2020.

Millegan, Brantly. “ENS Domains twitter space 2/5/22 — Brantly Millegan defending his views before getting fired by TNL.” YouTube, Theology Meets Web 3.0, 8 Feb. 2022.

“Why ENS Names Are Much More than Domains.” Fleek Blog, 22 Dec. 2020.

Lessig, Lawrence. “Code Is Law.” Harvard Magazine, 1 Jan. 2000.

Brennan, Coogan. “Want to Really Understand Blockchain? You Need to Understand State.” ConsenSys, 20 Mar. 2020.

Buterin, Vitalik. “The Meaning of Decentralization.” Medium, 6 Feb. 2017.

Hamilton, Alexander. “The Federalist Papers : №26.” The Avalon Project, Lillian Goldman Law Library.

“Vitalik Buterin “Spiritually, I Really Love DAO.”” YouTube, uploaded by Stakeborg DAO, 19 Oct. 2021.

Buterin, Vitalik. “Bootstrapping a Decentralized Autonomous Corporation: Part I.” Bitcoin Magazine, 19 Sep. 2013.

““ENS Is for Everyone” — Twitter Space Hosted by ENS Domains Community Leader Alisha.eth, 6 Feb. 2022.” YouTube, Theology Meets Web 3.0, 8 Feb. 2022.

“Frequently Asked Questions” ENS Documentation, ENS Domains, 2021.

“Open Letter to Brantly Millegan, in Reference to EP6.1.” ENS DAO Governance Forum, 5 Mar. 2022, discuss.ens.domains/t/open-letter-to-brantly-millegan-in-reference-to-ep6–1/11164.

daylon.eth. “Nominations for ENS Foundation Director to Replace Brantly.eth.” ENS DAO Governance Forum, 8 Feb. 2022, discuss.ens.domains/t/nominations-for-ens-foundation-director-to-replace-brantly-eth/10634.

“Vitalik Buterin: Mechanism Design in Political Theory.” YouTube, uploaded by Palladium Magazine, 9 Jun. 2020.

On January 6th, 2021, thousands of aggrieved American citizens descended on the U.S. Capitol to protest an election they believed was stolen by a cabal of nefarious foreign actors and transnational elites. Alongside the rousing speeches and calls for political reform, the gathering was marked by the sound of prayer and displays of worship from a large and vocal Christian contingent. Unfortunately, the 6th will likely not be remembered for its impassioned speakers, criticisms of government corruption, or patriotic crowd. Instead, it will be remembered for its historic political “violence” and the ensuing witch hunt against conservative attendees and sympathizers.

Christian political activist Ali Alexander was the primary organizer of the January 6th rally. Proclaiming on Telegram, “I am glad I have been humiliated before the world that God, my Father, might be greater glorified when we are vindicated…” Alexander disavowed violence and promoted civil solutions. Despite his denouncement of bad actors, Alexander found himself targeted by the incoming regime. Erased from social media and canceled by multiple payment processors, Alexander turned to the Christian crowdfunding platform GiveSendGo for financial support. Without notice, major payment processors including PayPal and Visa immediately dropped support for GiveSendGo, affecting Christian charities and missionary funds across the platform. On January 18th, Alexander sent out a plea to his Telegram followers:

“GiveSendGo, a Christian crowdfunding website, finally re-enabled by (sic) account after being harassed by far-left partisans but now the processor is cutting me off

I’ll officially have no ability to accept funds outside of cryptocurrency for days to weeks while I put a team on sourcing a solution that will eat a higher chunk of funds” (January 18th Telegram Communication, Ali Alexander).

Ali Alexander was effectively “de-personed,” but he was not the first to face the full force of Big Tech censorship without so much as a criminal charge. In 2019, Laura Loomer was banned from major payment processors including PayPal, Venmo, and GoFundMe following a dispute over the Islamic beliefs of Representative Ilhan Omar. Similarly, conservative Catholic commentator Nick Fuentes was forced to only accept crypto payments for merchandise and show subscriptions following various service provider drops after the 6th.

Major institutional players including the NRA, immigration detention facilities (CNA), and conservative think tanks have also faced financial censorship. As recently as March, 2021 self-proclaimed Christian social media alternative, Gab, reported they were suspended from five banks in three weeks. One bank is purported to have justified their decision by saying “the media has written bad things about your business” (Email Communication, Gab News). Gab is also blacklisted by both Visa and PayPal along with its founder and CEO, Andrew Torba.

“Time and time again, corporations [have] bent the knee before outraged activists and stifled the free speech of ordinary Americans. We see this when social media giants regularly censor and ban individuals who run afoul of liberal orthodoxy…. Less noticed is the threat of financial de-platforming. This growing menace means those who dissent from the official left-wing line won’t even be allowed to bank or use a credit card” (“Trump Administration Rule Poised to Take a Stand Against Financial Censorship,” CNS News).

With increasing frequency, those who hold to conservative, Christian beliefs are finding themselves isolated and unable to conduct business in a corrupted social economic system that is hostile to dissenters. These concerted attacks are no accident. Rather, they are the result of a careful and coordinated effort by leftists to assimilate all of western society to their social vision.

“They don’t want me to fund security. They want me, the founder of the Stop the Steal movement in 2020, to die” (Ali Alexander).

How is the U.S. Financial System a weapon?

It is little wonder how we got here. Our modern financial system requires three parties to be involved in every transaction: the buyer, the seller, and an intermediary. There is no way to buy or sell in our global, digital economy without an independent, federally approved payment processor. Whether making a wire transfer from a bank, a credit card payment, or a transfer via PayPal, every transaction involves a third-party processor or facilitator who manages, tracks, and reports activity to regulators according to strict policy measures.

While tight regulation may serve to ensure taxes are properly paid, it also serves to reduce competition in the market. Because of strict regulation, payment processors are few and the threat of competition is small. A January, 2021 report by Merchant Cost Consulting found the total list of direct credit card processors and acquirers at just 66 (“List of Credit Card Processing Companies 2021,” Matt Rej). However, the interlacing nature of the payment processing industry means there are also downstream and side-chain services that work together, often within exclusive ecosystems, to support online payment processing.

Once a service provider decides to drop support, whether due to company policy or capitulation to mob demands, it can be days or weeks before another payment solution can be sourced and implemented. Even worse, the forces of mob pressure and nature of low competition mean some may find themselves completely stranded with no way to receive funds in the online, global economy — a reality that conservatives Christians across the world are quickly waking up to.

The Crypto Currency Solution

Recognizing the financial risks of the U.S. Dollar, and considering the moral implications of supporting it, many turn to traditional, longstanding stores of value such as gold, silver, and other physical assets. However, those kinds of physical assets present problems to their use as an exchange of value in the modern economy that will be difficult to overcome — difficulties that will be felt hardest by those who rely on charity donations (such as global missions) where convenience of payment can more often mean the difference between a received or a lost donation.

A 2019 survey by the American Express found that 85% of consumers have abandoned an online purchase because the shopping experience was not easy enough (“Payment Method Statistics,” Jason Steele & Tamara E. Holmes). Thus, it seems fair to say that physical assets that necessitate an in-person exchange are out of the scope of reasonability for the vast majority of consumers.

Crypto currencies, however, provide an elegant solution to this problem and many more. With an infrastructure that has slowly and organically grown, and is just now ripening for use, one might reasonably claim the hand of the divine at work.

“Bitcoin allows anyone in the world to store value digitally and transact in a way that is secure, censorship-resistant, and doesn’t require permission or approval from any government, corporation, or bank” (“What is Bitcoin?” Gab News).

Bitcoin, the first and most popular crypto currency, was developed by an anonymous figure known as Satoshi, and unlike the U.S. dollar with its seemingly endlessly printed supply, is capped at a total circulation of 21 million. But the true power of bitcoin and the crypto currency revolution it has spurred is Blockchain.

Blockchain was proposed as a record keeping system as early as 1982 before being repurposed by Satoshi in the development of bitcoin. Blockchain is a database system that stores information in a chain of sequential blocks. Using cryptographic math functions, each block is immutably chained to the previous block so that validated information cannot be manipulated.

In the case of bitcoin, the information is transaction data, and the security of blockchain removes the need for a trusted intermediary to process and validate online payments. This principle is called immutability and is the first pillar of blockchain technology.

“A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution…. We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network. The network timestamps transactions by hashing them into an ongoing chain of hash-based proof-of-work, forming a record that cannot be changed…” (“Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” Satoshi Nakamoto).

The next pillar is decentralization. Once you understand immutability, you might be tempted to wonder who validates transaction data? The answer is no one, or rather, everyone. Unlike traditional finance, there is no single entity that controls bitcoin and there is no central server location where blockchain transactions are processed. This means no entity can deprive a user of the ability to exchange value through bitcoin.

Decentralization is achieved through a network of computers, or nodes, that each store a copy of the entire blockchain ledger history and compete with each other to validate new blocks of transactions and earn bitcoin, a process known as mining. Mining rewards are made up of a combination of transaction fees and new bitcoin that will slowly be released into the system by the bitcoin algorithm until the total circulation reaches 21 million.

Once a node mines a new block it broadcasts its updated blockchain to the network where it is re-validated by the remaining nodes. Anyone can connect a node to the blockchain network and begin mining for bitcoin. Currently there is estimated to be over 1,000,000 unique individuals worldwide mining for bitcoin (“How Many Bitcoins Are There? How Many Left to Mine?” Wallabit Media).

The final pillar of blockchain technology is transparency. Once created, Satoshi released the bitcoin source code to the world. It is open source and viewable by anybody. Furthermore, source, amount, and destination data of every transaction logged is public information and can be reviewed by anybody at any time. Transparency means blockchain technology does not require blind trust, and all entities are accountable to the public.

The three pillars of immutability, decentralization, and transparency create a financial alternative to the U.S. economic system that can be trusted to remain secure and censorship free. In a global economy, crypto currencies represent the best alternative to traditional fiat. But bitcoin is just the tip of the cryptocurrency iceberg, and a replacement for fiat is just the beginning.

Web 3.0 and the Blockchain Revolution

The term Web 2.0 was coined to describe the rise of user-generated content, such as blogging and social media, over the old consumer-content provider relationship that dominated the early web. Web 2.0 drastically shifted the power structure of the internet, but centrally controlled content aggregators, such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, were still required to host and manage data. Blockchain represents a paradigm shift in our understanding of the internet and opens up the possibility of a fully decentralized web where users manage their own data in a system that is transparent, secure, and censorship free. The development of blockchain technology solutions and the decentralized applications (dapps) built on them are referred to as Web 3.0

“Decentralized infrastructure and application platforms will displace centralized tech giants, and individuals will be able to rightfully own their data” (“What is Web 3.0?” Charles Silver).

Etherium is an asset, like bitcoin, that is built on a blockchain network. However, Etherium expanded the use of blockchain by creating a network that is capable of handling complex data processing requests beyond simple transactions. Through the use of “smart contracts,” users can buy processing power on the Etherium network creating the first asset of its kind that can be used as both an exchange of value and a convertible resource with ease.

In a world where server power is increasingly expensive and under the control of big tech monopolies, censorship is a very real concern for all web projects. Recently, the case of Parler, an alternative social media platform, provided more than enough validation for those concerns. Following the events of the 6th, media sources claimed Parler was responsible for harboring right wing dissidents who incited violence. By the 9th, Amazon Cloud Services dropped hosting for Parler’s backend data (“Amazon drops Parler from its web hosting service, citing violent posts,” Annie Palmer). To date Parler has been unable to find an alternative hosting solution.

Thankfully, the Etherium network, and other projects like it, represent a scalable solution for web projects without concern for censorship. The ecosystem is only just emerging, but smart contract solutions are finding integration with new areas of the web every day.

A Moral Imperative

“Therefore go out from their midst, and be separate from them, says the Lord, and touch no unclean thing; then I will welcome you,” (2 Corinthians 6:17, ESV).

As institutions across the West seemingly act in ideological lock-step, it is apparent that a new order has emerged, and it will not rest until it has assimilated all of society to its liberal agenda. Seeking to coerce the Church into sharing its vision, the centralization of big tech and the U.S. economic system are viscous tools in their hands. Blockchain, DeFi, and their associated cryptocurrency projects represent some of the best solutions we have to maintain the autonomy of the Church within a hostile system.

In the book of Galatians, the Apostle Paul teaches us to fulfill the law of Christ through the act of “bearing one another’s burdens” (Galatians 6:2). We understand this in the context of the weight of sin, but in it we also find the principle of the mutual solidarity of Christians as one body, and one bride, striving together to perfect the love of Christ in us and to present ourselves “as a living sacrifice holy and acceptable to God” (Romans 12:1).

Individually, we may not, and God willing, may never feel the pressure on our means of income that others face, but if our brothers and sisters are banned from doing business with the U.S. dollar, surely we have a responsibility to investigate alternative means of compensation.

“By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35, ESV).

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was put to death in 1940s Germany for opposing the Nazi Regime. A Lutheran theologian and founding member of the confessing Church, Bonhoeffer wrote vigorously about the ethical and moral responsibility of Christians in a secular state leading up to his execution. Bonhoeffer believed that the Church should seek to obey the state, but that its true responsibility was to the people of the state. He argued that Christians had a moral imperative to act when the need grew great enough, not out of rebellion, but out of our conviction to obey the will of God. Bonhoeffer did not believe that the actions required would always be clear, but that the Church was still required to act in faith and trust that God would provide revelation.

Knowledge carries great responsibility, and we cannot turn a blind eye to the injustices of the U.S. economic system. Bonhoeffer argued that God would reveal Himself at the junction of conscious and dilemma. Finding ourselves at a similar, critical junction now, can we trust that God has revealed Himself through a viable alternative? If we recognize the existence of our moral imperative to move away from evil and towards good, then it’s time to act.

“So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin” (James 4:17, ESV).

Works Cited

“Trump Administration Rule Poised to Take a Stand against Financial Censorship.” CNSNews.com, 28 Dec. 2020.

Rej, Matt. List of Credit Card Processing Companies 2021 | Merchant Cost Consulting, 4 Mar. 2021.

Steele, Jason & Tamara E. Holmes “Payment Method Statistics.” CreditCards.com, 24 Mar. 2021.

“What Is Bitcoin?” Gab News, 8 Oct. 2019.

Nakamoto, Satoshi. Bitcoin: A Peer-To-Peer Electronic Cash System, 31 Oct. 2008.

“How Many Bitcoins Are There? How Many Left to Mine? (2019).” Wallabit Media, 2019.

Silver, Charles. “Council Post: What Is Web 3.0?” Forbes, 6 Jan. 2020.

Palmer, Annie. “Amazon Drops Parler from Its Web Hosting Service, Citing Violent Posts.” CNBC, 10 Jan. 2021.