1/3 I agree with Vitalik's point: if you restrict the set of coalition-level deviations the principal has to defend against, the principal’s problem gets easier. My question: can the restriction can be made strong enough to do the work we want from it without making the agents useless? Useful agents cannot be informationally isolated. They need models of the world, public signals, shared data, evaluators, tools, intermediaries, and other sources of context. But once agents inhabit overlapping information environments, restricting direct communication does not eliminate coordination capacity: common signals and shared context can themselves support tacit coordination. That creates a basic tension. The more we isolate agents to suppress tacit coordination, the less informed (and therefore less useful) they become. But once we give them enough shared context to be useful, we reopen informational pathways for coordination without explicit communication. The same information environment that enables useful action can also make tacitly coordinated deviations practically available. So perhaps the harder problem is not simply whether agents can communicate, but where the enforcement boundary falls within the broader information environment? That is not giving up on collusion resistance, but instead asking how to achieve it given informational interdependence.

Since AI x crypto agents seem poised to take over the world, I’m throwing this *draft* into the wild for public comment, critique, and ridicule: 🚀 Community Currencies: The Price of Attention & Cost of Influence ---or--- 💡 The Price of Entry & Cost of Exit This paper is a culmination of my thoughts on networked governance, risk, and decentralized identity that hopes to resolve the tensions and contradictions we face in the digital age: money/voting, public/private, democratic/corporate, capture/overreach, voice/exit. Meaningful feedback and contributions will be acknowledged in the final version! All errors are my own. (And special thanks to the Idena community for giving a model to chew on and improve). papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…

This is precisely what @cryptoidentity @_paulaberman and I warned about in our paper “Compressed to 0: the Silent Strings of PoP”—-the first empirical analysis and critique of PoP. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.… (published by @Stanford_JBLP)

How can X generate more common knowledge? Check out my blogpost: "Common Knowledge Machines: From Community Notes to Community Posts" pujaohlhaver.substack.com/p/…

Giving this talk with @cryptoidentity was maybe the highlight of the year, especially the ending when the crowd erupted in applause. Thank you for the collaboration, Misha. 🙏🏽

Looking forward to talking identity with @cryptoidentity!