Life After Google

by George Gilder

  Rendering is estimated to be a nearly two-billion-dollar market, growing at 22 percent per year. It is dominated by entertainment companies with their own supercomputers and by hundreds of “render farms” around the globe. Golem’s announcement that it was entering this arena aroused new interest in its token issue from tens of thousands of game designers, architects, and virtual reality experimenters. These users now find themselves in queues for what often are prolonged procedures on arrays of multi-core Intel Xeon processors.

  For Golem, however, rendering is just test-market “Brass,” low-hanging fruit to be harvested with free “Blender” software before the company moves on to its panoply of other supercomputer functions in its “Stone” and “Iron” versions.

  At the end of 2017, a year after Golem’s announcement, the rendering specialist OTOY initiated its own token issue, RNDR (the Render Token). Under its galvanic co-founders, Jules Urbach and Alissa Grainger, OTOY has been looking forward to this since 2008, when it received a patent for the use of tokens to enable new markets in rendering. Unlike Golem, which proposes to perform its rendering functions on parallel arrays of CPUs, OTOY from the outset is focusing on graphics processors optimized for these uses. OTOY’s OctaneRender, the industry standard, is the basis for the OctaneBench unit of value, which Golem will use as a metric for its render jobs.

  OTOY is built on the brain of Urbach. Long before Peter Thiel started giving bounties to kids who leave college to start companies, Jules spurned Harvard and the rest of the academic cosmeticians to continue his gritty creativity in gaming. His first hit was Hell Cab for Warner Interactive, published on CD-ROM twenty-five years ago. A graphics and software prodigy, he also did some of the first 3D games in the industry for Groove. Then with a succession of long nights and months of invention, he launched OTOY into real-time 3D rendering and streaming.

  Now a wiry, shining-eyed forty-three-year-old render warrior, looking like Al Pacino’s Serpico after a bad night and speaking at six-shot-latte speed, Urbach announced his plans late in 2017:

  When I started OTOY, my goal was to build an open system that enabled anyone to render and remix simulated reality as effortlessly as the web did for text and digital media.

  A decentralized and open global rendering system is foundational for disruptive services and platforms to evolve from the post-mobile world of immersive computing, just as the open web was formed in the creation of Google, Amazon and Facebook.

  . . . OctaneRender uses cheap GPUs found in nearly any PC to generate photoreal images and media in near real time, at a quality that surpasses cinematic CPU rendering that takes hours longer. . . .

  Our aim is for the Render Token to [make] the transactional process of rendering and streaming 3D environments, mixed reality experiences, and virtual objects much simpler for end users and content creators.6

  What makes such a global computer for rendering possible is the blockchain, which can publicly record all the intricate transactions entailed by the renting of unused space on computers and the delivery of rendered images to users. As Urbach points out,

  its integration with [smart contracts on the] Ethereum network means there is robust and indisputable digital rights resolution built into the service. This is essential for resolving permanent state changes in shared 3D scenes, for which timestamped proof of authorship and re-composition rights is needed.

  From industrial engineers and architects testing light leakage in CAD models, to scientists simulating galaxy formation in the early Universe, to creators and consumers tapping into bursts of massive raytracing power to share holographic virtual worlds and experiences, a distributed GPU rendering system on the blockchain taps into massive simulation resources at a low cost.

  This system, says Urbach, will be “valuable for real world jobs that are prohibitively expensive to fulfill quickly on local or centralized GPUs. . . . [W]e believe that users will be able to fulfill more and more jobs with less and less hardware, latency and energy costs.”7

  In a September 2017 blog posting, Brendan Eich summed up the OTOY plan and compared it to his own Basic Attention Token (BAT):

  I wrote about OTOY over four years ago, in “Today I Saw The Future”. Since then, I have been inspired by the commitment of the founders Jules Urbach and Alissa Grainger to the vision that Jules enunciates:

  . . . to render and remix simulated reality as effortlessly as the web did for text and digital media.

  Now, OTOY is building RNDR, its own GPU-cloud rendering token, to decentralize AR/VR [Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality], game, and movie rendering to over 7 million GPUs owners. The advantages of RNDR align with those of the BAT:

  1. Efficiency: Utility tokens unlock access to idle or mispriced resources, e.g., GPUs for RNDR, user attention for BAT.

  2. Fraud resistance: Tokens act as a low-fraud unit of account with payment only after blockchain-attested verification of work.

  3. Social credit: Pre-creating a pool of tokens not for sale endows users with tokens by fiat.

  . . . Decentralized rendering requires verification of results. Tokens do not flow until the render-job’s author confirms quality of results via sampling and testing. Renderers gain and lose scored reputation based on degree and quality of jobs completed.

  Decentralized rendering requires confidentiality. In one of those technological ironies for which I live, the same kind of security hardware (e.g., ARM TrustZone) created for DRM [digital rights management] helps solve the confidentiality problem.

  In my original blog posts about OTOY, I advocated watermarking as inevitable and superior to DRM. OTOY has been developing and deploying watermarking since 2009. Large shared AR/VR worlds cannot possibly “encrypt what you see” (as DRM for fixed media tries to do). Yet creators of models and art in such shared virtual worlds need effective and fair protection, as experience from Second Life shows.

  Indelible watermarking is a key part of the solution. See the “Watermarking and Encrypted Escrow Transactions” section at RNDR: A Photon-Driven Economy for more details.

  . . . I’m thrilled by the prospects for RNDR, BAT, and other domain-specific tokens that will bind the Metaverse economy into a coherent and equitable, yet decentralized, whole. The future will be tokenized!8

  Urbach eventually will take his system beyond rendering to cover much of the Golem agenda. Focused as he and Grainger were on the first steps of launching the Render Token, Urbach neglected to point out that a global rendering parallel supercomputer based on graphics processors is optimal for an array of other applications as well. Bill Dally of Nvidia has described many of them. Much of the machine-learning activity in Hölzle’s data centers, for example, takes place on clustered graphics processors that can be simulated by OTOY’s new blockchain-based distributed render farms.

  OTOY is expert in joining CPU and GPU cycles in optimal configurations for different uses. By tapping the GPU resources in a total universe of billions of computers, OTOY and its rivals and collaborators might eventually marshal a virtual planetary parallel computer that dwarfs the CPU and GPU arrays in Google data centers with their mere millions of servers.

  Together with Golem, OTOY is leading the march of blockchain supercomputers to market. Gridcoin at Berkeley raised $11 million for its BOINC (open infrastructure for network computing) and is offering middleware for distributed “proof of research” in a Berkeley bouquet of mathematics, linguistics, medicine, molecular biology, climate science, environmental science, and astrophysics. Streamr is collaborating with Golem on a data transport layer for a new distributed Internet architecture for streamed content. SONM.io in Moscow, Russia, is experimenting with a “fog” computing model using resources distributed on the “edge of the cloud” to be rented out by enterprise telecom and network owners. It has achieved a market cap of $55 million.

  All these projects use blockchains to coordinate potential billions of randomly distributed owners of computers, with often unused resources, forming virtual supercomputers. Eac
h token enables an immutable timestamped blockchain transaction and connects it with scores of others in a mesh of machine intelligence. Most of the advances in interlinking racks of machines in the water-cooled crucibles of parallelism also work in interlinking dispersed networks of thousands of air-cooled computers around the world.

  Many of these ventures will fail, but together they can emancipate the next generation of the Web from closed silos of captured data. The cryptocosm can mobilize computer power in volumes that dwarf even the data centers of the leviathans. In this cause, the advances in computer science pioneered at Google serve to emancipate the world from Google’s silos.

  Every gain in organizing the parallel resources of closed supercomputers in clouds spurs the creation of open supercomputers in the sky. Every fiber-optic cable helps interlink mobs of currently random computers in hives of efficient virtual machines. Dally of Nvidia can look on in wonder as his architectural advances, marching across the globe, are realized in worldwide webs of blockchain data and processing.

  These gains are made possible by the industry’s shift of focus from the fruits of computation to its roots in trust and security. The existing Internet architecture is top-heavy with apps that can do anything you could want for free, and porous in its underlying protocols to establish identities, property rights, and other facets of the ground state of the system.

  As a global copying machine, the Internet founders in establishing origins, facts, truths, timestamps, and ground states. Beyond the slippery slopes of the Internet, the blockchain can provide an immutable database on which to build new structures of trust.

  Once data are planted on the global blockchain, it is no longer necessary to create a physical enclosure to organize a vast parallel computer. It is no longer reasonable to aggregate computation beside remote rivers or in arctic climes or to launch supercomputers into the chill of outer space. Just as the Internet could mobilize rooms or cars or even the labor of private citizens around the world, so blockchains can organize the computers of the world. When the computers are so engaged, it will be only a matter of time before the rooms and cars and jobs will follow.

  CHAPTER 19

  A Global Insurrection

  Guatemala occupies an unenviable place on the list of countries where one is most likely to be murdered. Its capital, Guatemala City, is one of the world’s fifty most violent cities and sits uncomfortably close to even more violent cities in El Salvador and Honduras. The murder rates in countries unfortunate enough to lie between coca plants in Colombia and drug dealers in the United States are the highest in the world; Guatemala’s is tenth highest. Adding to the country’s misery is its infant mortality rate, one of the Western Hemisphere’s highest.1 And for thirty-six years, these were not even Guatemala’s worst misfortunes: its civil war, one of the longest-running in the Americas, ended only in 1996.

  In the middle of that war, waged by the military government and Marxist guerillas, a U.S.-educated engineer and outsized personality, Manuel Ayau, established the Center for Economic and Social Studies to promote the thought of the “Austrian School” of economics, exemplified by such thinkers as Ludwig von Mises and the chemist-philosopher Michael Polanyi. Within a few years, Ayau and other members of the center started a university, which they named after Francisco Marroquín, a Spanish bishop and contemporary of Martin Luther who spent the second half of his life in their country as an advocate for the freedom of Guatemalans.2

  As the civil war worsened all around, the Universidad Francisco Marroquín opened in January 1972 with Ayau as its first president. In his inaugural address, he proclaimed UFM’s core convictions—individual rights, truth, justice, pluralism, and democracy—which dictators and terrorists were trampling just outside the door. Freedom, Ayau said, came first of all: “We firmly believe in the capacity of imperfect human beings to be better able to realize their destiny when free, and not when compelled by the collective entity personified by the state.”

  Amid the heat and politics outside, Ayau took the long view:

  The commitment of universities everywhere is not to the passing aspects of human life, rather to the permanent. As such, universities need to place themselves beyond the conflicts of their time so that science and academic freedom—which humankind will need at all times—may be preserved. What we suggest here is that the traditional ivory tower not be abandoned by scholars seeking to join the heated discussions of the political arena, but that it be transformed into a new and transparent crystal tower that will allow scholars—professors and students—to watch, think about, and critically study present conditions in an effort to discover the probable shape of the future.3

  At the university’s first graduation ceremony, Ayau again spoke of freedom, while wearing a bulletproof vest under his academic robes.

  Bishop Marroquín himself founded a school in Guatemala, which eventually developed into the Universidad de San Carlos, one of the oldest universities in the Americas. Ayau’s new university, with its emphasis on free markets and a free society, charted a very different course from that of the old university. The Los Angeles Times reported in 2008: “Whereas San Carlos University actively aided leftist guerrillas, [Universidad] Francisco Marroquín preached the sanctity of private property rights and the rule of law. The cheeky Ayau chose red as the school’s official color ‘on the theory that it had been expropriated by the communists and we shouldn’t cede them exclusivity.’ ”4

  Starting with “forty students in a rented house,” UFM was able within a decade to buy forty acres in the center of the city. On this semi-abandoned land, reclaimed from sewage and trash, in that violent and beautiful capital, a serene campus emerged. Its curving brick buildings dripping with greenery, grand old trees, and meandering walking paths formed a peaceful oasis of academic freedom.

  Academic freedom led to other kinds of freedom. In 1996, the new president of Guatemala, Álvaro Arzú, asked a young engineer and member of congress, Alfredo Guzmán, to privatize the dysfunctional and expensive state-run phone system. At the time, Guatemala’s state-owned telecom company focused on urban areas—and spottily at that—in a country where most people lived outside the cities. Guzmán, himself a UFM graduate, gathered a team of mainly UFM graduates and professors. In a few years, this team’s privatization plan turned a country where rural people had to drive miles to stand in line for an expensive urban telephone—one that might take ten minutes even to get a dial tone—into the best-connected country in Central America. A case study in 2012 reported that “seven years after the reform, the number of mobile phone lines exceeded the country’s total population.”5

  After one of the telecom reformers, Giancarlo Ibárgüen, became president of UFM in 2003, it became the world’s first university to be fully connected by WiFi (as a “beta site” for a local equipment company). UFM now tops the worldwide list of the fifty best places to study classical economics, beating out even Milton Friedman’s University of Chicago.6 Peter Thiel, not known as a fan of higher education, addressed the UFM graduation ceremonies at Ibárgüen’s invitation in 2009 and received an honorary doctorate. UFM opened, for what it’s worth, a George Gilder Computer Center, attracting my attention. In June 2013, under Ibárgüen’s inspirational successor, Gabriel Calzada, UFM became the first university in the Americas to accept bitcoins for payment. The Startup Cities Institute has its home there, part of a movement Mark Klugmann conceived of, at least in part, as a vessel for digital currencies—recalling Ayau’s vision, nearly half a century ago, of a community engaged in discovering “the probable shape of the future.”

  “Who is holding the bag?”

  • • •

  Tuur Demeester’s disdainful voice flared over the Skype link from Belgium to the classroom in Guatemala. The wide screen showed a young man with a conservative haircut and a studious, collegiate appearance. I had presumed to suggest that perhaps his precious bitcoin currencies might prove to be a Ponzi scheme, with the bellwether “miners” getting rich an
d the latecomers getting fleeced.

  It was May 2014, early in my plunge into the international bitcoin hacker community. I was in Guatemala to receive an honorary doctorate from the Universidad Francisco Marroquín. There in a deep ravine that cleaves the volcanic “Zone Ten” in Guatemala City, I was feeling a system of the world quake under my feet.

  I was seated at a large rounded table in a UFM classroom, the pink and red blooms of a huge bougainvillea tree visible across the ravine from the nine-story towers of opaque and transparent silicon, interconnected brick and glass: Ayau’s “crystal tower” reified. Gathered around me now were a gaggle of oracular coders, pioneering educators, technology venturers, gold-oriented value investors, Randian libertarians, “free-zone” projectors, and cypherpunk bitcoiners—several playing all these roles at once—who conveyed a unified vision of changes in finance enabling a new efflorescence of freedom and economic opportunity.

  At first I was skeptical about this movement. The protagonists were too young and too visionary, too radical and too conservative, too naïve and too far beyond the bounds of respectability to build the foundations of a new financial and banking infrastructure. But then as they addressed me there at UFM in their intense, tech-savvy language of open-source programming and paradigm-shifting politics, displaying an impressive grasp of the intricacies of financial markets and cryptography, I realized that this movement might well command the tools and charisma to upend the top-heavy and over-regulated regimes of money and banking around the world.