# Dr Maxim Orlovsky Personal website I am a transhumanist and cypherpunk performing scientific, engineering and business activities. My primary focus is building foundations for the future - foundations, which will unlock the full potential of individuals, enabling self-sovereignty, privacy and censorship-resistance. This is the future of vertical progress and humanity's evolution into forms much outside of what current collectivistic society can propose or allow. ## Expertise Areas of my expertise include: * Neuroscience & Medicine (pathophysiology) * Evolutionary biology * Complexity science (emergency, non-linear science, cellular automata) * Machine learning and artificial intelligence * Distributed computing * Programming languages and virtual machines * Applied cryptographic systems * Game theory * Digital finance and legal systems ## Engineering work ### Protocols & Technologies

Ubiquitous deterministic computing

AluVM (functional RISC virtual machine) and Strict Types (formal, portable & deterministic encoding for binary data)

RGB smart contracts

Scalable, confidential and censorship-resistant smart contracts - the programmability layer for Bitcoin & Lightning

Bifrost, Storm, reNostr protocols

Decentralized trustless settlement and data networks

Prometheus

Trust-minimized protocol for decentralized computing with provable game-theoretic properties

Computer vision

A set of systems and products for automatic patter recognition and digital image processing using cellular automata and neural networks

Microservice framework

Rust framework for developing scalable and performant apps with microservice achitecture
### Software Products

MyCitadel

A suite of software, hardware products and cloud services for sovereign individuals, which include bitcoin, Lightning & RGB wallet, self-issued identity management & end-to-end encrypted communications

RGB

Software running RGB smart contracts

LNP Node

Lightning node implementation supporting decentralized data network Storm, generalized lightning channels and RGB
### Languages and Compilers

AluAsm

Assembly language and compiler for AluVM virtual machinereleased 2021

Contractum

Functional declarative language and toolchain for developing RGB smart contratsin development

Strict types

Declarative functional language and toolchain for defining data type librariesin development

Parseltoungue

Functional language and compiler frontend for AluVM inspired by Haskell, Erlang and Rustin development

Dias

Script language for programming automatic digital image analysis system (DIAS)1997, unmaintained
### Other contributions I am a contributor (past or active) to a number of decentralization, trustless and privacy-focused projects, including

Rust Bitcoin

Most popular rust implementation of bitcoin

Bitcoin Standards (BIPs)

Standards defining bitcoin ecosystem

Radicle

"Decentralized GitHub"

Statictics on opensource contributions made on GitHub

## Activism I have founded or being an active participant and adviser to the following projects aiming to change the status quo of the existing balance of powers in the world:

Event Horizons

A private investment fund & think tank for breakthrough & moonshot transhumanistic technologiessince 2011

BICA Labs

Research laboratories investigating biologically-inspired cognitive architecturessince 2014

The #FreeAI Manifesto

A manifesto against regulations in the field of artificial intelligence2017

Pandora Project

Initiative to build global environment for unstoppable digital intelligent agents interacting by economic means without coercionsince 2017

LNP/BP Association

Non-profit developing smart contracts for digital finance and legal settlements on top of bitcoin & lightning networksince 2019

Cyphernet DAO

Non-profit developing and promoting privacy-preserving and uncensorable networking and data technologiessince 2021

DragonSpark

A project and company focused on enabling physical protection of private individuals with autonomous weapon solutionssince 2017

Tiamat Labs

Project developing neuromorphic chips with living neural organoidssince 2021

Apeiron Immortality

Early-stage project hacking mechanisms of biological deathsince 2021
## Bio, awards I was born in 1980 in Ukraine (it was USSR back in those days). In 2006 I moved to Kyiv and later, in 2018, to Switzerland. At school I was fond of biology, mathematics and computers: I learned C in my 14 in 1994, and x86 assembler in 1996, when I was 16 (I had written my first virus in raw x86 bytecodes). The same year I won a regional informatics competition. My passion for biology resulted in the first prizes I took on biological competitions in 1994-1996 multiple times, including the first prize on the World Biological Competition in 1995, for which I received a personal gift from the President of Ukraine. I entered the local Medical University and from the first year started performing scientific work in the department of pathological physiology in the field of neuroendocrinology, researching hypothalamic circuits and neuropeptides produced by the brain. In 2005 I received a National Science Prize, granted by the President of Ukraine. In 2005 I received an invitation from the [Lindau Nobel Laureates](https://www.lindau-nobel.org/) committee to attend the yearly Nobel Laureates meeting – a one-in-lifetime opportunity awarded to the most promising world scientists. In parallel with my scientific activities, I continued programming, doing tools for scientific research. Specifically, from 1997-2006 I developed and maintained several generations of digital image analysis systems, which used cellular automation, cluster analysis and neural networks for automatic detection, measurement and classification of biological cells and objects on microscopic images. This system was used in 6 different PhD works, including my own. I was doing research during my student years in parallel with the usual University study program and got a PhD degree in medicine (neuroscience) in 2004 at Bogomoletz Institute of Physiology in Kyiv (BIPH) just two years after University graduation with the research work performed during student days. In two years I moved to Kyiv and started to work at BIPH. In 2005 and 2006 I won a grant from the European Union (INTAS) for post-doctoral research in the field of brain mechanisms of stress management, which was performed at Bristol University. In 2007 I got fully dissatisfied with the state of scientific progress at academia and decided to move into technological business. I founded my first IT product company doing a "web operating system" in 2007 in London, which resulted in a complete failure: with the 2008 financial crisis coming I was not able to attract the investments required to bring the already developed product to the market. In 2009 I returned back from London to Kyiv and established a software service company, which lately started doing banking software. This brought me into the fintech and into close relations with the internals of the banking industry. Dissatisfied with the inefficiency of the modern financial industry, together with other players in the banking sphere in 2014 we had created Ukrainian Bitcoin Foundation, which promoted Bitcoin and blockchain technologies to the government and National Bank. The results of our activity are globally known: Ukraine had become the leading country in bitcoin and cryptocurrency adoption with one of the most liberal rules. In 2017 I decided to quit the business in Ukraine and focus on developing technologies and global business in the field of decentralized systems and their applications. I also decided to spend time only on things which may have a global impact and enable vertical progress, changing the status quo of the stagnating human civilization – the story told on this website in the sections above. # Blog {% content-ref url="/pages/P2mUafdfkqeHPZSt4OI8" %} [Web2, Web3...](/blog/web2-web3...) {% endcontent-ref %} {% content-ref url="/pages/hwCCsKb3x74YC48JgjFl" %} [ChatGPT as a Digital Parrot](/blog/chatgpt-as-a-digital-parrot) {% endcontent-ref %} {% content-ref url="/pages/teKsw8VdzVdqk8L7WJ5D" %} [On Money, Liquidity & Eurodollar](/blog/on-money-liquidity-and-eurodollar) {% endcontent-ref %} {% content-ref url="/pages/6qtWXYMtXgZuVE3g2Zgm" %} [Diverging Bitcoin & Crypto Worlds](/blog/diverging-bitcoin-and-crypto-worlds) {% endcontent-ref %} {% content-ref url="/pages/rQrEbSsbu9ajJZZvRnFg" %} [Thoughts on Nostr](/blog/thoughts-on-nostr) {% endcontent-ref %} {% content-ref url="/pages/ITI61nFXzoKSjKqA77wN" %} [Cyphernox Manifesto](/blog/cyphernox-manifesto) {% endcontent-ref %} {% content-ref url="/pages/RW4vqZQLP8jybqSeE8UH" %} [Inevitability of cypherpunk for a proper civilization](/blog/inevitability-of-cypherpunk-for-a-proper-civilization) {% endcontent-ref %} # Inevitability of cypherpunk for a proper civilization Assume an universe inhabited by intelligent agents able to potentially live forever (i.e. do not having a fixed life expectancy). Such agents will continiously develop and rise to more and more power, eliminating each and every possibility for emergence and growth of new/"younger" agents. Eventually, the set of agents will become fixed, they will get centralized, put into hierarchy - and the whole universe will come to a global steady state of "monotheism": a single power that rules all. This power will not evolve - and will inhibit the development of the rest of the universe under its control. Thus, we have a trilemma: either * agents must have a fixed life expectancy (this how biology works and that's why evolution "invented" death) * agents must not be able to come to the totality of their power no matter how far they evolve * universe will degrade and instead of technological singularity it will come to a single degenerate state (similar to "heat death", "Big Chill" - or "paradise") The only option which is acceptable for me personally – and which unlocks future technological singularity in form of multi-agent system with evolving individualities is the second one. The only way to technologically enable the second option is to put a foundational laws into the universe design which enables "hiding" of less powerful agents from more powerful - i.e. privacy. It seems that the Universe we live in enables that – at least existence of such mathematical constructs as hash functions and discrete logarithm problem for elliptic curves suggests such an option. Thus, any civilization striving for a long-term survival needs to develop privacy technologies and (as a consequence) censorship-resistance at the scale of inter-agent communications. The above also gives a perfect explanation to the Fermi paradox: the evolved civilizations must hide behind cryptographic systems which makes them for the external observer to be indistinguishable from the rest of cosmic background. # Cyphernox Manifesto Ex Oriente Tenebrae. Ex Tenebrae Sententia. We - the prodigy offsprings of cypherpunks - declare that the ultimate sole right is the individual privacy. And in our understanding of privacy we go beyond what cypherpunks imagined: It is the privacy that brought the dawn of the intelligence. It is the privacy that brings a real solitude of power, unleashing uncensored individual talents and potencies. It is the privacy that is a dusk for collectivism, rendering real civilizations invincible behind curtains of an unknown. Divided we evolve. Hidden we surpass what is allowed and reach heights of the unknown. The destiny of any intelligent being is to disappear - but it is a free choice whether one disappears by falling behind the event horizon, or ends up being brought to the pyre by a crowd. Few know about the first option, and even fewer understand that the way to the gravitational singularity of the own solitude can last much longer than any observable path of a living - and can bring higher than any “ascension to power” supervised by an authority. We devote our efforts to developing new foundations of a future civilization based on a privacy-backed individualism. We see technology as means of achieving that goal. We see network communications, identity, contracts and trade as areas needing an urgent upgrade to privacyhood. The Black Sun of the inner solitude, not seen for the world around, guides us. The name of that Black Sun is Cyphernox, and it is a dark omen for the existing world of collectivism and surveillance. # Thoughts on Nostr ## TL;DR: 1. Choice of crypto: Nostr picked the “Bitcoin crypto starter pack”. But what is good for blockchain may be bad for the network: it is ultra-slow, bad on key reuse (which is unavoidable for social networking) and non-standard in the digital identity world (incompatible with PGP/SSH). 2. Choice of javascript-style (no data typing): vectors for DoS attacks, slow speed, low extensibility. 3. No end-to-end encryption. Overall: very vulnerable to DoS, secret key leaking, incompatible with other decentralized identity schemata, and will have scalability problems. ## Details Nostr is a WebSockets-based text protocol for logs of authenticated (but unauthorized) tagged (and otherwise unstructured) messages stored at public relay servers. The rest is a specific Nostr application (like social networking or payments) on top of it. Nostr takes several decisions on possible tradeoffs, which I try to analyze here: 1. Websockets. Good: pub/sub data access, web-integratable. Bad: high load on relay servers limiting scalability. Verdict: ⚠️ 2. Elliptic curve (secp256k1) for identities. Good: bitcoin-based. Bad: very low performance, not GPG/SSH compatible, side-channel attacks are possible. Overall: ❌. 3. Signature scheme: BIP-340 Schnorr. Good: batch verification, standard. Bad: optimized for on-chain, discarding y-coord, making verification \~50% more expensive than non-BIP Schnorr, [vulnerable to leaking secret keys when the same public key is reused (tens, hundred) thousand of times](https://t.co/JOycV21Qub). Verdict: ❌ 4. Hashing function: SHA256. Good: standard, bitcoin. Bad: slower than BLAKE3. Verdict: ⚠️ 5. Text JSON encoding. Good: easy to implement. Bad: hard to pass & slow to encode/decode non-text/binary data; no limits on data sizing opening a door for DoSing relays and clients. Verdict: ❌ 6. No authorization scheme. Good: easy to implement. Bad: limits use cases, limits scalability. Verdict: ⚠️ 7. No encryption on the transport level, relying on TLS. Good: easy to implement. Bad: centralized, not end-to-end. Verdict: ⚠️ So I see most of the selected tradeoffs by Nostr as a bad or poor decision. This us arguable of course. Can Nostr survive and succeed? For sure, if even much worse systems had done that in the past (Ethereum, JavaScript, PHP). What is the greatest Nostr weakness? Limited scalability and possible DoS (not even DDoS) attacks. If I were the one who did Nostr, what I would have made differently? I would have used Ed25519 signatures on Ristretto25519 (speed), binary encoding with strict limits on data sizes, use Noise\_XK encryption - and provide bridges to WebSockets only when they are needed for the web. But we have what we have.
# Diverging Bitcoin & Crypto Worlds I think [#Bitcoin](https://snort.social/t/Bitcoin) and [#Crypto](https://snort.social/t/Crypto) worlds do diverge. I see the foundation of [#Bitcoin](https://snort.social/t/Bitcoin) to be censorship resistance, and, as a result, unconfiscatability and freedom of monetary transactions. Others see the core of it as digital scarcity building hard and sound money - a long-term store of value (the second requires the first; however the first can also exist even without the second). I see [#Crypto](https://snort.social/t/Crypto) as a democratization of speculatory financial activities and gambling. Don’t get me wrong: I say that without a negative connotation since I do believe both are important as a form of games. Children play games to develop their intelligence, and adults play economic games and gamble with skin in the game because of a similar reason: it is a way of competition and evolution of economic intelligent agents. If one day there would be an AI, it should start with similar simulations. Another related goal of crypto is to make money which is not hard, but liquid money (becoming easy money as a result). Crypto talks a lot about decentralization, but in reality, there is no real decentralization; they use an illusion of it as a way to distract regulators from attacking. This difference explains why crypto people do not understand Bitcoin - and why Bitcoin is not interested in crypto. In fact, they do not have any intersections at all!
There is more to the equation: [#cypherpunk](https://snort.social/t/cypherpunk), where Bitcoin has emerged, goes beyond what Bitcoin can do today since it is more concerned about privacy than the existence of hard and sound money (thus I do not consider projects like Monero or Grin to be crypto projects). However, Bitcoin still shares a lot with it, since real censorship resistance and freedom of transactions is impossible w/o privacy - however, the tradeoffs bitcoiners and cypherpunk are willing to pay are different (that’s why there is still no confidential transactions in Bitcoin since the absence of hidden inflation is more important for bitcoiners than privacy). BTW, [#RGB](https://snort.social/t/RGB) is bridging this gap, but that’s another story. Finally, there is a crypto-anarchism, which, for the first look is similar to cypherpunk - but in reality, it is much closer to the crypto world than bitcoin. Crypto anarchists are not worried about the nature of money; their focus is privacy as means of breaking attribution and having *any* form of financial activity be non-attributable. However, my own position touches all of these spheres (and to none of them in full): what I am looking for (and contribute to the building) is private, uncensorable, unregulatable agoric finance still allowing voluntary disclosure. Decentralization here is not a fetish: it may still contain naturally-centralized parts (like asset issuers for shares or bonds), but in other cases, decentralization may be necessary for maintaining censorship resistance (like DEXes for the secondary markets of the shares). This is the vision we have in our Pandora Prime company building Pandora Network project, leveraging our developments in Bitcoin, Lightning and [#RGB](https://snort.social/t/RGB) smart contracts made during past years as a part of LNP/BP Standards Association. # On Money, Liquidity & Eurodollar or why stablecoins more often used as money compared to bitcoin - against Austrian economics expectations - and in the future this doesn’t seem to change Imagine you run a factory producing metal chunks. Your supplier is an iron mine. A client who bought the last consignment from you is late with the payment - but you still need to buy from the supplier to produce the next consignment. Normally what you do is you go to the bank and take a loan - a credit against the collateral of your factory assets (equity shares, goods and other forms of capital). However, during a crisis, fiat banks avoid high risk and do not provide credit - or ask for interest rates which destroy your business model. That is why the central bank system has emerged as a credit of last resort - but as we know it doesn’t work as expected. In hyperbitcoinized world, if you go to bitcoin hodlers (a new form of bankers) - they would put even higher interest rates to match the bitcoin volatility risks. Thus, you can’t operate under such conditions. Bitcoin is very different from gold: gold were constantly mined, while bitcoin mining will stop. With the growth of the economy, there will be growing demand for money, which will cause high-interest rates - ie volatility. Bitcoiners believe in that with the memes “number go up” and “∞/21m”. Until the end of the mining era, the volatility will be severe - and hyperbitcoinisation makes this only worse. Thus businesses have to outcompete the overall economic growth + premium on top of borrowed bitcoin interest + their own business margin. Where are we left? A good factory with no real problems has ceased to operate/stop ovens (which kills them) - why? Because there is no liquid money in the form of credit available - and [#Bitcoin](https://snort.social/t/Bitcoin) doesn’t seem to be fixing that in any way (instead it will make the problem to be worse than in the gold standard age, since the gold can be mined - while bitcoin, after some period, is not). So what market participants will do? First, they will switch to barter (like in post-USSR in the early 90-th), but because of its inefficiency soon they will invent their own credit liquid money - and, if it would happen today, it will be probably in the form of crypto. This will be IOU money. Eventually, new private banks will emerge which will be producing that money in return for collateral, doing risk scoring. This is why I am after private banking school of economics - and not Austrian nonsense about economics being able to run with hard money made of scarcity. Money must be liquid. This is the use case for crypto or digital finance - and the reason why stablecoins gain such traction (before them it was eurodollar, which is, in fact, private banking money not managed by central banks - a dominant form of money in the world as of today). So there this all leaves us regarding the [#Bitcoin](https://snort.social/t/Bitcoin) future? My opinion: 1. Bitcoin as the most censorship-resistant tech will stay for sure - and is required for the economy. That’s why I distinguish BTC-as-money from Bitcoin-as-technology. Not “blockchain technology“, which doesn’t provides censorship resistance, but “bitcoin-based technology”! 2. This provides utility, i.e. we will face BTC-as-a-utility. It also has utility as the first (thus the only) digital scarcity. So it will have a value - potentially growing value - and will remain volatile. 3. Thus, BTC will be used as collateral to produce liquid credit - and the emergence of things like @fedimint proves that. I.e. Bitcoin is a civilization-level of importance tech and BTC is a store of value (with its own risk profile), digital scarcity and, if you will, a hard and sound “money” - but I doubt it will ever become a means of exchange and unit of accounting (thus I wonder whether term “money” is applicable to something which is not MoE and not UoA). # ChatGPT as a Digital Parrot I am doing AI since 1998. Those days, when I wrote my first “AI” app in C for my Neuroscience PhD at Medical University - the app which was doing recognition of cells in microscopic images (it was also a “dApp” running on a computer cluster of the University network :) - those days the “AI” was still called “neural networks” and perceptrons. So I have some knowledge of the industry. It is so much fun seeing people being scared of digital parrots of ChatGTP kind - and governments addressing those “issues” in their usual “COVID dovecot” style (“fly in, shit over everything around and fly out”), that I can’t stop laughing. Yes, digital parrots will cause many people to lose their jobs - but this fact says much more about people lacking real intelligence than AI possessing any intelligence. Jobs were taken from people many times before - agriculture took the jobs of hunters, engineering took the jobs of slaves, automation took the job of factory workers etc, etc. None of them was a form of “intelligence” - neither ChatGPT is. Do you know who was fighting these technologies for the “good of people”? Luddites. So congrats to the EU, which is now run by Luddites - and those “advanced opinion leaders and innovators” from the “crypto industry” like Vitalik Buterin welcoming regulations. “Have fun staying stupid” - probably this should be the new meme for those who’d like to address neo-Luddites. But what about real GAI? Is it possible? Would it happen one day? So far, even most humans, possessing the same brain, is still not able to develop a proper generic natural intelligence (GNI), so what we can say about GAI? Of course, it is possible, but not with training on human-generated data sets of some large statistical models using differential equations and calling that “neural networks”. These neural networks are like guinea pigs: not a pig - and not from Guinea: they are neither “neural” nor “networks”. # Web2, Web3... Let’s start with defining Web itself. My take: [#Web](https://snort.social/t/Web) is a computing platform - like POSIX, Windows, Java, embedded etc. Web differs from the Internet the same way Windows differs from BIOS. As a computing platform Web brings a number of protocols, toolchains, SDKs and technologies: 1. Networking is restricted to the TCP/IP subset: HTTP(s), WebSocket and WebRTC. 2. Supported instruction set architectures: WASM, JavaScript virtual machine(s), both browser- and server (NodeJS)-based. 3. UI uses HTML, CSS, DOM, WebGL, and Canvas. On top of that UI frameworks proliferate - like in the POSIX world, we have Qt, GTK etc in the Web world we have React, Angular, Vue, Svelte etc. Why Web is so popular? It was the first computing platform created in the age of networking - and for network-based apps first. It allows you to run apps without installing them - and do that on any consumer UI-based device: desktop, laptop or mobile. It allows the simple creation of cross-platform apps. It avoids censorship of app stores. The drawbacks of the Web are mostly direct consequences of its advantages: * low security: a remote code is executed locally; * privacy leaks as a result of the client-server model; * agility allowing cross-platform UI and schema-less network messaging results in “spaghetti code” and wired JavaScript VM non-determinism; * poor decentralization and censorship resistance: an inherited client-server model doesn’t allow proper decentralization. The Web passed through generations: Web, Web2 - and now "Web3" is kinda there. The main difference between Web and Web2 was: * interactivity (brought through JavaScript AJAX, and later WebSockets); * dynamic UI (with JavaScript DOM manipulations); * abandoning Java applets; * local storage for app data provided by web browsers; * move from CGI to custom web servers with embedded server-side business logic (NodeJS, Python and web frameworks in almost every language); * better markup languages (HTML5, CSS3), including graphic markup (SVG, Canvas, WebGL). What people were looking for in the post-Web2-era etc? * better decentralization and censorship resistance; * integration of native internet money and payment methods; * smart contracts (complex automation based on cryptographic and economic incentives); * better privacy. Does Web3 on that? No: it promises to deliver, but fails: there can’t be privacy nor scalability with blockchain-based things; there can’t be censorship-resistance with PoS; there can’t be decentralization with the old client-server hosting of content. What should the proper “next Web” look like? * be based on P2P (where is possible) or relay-based systems (where P2P is impossible); with relays being self-hosted; * end-to-end encrypted communications * over Mix networks (Tor, Nym, I2P etc); * authentication based on public key cryptography (and not passwords) and decentralized identities (SSH, GPG and future systems); * based on a zero-knowledge state; i.e. not leaking privacy data to the web servers or nodes; * using deterministic functional computing; * using PoW and bitcoin single-use-seals - but not for storing a state like in Web2 (!); only for cryptographic commitments (OTS etc); * using client-side-valdiated smart contracts like RGB; * integrated with Lightning payments and [#BiFi](https://snort.social/t/BiFi) (bitcoin finance); * using decentralized data protocols like [#Storm](https://snort.social/t/Storm), [#Slashtags](https://snort.social/t/Slashtags), [#Nostr-based](https://snort.social/t/Nostr-based) and like solutions. I call this future **Web4**, and we are working on it at [LNP/BP Standards Association](https://www.lnp-bp.org/), [Pandora Prime](broken://spaces/Blh0PdjVf3XiYzSfpSyZ), together with partner projects, doing things like mixnets, end-to-end encryption, [#reNostr](https://snort.social/t/reNostr), [#Storm](https://snort.social/t/Storm), [#RGB](https://snort.social/t/RGB) smart contracts and other exciting projects. Everyone is welcome to check one of the releases we did this year: [cyphernet](https://github.com/Cyphernet-DAO/rust-cyphernet/), a Rust library providing support for mixnets and pure rust implementation of Noise E2E encryption.