The Thesis
The Internet
We have one democracy in the world that is, by a large gap, the very worst. It is in constant decay and turmoil. It is the epicenter of almost any global drama. It amplifies and complicates many world affairs. It has near-total free speech, constant participation, and yet almost no capacity to govern itself.
This democracy has failing institutions — arguably no institutions at all. And still we keep returning to it, interacting with it, arguing over it, although we know this toxicity is not good for our health.
It is the internet.
We treat the internet as a finished project, but it is too young to earn this title. Democracies take at least a century to stabilize, correct, and build institutions. We should not expect this 43-year-old democracy to have figured itself out. We should not treat it as if its shape and functionality are more or less solved.
You can argue it is not a formal democracy, but you cannot deny it governs and dominates most aspects of your private and public lives. Yes it has free speech — but free speech should lead eventually to shared understanding and action. The internet currently lacks methods to act on agreement. Yes you can freely interact and transact with other internet members, but you are still relying on external institutions to enforce these transactions.
If the internet is the greatest egalitarian project humanity ever came up with, it is also the one needing the strongest institutions to thrive. Yet it has none.
In democratic ages, the bonds of human affection are extended, but relaxed.
— Alexis de Tocqueville
The digital democracy obtains the broadest extent of human bonds, but also the shallowest. We have built barely any institutions to remedy that. And we have simply not been mindful enough to notice the problem.
Moloch and Azazel
You’ve probably heard of Moloch — the deity revered by the Canaanites 3,000 years ago, and more recently by Scott Alexander in his famous essay. Moloch is the demon of defection, responsible for fear and rivalry, incentivizing people to undercut one another even when everyone ends up worse off. In game theory, Moloch usually appears as the Prisoner’s Dilemma: two players would be better off cooperating, yet each has an incentive to defect. So both defect, and everyone ends up worse off.
But Scott overshot it. Not every social failure is Moloch.
The Stag Hunt
Consider another game. Two hunters can either collaborate on hunting a stag and eat for a week, or each hunt individually a hare and eat for a few hours. If they coordinate, both are clearly better off. Yet if one hunter fears the other will not show up, she safely hunts the hare. And so we both end up eating rabbits.
This is the Stag Hunt: a game where cooperation is stable and self-reinforcing once reached, yet difficult to reach — because without reliable communication and binding commitments, each hunter fears the other may not show up, and the one who trusted is left hungry and exhausted.
If Moloch is the demon of defection, this is a different demon. Azazel — the deity of the wilderness, before civilization, where humans wander alone and no associations form.
Why the Distinction Matters
These two demons require very different remedies:
If the problem is Moloch (defection), the natural response is to build central institutions that restrain selfish behavior — regulation, central planning, or activist social-justice movements to correct people’s behaviour.
If the problem is Azazel (isolation), the remedy changes completely. People do not need to be forced to cooperate. They already want to. What they lack are mechanisms to communicate commitment and bind themselves to shared actions.
This difference shapes our political imagination. Workers of the world, unite. Occupy Wall Street. Eat the rich. Every few decades a new slogan galvanizes our hearts. The desire is real — you identify that the state of affairs can be improved if people worked together. But the game is not rigged, and human agency is not corrupt.
You can make a dramatic impact by working with that — by building institutions that better the equilibrium selection of the free markets game. Do not waste your hearts on slogans that try to replace the self-interested individual with some collective virtue. This always leads down the road to serfdom.
In other words: solve the Stag Hunt.
The Real Problem
The real problem is assurance — “I move only if others move.”
Hong Kong protests. Libertarian Party support. Liquidity migration. The pattern is always the same. What mechanism would fix this?
A. Assurance — atomic action. B. Opacity — neutrality.
Why Cheap Talk Is Not Enough
Improving the internet through better communication channels does not suffice, since cheap talk is non-binding. In many scenarios, moving alone is catastrophic:
- Hunting a stag alone risks hunger and injury
- Rioting alone against a despot risks death
- Bootstrapping a liquidity pool alone risks getting eaten alive by arbitrageurs
The missing layer is not communication but binding intents — otherwise known as assurance contracts (Bagnoli and Lipman, 1989). An assurance contract allows one to express and enforce conditional commitments of the form: “I will do X if N others do X.”
In the Staghunt framework, these conditional commitments are called intendos.
Prior Attempts
None of this is fundamentally new:
- PledgeBank (2005) ran conditional commitments, but binding was enforced by social pressure in small groups
- The Point (2007) built assurance contracts, then pivoted to Groupon — more demand aggregation than assurance
- Kickstarter owned assurance contracts for creative projects, but remained niche and vertical
Each attempt either collapsed into a single vertical or was heavily biased toward petitions and activism. Instead, we take a market approach to coordination.
Three Implications of a Market Framing
1. Endogenous incentives. Participants commit not merely because they believe in the cause, but because the mechanism makes commitment individually rational.
2. Unopinionated rails. The mechanism engineers for no specific agenda. Market rails remain open to whatever coordination problems users initiate. In fact, CMs should be optimized for unopinionatedness — designed for hard resilience to pressure, extortion, manipulation. The mechanism should support heterogeneous preferences and risk thresholds, rather than hard-code a single safety level.
3. Conditional on external state. Conditions should reference on-chain data, real-world events, and other verifiable facts. Intendos should also condition on other intendos, chaining coordination markets into multi-stage sequences.
But before any of that, CMs must allow shielding one’s intendo. Even before the move-alone risk, being the first to signal willingness is itself a primary source of risk: revealing political preferences in a hostile environment, disclosing financial intention in the face of arb bots, exposing a social cause when it is still small and can be killed.
Building the Rails
We derived that the internet democracy desperately needs rails for assurance and coordination. The requirements:
- Autonomous, with no dictator entity
- Shared language for expressing conditional commitments
- Enforceable rules validated by consensus
- Programmable actions that execute atomically
- Shielding of opaque intents against surveillance and front-running
Everything that was built in crypto over the last two decades — from stateless money, to programmable money, to encryption techniques — are the building blocks the digital democracy needs.
Crypto hasn’t necessarily recognized this yet. The industry is still mourning old narratives and lost market caps. But the real mission is still ahead of us. Crypto should be building coordination markets — what we call Project Staghunt.
The Builders
In 1980, the political scientist Langdon Winner posed a question: Do artifacts have politics?
He described a system of bridges on New York’s Long Island — built too low for public buses to reach the beach. They were planned by Robert Moses, a high-status New York urban planner who designed a road that only car owners could use. Whether this was conscious discrimination or an oversight matters little. Artifacts are built in the image of their creators.
The cypherpunk pioneers are the Robert Moses of the internet. They built the essential infrastructure for the digital egalitarian project — TCP/IP, encryption, stateless money, programmable contracts, self-custody.
But when it comes to civic tech — community coordination and collective action — the contributions are mostly fringe and disconnected. Webs of trust, liquid democracy, DAOs — these artifacts were built with the right intention but by the wrong type of builders: brilliant introverts, paranoid, and more comfortable minimizing trust than organizing cooperation.
Hayek wrote: “The consistent individualist ought to be an enthusiastic supporter of voluntary associations.” Many cypherpunks might agree with this in principle, but rarely in temperament.
The internet rails — and definitely crypto — could not have been built by any other mindset or culture. Adversarial, trustless personalities are the ultimate builders of the bare backbone of the internet. But now the roads need to lead somewhere, and a different class of builders should take the reins.