My fellow retards,
Light isn’t just a wave, it’s also a particle called a photon. If you fire a photon in the direction of two slits, which does it travel through? Even though there is a single photon, it creates interference between the two slits and passes through each simultaneously.
This is a brain fuck, but it’s also our understanding of the physical world (at present) and it gives credibility to quantum mechanics.
If a phonon is sent, what path does it travel? If there are 250,000 compatible hardware devices in the world, does it travel just between two, or all of them? Does it traverse each possible path in existence? How can one say for certain where a phonon has been, if it has existed in every enclave or in none. How can one say a phonon is even in this realm? There is full plausible deniability that it does not exist until it eventually comes back to chain. On top of that, any address sharing certain characteristics with a phonon’s on-chain address is plausibly a phonon—at least until proven otherwise.
At the bottom of the technical rabbit hole is a simple concept: Values locked on-chain can be transacted off-chain by handing off the private key associated with that value.
Forget the light wave mind-fuck, wrap your head around that little razor. When you get it, you feel what the first guy to imagine cash must have felt, or the first guy to figure out how to make an airfoil and sail into the wind…
Spain took about three centuries to move a billion-odd kilograms of silver from Latin America to the old country. Granted they did it with square-rigged wooden ships that could only sail with the wind, but the point is illustrated just the same: the ability to transfer great sums of wealth is a fundamental feature of empire.
At some point someone discovered that semi-unique tokens could be used to redeem an amount of metal secured in a mutually trusted vault. The entire value of Spain’s 300-year blood silver convoy crosses the Atlantic in a single ship once it’s converted to silver certificates and bearer bonds.
That same fortune is even easier to shift in bitcoin, as a token of spent hash-power rather than a (no-longer) redeemable coupon for shiny metal. Still, the modern sensibility has outpaced currency tech and 10 minutes for block confirmations or $25 for simple transaction fees are both near-completely unpalatable for a modern commercial entity.
Enter Phonon.
The Phonon protocol wraps these cumbersome digital assets and in an unbreakable, invisible, instantly transact-able package. Nothing like it exists. It scales with the number of participants. In its alpha state it has already endowed bitcoin and ethereum with perfectly private transactions at a layer 0 topography. It moves at 1 transaction per second per pair of cards in existence. The limiting factor for scaling is no longer “can we verify all these transactions fast enough without completely centralizing the thing”, it’s “is there enough internet bandwith on Earth for everyone to make a phonon transaction at the same time?”. Literally. If you’ve got the bandwith, Phonon protocol has the throughput. Sounds crazy—still completely true.
How valuable is the dao that controls this protocol?
Phon/ongod thinks $1b by Q2 2022, $12b by EOY.