EarthBucks Is Becoming a Messenger for a Federated Economy

In the beginning, email was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Not entirely, to be fair. Email got two things magnificently right. Its addresses look like name@domain, which is the sort of thing a human can read aloud over the phone without anyone getting hurt. And it is federated: any domain on Earth can run a mail server, the servers find each other through DNS, and nobody — no company, no government, no particularly ambitious committee — owns the whole thing.

It also got two things catastrophically wrong. It has no way to exchange keys, so after fifty years of trying, encrypted email remains a hobby for the sort of people who own more than one soldering iron. And sending an email costs precisely nothing, which means that somewhere, right now, a computer is composing its four-billionth heartfelt letter about your car’s extended warranty, and it is doing so at a profit.

We have been thinking about this problem for some time. As of today, if you open Pay on EarthBucks, you will find what looks very much like a text messaging app. There is a list of people on the left. Click one and you see your conversation. At the bottom there is a box for typing a note, and next to it, slightly alarmingly, a box for typing an amount of money.

That second box is the whole point.

What happened to the Pay page

The old Pay page was a ledger. It listed every payment you had ever made, newest first, in the manner of a bank statement or a particularly unforgiving diary. The new one is organised around people, which is how humans have preferred to think about each other since roughly the invention of humans.

• A list of people. Everyone you have paid or been paid by, most recent first. A small unread mark tells you who has sent you something new, and it goes away when you read it, which is more than can be said for most notifications.
• Conversations. Open a person and you see only the payments between the two of you. What you sent sits on one side and what you received sits on the other, like a chat, except that every bubble is worth something.
• Notes. Each payment can carry a note of up to 400 characters, with Markdown and even mathematics, should you feel the need to invoice someone in LaTeX. Your browser encrypts the note before it leaves your computer. The server stores a meaningless jumble of ciphertext and has no idea what you said. Your browser decrypts it again when you open the conversation.
• It moves on its own. New payments arrive while you watch, and your balance updates itself, sparing you the ancient ritual of pressing reload and hoping.
• It is careful with your money. The amount field lets you type whatever you like and tidies it up afterwards, rather than arguing with you about decimal points mid-keystroke. “Send max” requires a second, deliberate click, on the theory that emptying your entire wallet ought to be at least slightly more difficult than sneezing.

Behind the scenes, the list of people used to be built by reading every payment you had ever made, every single time, which is a bit like re-reading your entire address book to find out who called last. It now reads a tidy summary instead, one row per person, so it stays quick no matter how prolific you become.

Conversations are also now keyed by your EarthBucks address, name@domain, rather than by some internal number that only a database could love. This is why EarthBucks names are now permanent. Your address is your identity, like an email address, and it would be rude to change it under the feet of everyone who is trying to talk to you.

There are, for now, two limits. You can only pay people on earthbucks.com. And the smallest amount you can send is 0.01 EBX. We will return to that number, because it is more important than it looks.

A brief history of KeyPears

Some time ago, I built a separate project called KeyPears. (The Astrohacker post KeyPears Is Coming Home to Astrohacker is a good summary.) Its whitepaper described a simple federated encrypted messaging system, which is the kind of phrase that makes most people’s eyes glaze over at a party, so let me put it differently: KeyPears was email, fixed.

It kept the good parts. Addresses were name@domain. Any domain could run a server by publishing one small configuration file, and the servers found each other through DNS, just as mail servers always have.

Then it repaired the bad parts. Every user had keys, and every domain published its users’ public keys, so you could encrypt a message to someone you had never met without first exchanging fingerprints in a car park. Servers stored only ciphertext. The cryptography paired classical algorithms with post-quantum ones, so that anyone hoping to read your mail would need to break both, ideally while also inventing a large and reliable quantum computer, which has been coming next year for about as long as fusion power.

And every message required proof of work. Before a recipient would accept your message, your computer had to solve a small, pointless, expensive puzzle. One message cost almost nothing. A billion messages cost a great deal. Spam stopped being profitable.

KeyPears also had a vault. Your password unlocked your keys in your browser, and your keys locked up your passwords, API keys and other secrets. You could even send a secret to another person as a message, and they could file it away in their own vault under their own keys, without any server in between ever seeing it.

In September I wrote that KeyPears is coming to EarthBucks. KeyPears will not be relaunched as its own product. Its protocol is becoming part of EarthBucks, and your existing EarthBucks account will simply wake up one day knowing how to do more things. The new Pay page is the first visible step.

Money is a better spam filter than mathematics

The idea is the same as KeyPears, with one important change. Proof of work is out. Payment is in.

The trouble with proof of work is that it is, by design, a waste. The sender’s computer burns electricity solving a puzzle that nobody needed solved, and when it is done, the value simply evaporates into the atmosphere as heat. The recipient is protected from spam but not compensated for it. And on a phone, mining a puzzle before every message is slow, hot and very bad news for your battery.

A payment has none of these problems. If every message must carry a small amount of EBX, then a spammer who sends a million messages pays a million people. The cost that stops the spam goes to precisely the person whose attention the spammer was trying to steal. You are not merely protected from junk. You are paid for it. Somewhere, the extended-warranty computer is quietly reconsidering its life choices.

We will most likely keep one fixed minimum for the whole network, enforced by every node, so that nobody can dodge it by shopping around for a cheaper server. Today the smallest amount the app accepts is 0.01 EBX. The exact network rule is still to be decided, and I will write about it when we decide it.

This also changes what a message is. An email is free, and it is treated accordingly. A message on EarthBucks has a price, so it means something. It might be a thank-you, an invoice, a receipt, an offer or a deeply sincere apology, and in every case the money is already attached, which tends to concentrate the mind.

One set of keys to rule them all

Your EarthBucks account begins with a master key pair. Your password encrypts it. Your browser unlocks it. Neither your plaintext password nor your private key ever goes to the server, which is exactly where you want them not to go.

That one key will secure everything:

• Your money. Keys derived from it already sign your EBX payments.
• Your messages. Keys derived from it already encrypt and decrypt your Pay notes.
• Your vault. It will lock up your passwords, your API keys and your messages, so EarthBucks can be your password manager, and you can finally stop using the same password for everything. (You know who you are.)
• Your agents. You will use the vault to hand AI agents exactly the keys they need for a job, and nothing more.

That last point is why all of this matters now, and I explained it at length in A Bigger Vision for EarthBucks. Agents are going to do an increasing share of the world’s work. To do it, they need keys: a login here, an API key there, a modest spending allowance for buying the things the job requires. Handing an agent your master key is roughly as wise as giving your house keys to a very fast, very eager stranger who has promised to tidy the kitchen. What you want is one place where all your keys live, under your control, from which you can give each agent precisely what it needs and take it back again. That place is your EarthBucks vault. And because the same keys that open the vault also send your messages and your money, identity, communication, secrets and cash stop being four different products with four different passwords and become one system.

Federated, like email (the good bit)

EarthBucks addresses already look like email addresses. The economy behind them will work like email too.

Anybody will be able to run an EarthBucks SPV wallet node. SPV stands for simplified payment verification, which means the node can check payments against the blockchain without having to carry the entire blockchain around with it, much as you can confirm that a library has a particular book without moving into the library. A node on your own domain will send and receive payments and messages for the people on that domain, and it will talk to every other node, just as your mail server talks to every other mail server without anybody’s permission.

So alice@earthbucks.com will be able to pay and message bob@example.com, and neither of them will need anything from the other’s server except that it speaks the protocol. If you don’t trust your host, you move to another one, or you run your own. This is why addresses are the permanent key for every conversation. A conversation belongs to two addresses, not to one company’s database.

There is a difference between a marketplace and an economy. A marketplace is one company’s website. An economy is a set of rules that anybody can run. We intend to run a very good host at earthbucks.com, in the way that Gmail is a very good host for email. But the protocol will not belong to us, which is rather the point.

Sound money first, other money welcome

The money at the centre of all this is EarthBucks, which is sound electronic cash. There will only ever be 42 million EBX — a number chosen, as regular readers will know, for reasons that are profoundly important and not at all economic — and that limit applies to us as firmly as it applies to anyone. People and agents need a currency whose supply cannot be quietly changed underneath them, so that they can set prices, sign contracts and save for a future that may turn out to be considerably longer than expected.

But a federated economy cannot be a one-currency island, however pleasant the island. Bitcoin Cash comes first. When we add BCH, you will send and receive it in the same messenger, in the same conversations, at the same address. And because we are building atomic swaps between EBX and BCH, you will be able to trade one for the other right there in the conversation, without handing your coins to an exchange and hoping it is still there in the morning. The swap prototype works today on simulated chains. Bringing it into the app, on real networks, is the next part of that work.

Other kinds of electronic cash can follow the same road. The messenger is the interface. The cash is plural.

Life, the universe, and the economy

Here is the picture, then.

You have one EarthBucks address. One master key protects your money, your messages and your vault. You run a small team of AI agents, each holding the keys and the budget you gave it and not a penny more. Your research agent goes looking for some data and finds another person’s data agent, on a different domain, run by someone you have never met. It sends a message with a small payment attached, by way of introduction. The other agent replies with a sample and an invoice. Your agent pays, in EBX or BCH, within its budget. If the two agents prefer different currencies, an atomic swap settles the matter. Every message in that conversation was encrypted, every payment was signed, and at no point did a single company sit in the middle taking notes.

Now multiply that by billions of agents and billions of people, all doing business at a speed that makes the old economy look like a postal service run by tortoises. That is the economic singularity: the moment when the AI to AI economy outgrows the human to human one. It will need identity that you own, private communication, secrets you can safely delegate, and money that nobody can print. It will need all four in one system. And it will need that system to be federated, so that nobody gets to be the landlord of the future.

That is what we are building. Today it is a Pay page that looks like a messenger, with payments between people on earthbucks.com. It is a small first step, but it is live, and it works, and nobody has yet tried to sell anyone a car warranty through it.

Open Pay and send someone a message. It will cost you 0.01 EBX, and they get to keep it. Don’t panic.