Gno.land Manifesto

@author: Jae Kwon

The prefix "gno" in Koine Greek is derived from the verb "ginōskō", which means "to know" or "to recognize." It is often associated with terms related to knowledge, such as "gnosis", which signifies knowledge or insight, particularly in a spiritual context.

To jump to the technical portions see Gno Language and Gno.land Blockchain.

Introduction

Gno.land Raison d'Etre

Gno.land was inspired by the desire to address intentional mistranslations of the bible. At the moment of writing chances are that the bible you have or find contains mistranslations from the original Hebrew or Koine Greek meant to keep you enslaved to authority. Coding for Gno.land began during the Covid19 lockdowns when I was most frustrated at the censorship of information regarding the true laboratory origins of Covid19 (created in the Wuhan lab as attested by multiple whistleblowers and researchers and made possible by Fauci) and the conspiracy to forcibly medicate the population with a dangerous experimental gene therapy that did more harm to children and young adults than it did good nor prevented transmission (and this was known at the time of the mandates).

The censorship of alternative narratives during this time was a wake-up call that we need to invert our information architecture to be open, transparent, and forkable instead of closed and centralized. This follows from a fundamental mismatch in incentives: the business "moat" of centralized online services is generally all the data that they "own" contributed voluntarily by the users at first, and reluctantly later as network effects make exit near impossible; and this in turn in combination with profit incentives makes the centralized abuse of the "moat" the norm rather than exception.

The only way to overcome the "satanification" of our devices and the internet, the bedrock of the information age, is to invert control by being uncompromising in the Seven Pillars of Good Systems:

FOSS (free & open source) software & hardware
security (simplicity, audits, formal verification, absolute Kelvin versioning)
accountability (e.g. cryptographic signatures, economic bonds, commits and proofs)
modularity (do one thing well; interoperable components for faster innovation)
transparency (if possible and reasonable)
decentralization (of validation and data silos)
exitability (e.g. forkability; permissionless competition)

It won't be an easy task to re-invent the myriad of products and services that we have become accustomed to, but it is feasible and necessary, and therefore also inevitable.

Gno.land, the Gno language, and the Gno VM.

The Gno virtual machine and language was created to address one of the key problems of blockchain smart-contract systems: the lack of a good familiar modern-day general purpose programming language for Ethereum Solidity-like massive multi-user dapp development where integration with external dapp logic as dependencies is native to the language itself. You can develop dapps in Go or Rust for WASM modules today but this approach is limited--each module/contract runs in its own memory silo with no globally shared heap space, and support for the sharing of pointers (to objects or closures) across modules is limited. Furthermore unlike Solidity where contract data is automatically persisted to disk at the end of a transaction, developing in Go or Rust contracts for WASM inherits all the burdens of data serialization and persistence (and so of ORMs or alternatives) making smart contract development in Go or Rust just as complex as server-side Web2 programming if not more so.

Gno.land solves the problem by virtue of a new VM design that interprets Gno. The Gno language is Go but extended minimally to make Go aware of different user agent contexts in execution and user storage realm contexts in persistence for security; and the Gno VM keeps track of creations, updates, and deletions of runtime objects at user transaction boundaries and throughout each transaction for automatic persistence that also computes Merkle hashes according to the shape of the object graph. In other words, the Gno VM simulates a machine that unifies disk and memory (i.e. simulates memristors which will become more dominant in the future with progress in AI).

The major benefit of dapp development in Gno therefore is the ease of programming where multiple layers of complexity are all but eliminated--the interoperability of contract applications (function calls to external import realm functions), and the serialization and persistence of data (or any mapping between memory objects and persistent data). As compared to Ethereum Solidity, Gno programming is not only familiar to Go developers also with ports of many of the great tooling that developers love in Go; Gno also lets you write complex applications in significantly less time and lines of code.

As when Ethereum was first released implemented in Python, at first Gno.land may not be able to compete in transaction throughput as compared to Solana or other smart contract blockchains optimized for speed. However as the ecosystem of Gno applications and libraries grow, so too will the set of alternative optimized implementation of the GnoVM, and with the horizontal scaling that will be offered in partnership with the AtomOne chain the Gno.land ecosystem will over time become a major competitor among existing and new smart contract systems. Furthermore the GnoVM and Gno's unique features open the door to applications outside of the blockchain context even for the home that follow the Seven Pillars of Good Systems.

Problem: Misinformation and Loss of Trust

The term "fake news" came into mainstream consciousness during the 2016 US presidential election. The Cambridge Analytica scandal made headlines regarding the unauthorized collection of personal data from millions of Facebook profiles:

"The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in one of the tech giant’s biggest ever data breaches, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.

A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica – a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon – used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements." - Carole Cadwalladr & Emma Graham-Harrison, The Guardian; March 17th, 2018

It was the scandal which finally exposed the dark side of the big data economy underpinning the internet. The inside story of how one company, Cambridge Analytica, misused intimate personal Facebook data to micro-target and manipulate swing voters in the US election, is compellingly told in “The Great Hack” - Amnesty International

"One of the most urgent and uncomfortable questions raised in The Great Hack is: to what extent are we susceptible to such behavioural manipulation?" - Joe Westby

Trust in our institutions is at an all-time low. CIA director William Casey was accused of saying that "we’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." by Barbara Honegger, assistant to the chief domestic policy advisor to President Reagan. The quote is contested but we know now about illegal mass mind control projects like MKUltra (by the CIA), and also that the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2013 lifted the ban on domestic dissemination of propaganda in the US, reversing the original Smith-Mundt Act of 1948. Whether the quote is true or not, the substance is clearly true today.

Health Sovereignty

The WHO Pandemic Agreement was adopted by the World Health Assembly in May 2025 despite the non-participation of the United States and the abstention of 11 other countries citing sovereignty concerns. Although the agreement claims that nothing in it grants the WHO authority to "direct, order, alter or otherwise prescribe" national law or to "mandate or impose" specific actions such as vaccination mandates or lockdowns, the very existence of binding international frameworks for pandemic response centralizes authority in an institution that has already demonstrated willingness to suppress dissenting scientific views during Covid19. Furthermore the agreement's pathogen access and benefit-sharing provisions create new obligations around technology transfer and intellectual property that could be weaponized against nations that do not comply.

Given the track record of institutional capture by pharmaceutical interests and the censorship of legitimate scientific debate during the Covid19 pandemic, any centralized health governance framework--no matter how carefully worded--poses an existential risk to medical freedom and informed consent. Decentralized systems for publishing, verifying, and discussing scientific research are therefore not merely useful but necessary to preserve health sovereignty. Gno contracts can host transparent peer-review systems, accountable clinical trial registries, and censorship-resistant repositories of medical literature that no single authority can suppress or alter.

Problem: AI Armageddon

By the latest projections ("There is no AI Bubble") 2027 AI will be able to accomplish by human standards week long tasks on the order of a day. By 2029 year long tasks will be possible in the same amount of time.

This means that by 2027 a single AI instance may be able to find and execute exploits of vulnerable systems much faster than humans can react. By the time a service administrator detects an issue and finds a way to patch the hack attempt, the AI may have already responded with another backdoor. And by 2029 any single vibe user will be able to plan and execute the exploit of multiple systems, or find a new zero day vulnerability in just a few hours. It's not possible to patch all the systems by 2029 even if we restrict ourselves to known vulnerabilities, let alone dealing with new zero day exploits. Realistically by 2028 it is inevitable that we see a major crisis from an AI swarm that attacks and continuously attacks our internet infrastructure to the point where we cannot even understand the truth of what is happening at a global scale, let alone recover from it.

It's not just that AI is getting more intelligent; large corporations are building AI and robotics systems seemingly in order to bring about armageddon. An anonymous whistleblower leaked in 2023 that Meta is building an AI that can take over a deceased person's social media account and continue posting convincing posts including age progression. On 5 February 2025, Alphabet, which owns Google, reneged on its pledge to not use AI for weapons. Eric Schmidt former CEO of Google now runs an AI drone company and is a licensed arms dealer. Boston Dynamics develops the Atlas humanoid robot that can be even more agile than humans, and the US military works with many robotics companies such as with Foundation Future Industries Inc. which develops the Phantom MK1 designed for military applications including carrying firearms.

Here are some of the things to look forward to in the coming AI armageddon.

internet discourse taken over by AI
fake news indistinguishable from real news
certificate authority system failure
mass internet & power outages
decentralized radio communications jamming
complete collapse of trust
mass hysteria
military takeover for continuity of government
hacked robots coordinated by malicious AGI
inadvertent nuclear war

We have largely speaking two paths to follow. The best path is to enact regulations to curtail the AI arms race. Ex-Google design ethicist and AI expert Tristan Harris makes a convincing case for AI regulation:

"If we stop or slow down, then China will build it." ... The "it" that they would keep building is the same uncontrollable AI that we would build. So I don't see a way out of this without there being some agreement or negotiation between powers and countries. ... We've done this before [with fluorocarbons and non-proliferation of arms].

However as also noted by Tristan it would be the most difficult coordination problem that humanity has ever solved on a global scale just given the economic incentives at play as AI is becoming a driving force in innovations of science, technology, and military applications. If we are fortunate we will have a mild AI armageddon scenario that compels the global population to enact an international treaty or moratorium on AI and robotics development.

Yet even with international agreements to curtail new development or limit deployment of AI, the cat is already out of the bag; in reality we need to prepare for the worst, with or without future regulations.

Manufacturers and creators may attempt to bake in software-based controls for restricting AI decision making within constraints, but such backdoor controls can just as easily be exploited: in particular China has repeatedly exploited such backdoors. AGI now or in the future can certainly exploit such backdoors or controls more easily than humans can. In short the set of potential interested and capable parties for conducting a mass hack of military contractors creating killer drones and android humanoid robots and chips is huge, while defensive capabilities (e.g. by formally verified hardware and software) are severely restricted in adoption in this capitalistic profit-centric environment.

‘No regrets,’ says Edward Snowden, after 10 years in exile But whistleblower says 2013 surveillance ‘child’s play’ compared to technology today.

Ewen MacAskill, The Guardian; June 8th, 2023

From a popular meme regarding surveillance technology:

The FBI distributes viruses and keyloggers that mainstream anti-virus software are legally not allowed to detect. [Magic Lantern, CIPAV, Carnivore (DCS1000), Network Investigative Technique]

The NSA has forced Intel, AMD, and chip makers to backdoor their CPUs and allow them to access your computer even if it is "turned off" (as long as it has access to electricity) [Intel ME, AMD PSP]

The NSA has also forced hardware manufacturers to backdoor their 'Random Number Generators' to allow them to break RSA encryption [Dual Elliptic Curve]

American-made electronics transmit radio frequencies which allow the FBI and NSA to access your computer even if it's not connected to the internet [Cottonmouth-I, SURLYSPAWN, ANT/TAO Catalog]

The NSA intercepts computers/laptops/phones purchased online and installs malware chips (see: ANT/TAO Catalog) on them before delivering them to you [TAO team]

If you are a "Person of Interest" the NSA is intercepting your mail, opening them up, and installing bugs on any electronics you order over the internet (e.g. TVs, microwaves, phones, video games, smart refrigerators) [ANT/TAO Catalog]

The NSA has already broken Tor networks and can identify you and attack you if you use Tor; ISP companies like Verizon, AT&T, Comcast assist with this [FOXACID, QUANTUMINSERT, EGOTISTICALGIRAFFE]

Major American tech companies like Microsoft willingly provide the NSA advanced warnings of zero-day security vulnerabilities before revealing them to the public [TAO Team, PRISM, NSA hoarding program]

The CIA can infect your car's control systems, which would allow them to remotely take it over and drive it [Vault 7]

The CIA/MI5 can hack into all smart devices (like TVs and Alexa) connected to the internet and spy on you [Weeping Angel]

Recent Amazon datacenter outages were caused by administrative error where internal AI was allowed to make changes to production systems without human oversight. In February 2026 Kim Dotcom claimed that Palantir was hacked by an AI agent that gained super-user access, alleging mass surveillance of world leaders including backdoored devices, cars, and jets. AI armageddon global scenarios are much more terrifying when considering all the backdoors that could be exploited by rogue AGI. Some of these backdoors may even be hijacked to cause physiological and psychological effects upon nearby people. All of these backdoors create more surface area for vulnerability making AI armageddon more certain and more deadly.

Problem: Central Bank Digital Currencies

Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) represent perhaps the most immediate threat to individual financial freedom. As of 2025, 137 countries and currency unions are exploring CBDCs. China's digital yuan pilot has processed over 7 trillion e-CNY (~$986 billion) in transactions. Russia plans Digital Ruble transactions by September 2026. Brazil's Drex CBDC launches in 2026. The European Central Bank's digital euro is expected between 2026 and 2029. The UAE's Digital Dirham targets a full launch by late 2026.

Unlike physical cash or even existing bank deposits, CBDCs are programmable money: governments can program expiration dates, restrict what you can purchase, freeze accounts instantly without judicial process, implement negative interest rates that force spending, and surveil every transaction in real time. This is not speculation--these are documented design features. China's e-CNY already implements programmable restrictions. The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has explicitly stated that a "key difference with CBDCs is that the central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability, and also, we will have the technology to enforce that."

CBDCs are the technological infrastructure for the "social credit" model of governance: comply, and your money works; dissent, and your money stops. This is the "mark of the beast" not as metaphor but as monetary engineering. During the Canadian trucker protests of 2022 the government froze bank accounts of protesters and donors--with CBDCs such actions require no cooperation from banks at all.

The antidote is sound money that no central authority controls: gold, silver, Bitcoin, and well-governed blockchain-based financial systems. Gno.land can host DeFi applications, stablecoins backed by real assets, and governance systems for community-managed currencies that operate outside the CBDC paradigm. The ease of developing complex financial applications in Gno as compared to Solidity makes it uniquely suited for the rapid development of these alternatives before the window closes.

Beyond financial sovereignty, our civilization is at risk of a global catastrophe on par or much worse than the historic burning of the Library of Alexandria (the largest and most significant library of the ancient world). Like the burning of the Library of Alexandria, the loss of our digital knowledge is likely to be accidental, simply because we did not prepare enough for it. My greatest desire is for Gno.land to help decentralize the internet archives for preservation and processing for the benefit of future generations.

Use Case: Gno.land for Data Archival and Processing

Aaron Swartz wrote in his 2008 Guerilla Open Access Manifesto:

"The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. ... Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable. ... Those with access to these resources—students, librarians, scientists--you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not--indeed, morally, you cannot—keep this privilege for yourselves."

There exist a number of archival projects that share books and journals such as Anna's Archive, Library Genesis, Sci-Hub, UbuWeb and Z-Library. Take for example Library Genesis:

"Library Genesis (shortened to LibGen) is a shadow library project for file-sharing access to scholarly journal articles, academic and general-interest books, images, comics, audiobooks, and magazines. The site enables free access to content that is otherwise paywalled or not digitized elsewhere." - Wikipedia

Some of these projects have or are working toward IPFS integration on top of BitTorrent; but for the value that global archiving provides not just today but also for all possible potential future timelines the number of seeders for many of the archival files still hover in the single digits.

More recently the US Department of Justice released millions of files of the "Epstein Files" many of which have also been made available for sharing (such as by lists of torrents.

Some projects such as thewebb.io are developing web tools for analyzing the Epstein Files and other high profile topics with the assistance of AI. But you can only know if the AI is being truthful:

if you can replicate the response deterministically on another computation instance (unless you have direct access to the AI hardware, or you are given a complete diagnostic record of internal computation, but practically you need repeatable determinism to rule out one-off injections of misinformation) and
if you completely understand the design of the AI and its training data set; because otherwise you can't know whether the AI even can provide a reasonable answer to the question, or whether it was trained with biased data to give the wrong answers.

By making everything deterministic, by committing the Merkle root of each data collection (whether Library Genesis or the Epstein files) and also committing the Merkle roots of all the relevant AI code and design (for deterministic build, but also audits for each release version), the training corpora, and all other information needed to inspect the substance of the AI image and also to deterministically build it and use it; only then can we be given some assurances about the answer. If we don't know likewise how the answer was generated, then that creates the opportunity for absolute abuse; and as we have seen with the censorship of all major Web2.0 platforms this opportunity is taken, such as with Google when it censors anything contrary to the position of the WHO regarding infectious diseases.

For this purpose Gno contracts should incentivize more IPFS and torrent seed nodes for sharing public archive files while keeping the files off the main blockchain. While such projects surely already exist, applications and libraries are much easier to develop in a general purpose language like Go/Gno, and Gno's innovative multi-user awareness makes it the ideal language for building complex applications composed of interoperable modules.

While one set of modules on Gno.land can help manage the availability of data, another set of modules can process the data and build artifacts to be stored themselves as archival files. Open source tokenized indexers can create search indices on these archives, even those populated by web crawlers. By decomposing the search engine and inverting control away from centralized entities to public accountable micro-services registered on chain users have the power to participate, verify, and fund for data gathering, indexing, and processing as they wish. The end result is a more trustworthy search engine; and for many the ability to search without being tracked for advertisers.

No longer would we need to depend on a handful of centralized search engines, and the few internet archives (many thanks to archive.org and other archives, but they are constantly hit by cyberattacks and are always under existential risk of being shut down by the powers that be or even mobs of terrorists or religious extremists. We can reinvent the data archives and search engines to be more open, decentralized, accountable/deterministic, and to a large degree more permissionless and participatory; not to replace the centralized alternatives, but for the sake of having alternatives that are provably trustworthy.

Furthermore we should also develop malware exploit detection tools to scan these files of these archives (especially the PDF files, but for all types of files) for malware and exploit hacks; anti-virus for public documents without relying on any central party. Clearly all popular technology is compromised and we need to get back to basics, even avoid the usage of PDF files and complex ever-changing web browsers entirely; but in practice our ability to avoid exploits is almost nil in the face of overreaching state actors and private entities. Since no state seems to be up for the task at hand, we seem to need a well-organized and well-funded public intelligence agency partially governed by a chain that is tasked specifically with creating provably secure (or in the very least finished or near-complete software that doesn't mutate with the latest trends) foundational open-source software implementations that all align with "small. simple. secure." philosophy of projects like Tendermint or Alpine Linux.

We also have the ability to construct new small/simple/secure composable modules (in Gno and Go) for the new opportunities of today (such as processing these archives w/ fully accountable deterministic AI). Once we have attained some level of financial power as a community we can also start funding the completion of foundational software projects written in more modern memory-safe languages, formally verify their safety, and even use AI to help secure them to finality.

Going back to the previous example of using AI to analyze archives, answers to common queries should be recorded somewhere again with full accountability of the entire chain of data and logic needed to compute the query responses such that anybody can easily verify the result for themselves. Some of these responses could be stored directly on Gno.land but they could also be stored and indexed in another archive that specializes in the accountable memoization of common queries.

Gno Language

We could not have arrived at the final design of the Gno language without the help of the many developers who gave much time of their lives to contribute to this project and the design of the language; specifically the NewTendermint Gno team and Gno community, and especially Manfred, Morgan, Maxwell, Milos, Guilhem, Ray, and Omar.

Gno is the first general purpose multi-user programming language.

By "multi-user" we mean a language where (1) multiple users' code and data coexist in a shared persistent heap, (2) trust boundaries between users are enforced by the language itself--not by the operating system, a hypervisor, or ad-hoc middleware--and (3) inter-user interoperability uses the same syntax and type system as intra-user code. Prior systems have achieved subsets of these properties: MUMPS (1966) shares persistent global state across users but has no language-level trust boundaries; MOO (1990) and LPC (1989) provide multi-user object ownership in virtual worlds but are domain-specific MUD languages, not general purpose; Erlang (1986) excels at concurrency but all processes are equally trusted with no per-user security model; Solidity (2015) and Move (2019) handle multi-user smart contracts but lack transparent inter-module interoperability with a shared heap (as detailed below). Gno is the first language to combine all three properties in a general purpose language based on an existing mainstream language (Go).

Gno is a minimal extension of the Go language for multi-user programming. Gno allows a massive number of programmers to iteratively and interactively develop a single shared program such as Gno.land (making it ideal for interoperable smart contract programming). In other words, Go is a restricted subset of the Gno language in the single-user context.

All of our programming languages to date are designed for a single programmer user. All programming languages make the same assumption that there is only one user -- the programmer, or program executor user. Whether written in C, C++, Python, Java, Javascript, or Go, it is assumed that all of the dependencies of the program are trusted. If there is a vulnerability in any of the dependencies there is a vulnerability in the program; it is the job of the programmer or program/product manager to ensure that the overall program is free of exploits.

When interacting with programs owned by another user (or process) various techniques are used such as via IPC APIs often generated by tools like Protobuf/GRPC; but such tools add extra complexity, additional surface area for exploits, additional compute complexity, and do not benefit directly from the language's native rules and type-checker--especially for inter-process passing of in-memory object references. In Gno, interacting with another realm's function is just like interacting with any dependency (import and call).

Automatic persistence of memory objects makes databases, ORMs, and serialization generally unnecessary. GnoVM at the end of realm transaction boundaries will "finalize" by scanning all new, modified, and deleted objects and will automatically persist what needs to be saved along with meta information like the Merkle hash, ref count, associated realm and unique number of each object. By making inter-user interoperability native to the language and also by removing the distinction between volatile and persistent memory, Gno eliminates much of the accidental complexity that plagues traditional multi-service and smart-contract development.

The GnoVM is implemented purely in Go and is a Gno AST interpreter. It is implemented to serve as a reference implementation suitable for production and tinkering. The GnoVM opcodes are expected to change over time to balance simplicity, efficiency, and transpilation targets--perhaps even to hardware. Just as Ethereum was originally implemented in Python we expect future software to be optimized, whether implemented in other languages, or possibly transpiled from the existing GnoVM implementation.

For the latest Gno specs including the inter-realm spec refer to the Gno docs/resources directory.

Gno vs Existing Smart Contract Platforms

Smart contract platforms like Ethereum allow for many users to upload their application and call other user application logic functions, but Solidity is not a general purpose programming language and has severe limitations that make it suboptimal for solving the task at hand.

First, Solidity and other existing smart-contract languages/platforms do not support transparent inter-module (inter-user) interoperability with the same language rules as for intra-module dependencies. That is, an application developer for a smart-contract cannot simply import and call/use another user application's functions and types as if they were library dependencies of the same application. Generally interoperability between different modules are implemented with extra-language frameworks and libraries on top of an incomplete or primitive message-passing agent architecture; such interop function calls generally do not share the same call-stack nor memory space. Solidity's implicit msg.sender changes on external calls have caused billions of dollars in exploits (reentrancy, confused-deputy attacks). In Gno the programmer writes cross at each call site that changes the realm-context, making every trust boundary visible in the source code and checkable by the compiler--a small syntactic cost for a huge safety gain. Move (used by Sui and Aptos) improves on Solidity with a linear type system that prevents reentrancy, but at the cost of a bespoke language unfamiliar to most developers and without a shared persistent object graph; inter-module calls in Move still pass values by copy or move rather than by shared reference.

Second, Solidity and other existing smart-contract languages/platforms do not support the automatic persistence and Merkle-ization of in-memory (heap) objects and often require custom serialization logic. Solidity does not support such a heap at all as all memory for variables are predeclared in the function and as such is not object-oriented and does not have a garbage collector or similar memory-management primitives. WASM-based smart contract systems do not support automatic persistence of objects without persisting the entire memory state of the module. This requires a specialized virtual machine such as the Gno VM which keeps track of every object created, modified, and deleted. Solidity developers manage storage slots and mappings manually; Move developers serialize structs into global storage with explicit move_to and borrow_global calls. Gno developers write ordinary Go structs and they persist automatically with Merkle-ization--a major reduction in complexity for the common case.

The automatic persistence of in-memory objects of the GnoVM is like a memristor simulator. The advent of AI has created a new market for memristor-based memory systems where the distinction between RAM volatile memory and persistent disk storage is removed. Urbit is similar but is not based on any general purpose programming language. With memristor-based memory the GnoVM can be further simplified and the performance of applications can be vastly improved without any changes to the Gno language specification.

Third, Solidity and other existing smart-contract languages/platforms do not support a shared heap memory space for objects to be referenced by external-user objects in a uniform manner by language rules. Alice cannot simply declare a structure object that references the structure object persisted in Bob's application and trust the garbage collector to retain Bob's object for as long as Alice's object is retained.

Fourth, the split between immutable p-packages (gno.land/p/) and mutable r-realms (gno.land/r/) solves a real trust problem that no other smart contract platform addresses at the package-system level. Two mutable realms cannot trustlessly cooperate because either could upgrade its code, but an immutable p-package can enforce a contract between them. In Solidity, library contracts can be proxied and upgraded, undermining any guarantees they were supposed to provide. In Move, modules are also upgradeable by default. Gno bakes the immutability guarantee into the package path convention itself.

The above differentiating factors of the Gno language allows for the most succinct expression of a single-user application or multi-user application composed of independent modules without the extra complexity from extra-language interop type-checking syntax or frameworks nor of the extra complexity from any database, ORM, or serialization logic.

Shared garbage-collection in a shared (multi-user) graph of object references makes it possible for one's object representing (say) a propositional statement or idea to be easily referenced by an alternative statement or idea, or even be extended by reference with additional commentary, metadata, or even a subreddit-like tree of discussions. Without a shared garbage collector the task of ensuring that references still hold over time without becoming dangling pointers is left up to each inter-application interface at best, requiring custom logic just to handle garbage collection. WebAssembly (WASM) externref support in Go has limitations, particularly in how it handles external memory references. Currently, Rust and Go do not natively support externref types for function parameters or return values, making it challenging to pass complex data between Wasm modules and their host environments effectively.

Reference type (aka externref or anyref) is an opaque reference made available to a WASM module by the host environment. Such references cannot be forged in the WASM code and can be associated with arbitrary host data, thus making them a good alternative to ad-hoc handles (e.g., numeric ones). References cannot be stored in WASM linear memory; they are confined to the stack and tables with externref elements.

Rust does not support reference types natively; there is no way to produce an import / export that has externref as an argument or a return type. wasm-bindgen patches WASM if externrefs are enabled. This library strives to accomplish the same goal for generic low-level WASM ABIs (wasm-bindgen is specialized for browser hosts).

externref use cases Since externrefs are completely opaque from the module perspective, the only way to use them is to send an externref back to the host as an argument of an imported function. (Depending on the function semantics, the call may or may not consume the externref and may or may not modify the underlying data; this is not reflected by the WASM function signature.) An externref cannot be dereferenced by the module, thus, the module cannot directly access or modify the data behind the reference. Indeed, the module cannot even be sure which kind of data is being referenced.

https://docs.rs/externref/latest/externref/

Even if externref were fully implemented in future specs for Go (or Rust) such that it could be used as an argument or return type across modules (still not ideal for type-checking as it is not the underlying type), this would limit what can be inter-module-referenced to that which can be held in memory. The Gno Virtual Machine (GnoVM) allows for inter-user-package (inter-realm) references across the entire persisted disk store space, and does not require any additional language syntax such as with the externref keyword, and supports the normal course of type-checking already familiar to Go developers.

Interrealm Programming

Gno extends Go with explicit multi-user realm awareness. The key concepts:

Realm-context: determines runtime.CurrentRealm() and runtime.PreviousRealm(), controlling identity and agency.
Realm-storage-context: determines where new and modified objects are persisted during finalization.
Crossing-functions: declared with func fn(cur realm, ...) and called with fn(cross, ...) to explicitly change both contexts.
Readonly taint: values accessed via dot-selectors or index-expressions on external realm objects are tainted read-only, preventing direct mutation even by logic declared in the same realm. This protects against a class of exploits where a realm is tricked into mutating its own objects.
Realm-transaction finalization: at realm boundaries, new objects are assigned IDs and persisted, ref-count-zero objects are deleted, and Merkle hashes are recomputed.

// realm /r/bob/bob
package bob

import "gno.land/r/alice/alice" // import external realm package
import "gno.land/p/bob/types"   // import external library package

func Register(cur realm, name string) {
    prof := types.UserProfile{Name: name}
    alice.SetObject(cross, prof) // explicit realm crossing
}

Non-crossing methods on receivers residing in external realms implicitly change only the realm-storage-context (not the realm-context), allowing methods to behave identically whether declared in a p package or realm package. Panics that cross realm boundaries abort the program; revive(fn) provides software transactional memory semantics for testing (and eventually production use). Future builtins include attach() for binding unreal objects to a realm-storage-context, and safely(cb) for clearing realm-contexts to prevent yielding agency to callees.

For the full specification including the object model (real/unreal/escaped objects), readonly taint rules, crossing semantics, and design goals, see the Interrealm Specification.

Gno.land Blockchain

Tendermint solved proof-of-stake by innovating upon classical Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus algorithms published by Dwork, Lynch, and Stockmeyer in 1988 (originally funded by Darpa for missile defense systems) for blockchains. It paved the way for the Cosmos Hub, the first proof-of-stake IBC hub, and Cosmos the internet of blockchains. Also of note, when Binance first launched they used the CosmosSDK and Tendermint.

Gno.land builds upon Tendermint2 and aims to shift the paradigm of programming languages in general: Gno is the first multi-user programming language, making it a superior smart contracting language as compared to any existing solution. Thus Gno.land is the first multi-user language-based operating system. Its ultimate goal is to be the world's open knowledge base for the next millennium.

Use Case: Open Programmable Knowledge Base

Go's simple embedded struct-centric design and the Gno VM's automatic transactional persistence makes Gno.land not only great for decentralized financial applications but also makes it uniquely well suited and designed for permissionless innovation of information-based applications such as social communication and coordination systems, or the next Wikipedia or programmable knowledge-base systems. The latter will be explored here.

Each of the thought statements in the introduction can be represented as a simple Go string, but as in Tractatus we want to allow each of these thought- statements to be supported by any number of supporting thought statements, so we need a struct declaration.

type Thought struct {
    Statement    string
    Dependencies []*Thought
}

The above allows for a simple tree structure, but it would be better to annotate each child node (thought statement) with the type of relation to the parent node-- for example whether a child node represents an example, a caveat, a corollary, or supporting evidence and so on.

// Option "Denormalized Thought"
type Thought struct {
    Statement   string
    Examples    []*Thought
    Caveats     []*Thought
    Corollaries []*Thought
    Support     []*Thought
}

Better than a denormalized structure is one where the type of thought statement association can be arbitrary or fixed depending on the application.

// Option "Normalized Thought"
type Thought struct {
    Text         string
    TypedSupport []*Thought
}

type ThoughtType string // examples, caveats, corollaries, support

type TypedThought struct {
    Type    ThoughtType
    Thought *Thought
}

Note on the usage of []\*Thought slices: in the current implementation of the GnoVM each slice can only be used by first loading the entire underlying base array. This may be optimized in the future, however for holding large sets of elements the programmer should instead use a tree-structure such as the avl.Tree (or an iavl.Tree).

Now arises the question of whether counter-arguments should also be referenced as a child node to the original thought parent node. If we include counter-arguments in the graph of *Thought objects itself there is the issue of permissioning who can add counter-arguments to the graph. With the examples above and with no method declarations a *Thought belonging to one user cannot be modified by a third party even though the fields of a Thought struct is exposed due to Gno (runtime) interrealm rules that taint third party reads via direct dot-selectors & index-expressions with a readonly-taint that persists even with (direct selector) access of sub-fields.

The *Thought object can however be modified by another user by calling a declared method. We can extend the Thought struct with additional fields for authorization or ownership and implement a method such as follows:

type Thought struct {
    Owner        account
    Statement    string
    TypedSupport []*Thought
}

func (th *Thought) AddCounterArgument(cth *Thought) {
    caller := runtime.CurrentRealm().Address
    if th.Owner != caller {
        panic("unauthorized")
    }
    th.TypedSupport = append(th.TypedSupport,
        TypedThought{Type: "counter", Thought: cth})
}

This works but not well--it only works if the owner of the parent node wants the counter-argument to be registered. Even if counter-arguments were not registered as an assocation on chain, it is still possible for any Gno.land state indexer to separately index the reverse association of reference to the original *Thought when it finds a counter-argument *Thought that references in its struct field the original as a counter-argument. This reliance on an external indexer shifts trust from the blockchain itself to the indexer so is not always ideal.

Gno is intended for permissionless iteration and improvement so we will discuss another way (among many) to manage associations of competing thought statements; the pair-wise association among competing thought statements can be registered in another (neutral) external realm that allows the registration only at least one of the two thought statements identify the other as a counter-argument. In this case it is not necessary for a *Thought object to be associated with any owner explicitly (via the .Owner field). Note however that given the Gno inter-realm specification to make a *Thought object truly immutable even for the owner of the realm in which it resides it must not expose any mutator functions, or it should have at least a readonly bool field.

We can also add discussion board objects for each thought statement.

// Board defines a type for boards.
type Board struct {
	// ID is the unique identifier of the board.
	ID ID
	// Name is the current name of the board.
	Name string
	// Aliases contains a list of alternative names for the board.
	Aliases []string
	// Readonly indicates that the board is readonly.
	Readonly bool
	// Threads contains all board threads.
	Threads PostStorage
	// ThreadsSequence generates sequential ID for new threads.
	ThreadsSequence IdentifierGenerator
	// Permissions enables support for permissioned boards.
	// This type of boards allows managing members with roles and permissions.
	// It also enables the implementation of permissioned execution of board related features.
	Permissions Permissions
	// Creator is the account address that created the board.
	Creator address
	// Meta allows storing board metadata.
	Meta any
	// CreatedAt is the board's creation time.
	CreatedAt time.Time
	// UpdatedAt is the board's update time.
	UpdatedAt time.Time
}

// New creates a new basic non permissioned board.
func New(id ID) *Board {
	return &Board{
		ID:              id,
		Threads:         NewPostStorage(),
		ThreadsSequence: NewIdentifierGenerator(),
		CreatedAt:       time.Now(),
	}
}

While it is certainly possible to embed a *Board as a field of each *Thought, the current implementation of *Board is only safe from a moderation perspective when it is permissioned; and so a board tightly coupled to a *Thought may not be ideal depending on the use-case. Instead we can map an external realm persisted index of *Thought to *Board associations similarly to how counter-thoughts are associated as mentioned before. In both cases we probably want to add to the Thought struct a globally unique ID like how Board has. In the future we may provide a standard function to get a unique identifier for every pointer object but this has not yet been decided yet.

Finally, consider for example the numbered sequence of verses of a book of the bible, or the deep tree of statements in Wittgenstein's Tractatus. In order to facilitate the efficient forking of such large lists or graphs of objects it is necessary to avoid the usage of slices. Even the avl.Tree (as provided in the Gno monorepo under the examples directory) is not sufficient as it is a mutable tree. However a fork of the avl.Tree into an immutable tree (or likewise a port of the iavl tree in the tm2 Tendermint2 directory) can be used with some improvement to allow for splicing in new elements and deleting existing elements from the original tree.

So far I have illustrated a way for multiple users to construct their thought statement graphs independently while also allowing for counter-arguments to be registered/associated permissionlessly. More design and exploration is needed to create a fully functional permissionlessly extensible thought statement graph system; and in the primordial soup of Gno ecosystem eventually one or more designs will become dominant in usage by evolution. The reader is encouraged to explore the above template and measure success by references and by forks. See also Use Case: 95 Facts.

Use Case: Home Computing Chains

The Gno VM is not just useful in the context of public decentralized blockchains. It is also useful for home computing. Take for example Email which despite all attempts to replace it still persists in our lives today as flawed, complex, and outdated as it is. While a realm that stores mail on the blockchain is not useful unless the data is encrypted (and even if it were encrypted it is not a good idea nor encouraged to store encrypted data on gno.land as encryption keys may eventually get acquired by hackers and leaked and even persisted on the blockchain too), the Gno VM can run anywhere, even on your private server hosted at home. In fact, this is what we should do given the prevalence of surveillance technology such as Google's Gmail which uses AI to sort your mail and analyze for targeted advertising.

Imagine a black box local GnoVM you run at home. You can have the /r/home/email realm store your emails at home on your own home server. The same blockchain node logic can run on its own as a single-validator home chain which naturally supports backups as secondary full nodes, or you can even make your home chain byzantine fault-tolerant for better uptime.

Install in your home GnoVM chain a service plugin: /s/email/indexer, not /p/* nor /r/* but /s/* for off-chain service applications. (this prefix is not supported in gno.land but may be in the future).

/s/email/indexer reads state upon init, but also registers as a listener for notifications from /r/emails.
When a new email comes in, /r/emails via listeners calls /s/email/indexer.AddEmail().
/s/email/indexer also imports /d/email/indexer which is an off-chain daemon component. Here /d/* represents a hypothetical prefix for Gno code to be run off-chain with arbitrary Go native functions available for import that would otherwise not be possible on gno.land (since a blockchain can only support deterministic logic).
/d/email/indexer can only access /s/email/indexer by a Gno firewall system declared with Gno package paths, types, and function/method names.
/s/email/indexer can import any /r/* or /p/* but not any /s/* (like Chrome extensions) and its own /d/email/indexer, unless otherwise restricted by the Gno firewall system.
Your mobile device registers an account with your local GnoVM home chain. This phone account is restricted to only access /s/email/indexer.
Your phone makes a request to /s/email/indexer. It then asks /d/email/indexer which in turn queries the local index and responds via /s/email/indexer.

Here are some benefits of GnoVM home computing:

Gno.land can be leveraged to ensure that all software is properly audited.
Software is expected to become finished and immutable.
All software benefits from Go/Gno's type-safety and memory-safety.
A unified IPC system drastically reduces surface area for penetration.
Plugin services and daemons such as the aforementioned email indexer can be containerized and restricted from unauthorized access.
Fine-grained security/firewall rules at the function invocation level.
Byzantine fault-tolerance comes out of the box for zero downtime.
Inversion of control with public key cryptography for everything: no more password management.
Resilience against infrastructure failures: home chains continue operating during internet outages, power grid disruptions, or state-level network shutdowns. Combined with mesh networking and local power (solar, battery), GnoVM home chains can form the backbone of community-level communication and coordination when centralized infrastructure fails.

Use Case: Supply Chain Transparency and Food Sovereignty

The fragility of global supply chains has become impossible to ignore. From semiconductor shortages to food supply disruptions, dependency on opaque, centralized, and geographically concentrated supply chains puts populations at the mercy of forces they cannot see, verify, or influence. The geopolitical tension surrounding Taiwan and TSMC, the concentration of pharmaceutical manufacturing in China and India, and the consolidation of food production under a handful of multinational corporations all represent single points of failure with civilizational consequences.

Gno contracts can implement transparent, accountable supply chain tracking where every step from origin to consumer is recorded with cryptographic accountability. Unlike centralized supply chain solutions (which are only as trustworthy as the company operating them), Gno-based supply chain modules are open source, auditable, and composable. A food provenance realm can import a certification realm which imports a reputation realm--all with type-safe interoperability and no middleware.

For food sovereignty specifically, local communities can use Gno.land to coordinate direct farmer-to-consumer networks, manage community-supported agriculture (CSA) memberships, and maintain transparent records of growing practices--all without depending on any centralized platform that could deplatform them or change terms of service. When combined with home computing chains, local food networks can operate entirely independently of the global internet if necessary.

Other Use Cases

Gno.land can be used to host any other smart-contract application supported by Ethereum written in Solidity, such as Defi applications, name-resolution systems, DAOs and governance applications, etc.

You can explore the various dapps including sample implementations of ERC equivalents in the examples directory. Note that these prototypes have not yet been audited unless otherwise specified!

There are also many good use-cases for integrating the GnoVM in client or server side programming where deterministic gas-limited (for CPU, disk, memory) execution of logic is desired. In particular Gno and the Gno VM can be ideal for scripting in the gaming context for multi-player games. There are many games like Minecraft (with JavaScript) or Second Life (with LSL) that offer scripting in the game, but they are usually not both deterministic and gas-counted; but these are the properties you may need in a multi-player game if you also want to provide fault-tolerant, accountability, and replayability guarantees (with or without decentralization or replication).

The main feature of Gno is its multi-user context awareness. Where-ever you want user provided logic directly interacting with those of another user Gno solutions will be more succinct, elegant, and easy to develop and maintain.

Gno.land Constitution

See [./CONSTITUTION.md] for the Gno.land Constitution (draft) and details of genesis, tokenomics, governance, and more.

Separation of Church and State

Madison separated church and state in the US Constitution albeit there is a hint of the Christian spirit by the way in which the constitution was signed: "... in the Year of the Lord...". All the founders were Christian including Jefferson and Madison, and in particular the primary author of the US Constitution James Madison explicitly separated church from the constitution so as to help promote the teachings of Jesus as evidenced in his other writings. Likewise Gno.land besides this whitepaper is independent of any religion by its constitution, which should only refer to this whitepaper sparingly.

Gno.land will launch with a minimal (living) constitution written and maintained in English, but also ultimately be supplemented by the completed GnoVM code and Tendermint2 and Gno.land implementation. Future implementations of the GnoVM and Gno.land should adhere to the completed software mentioned above.

Gno.land should not censor speech, even if the speech is wrong. However, it should ban all porn and try to limit external links to porn sites as porn is not speech and is dangerous to civilization. Whether hate-speech is tolerated should be determined by each realm but also by the living Gno.land constitution and by GovDAO vote to amend the constitution and laws of Gno.land.

GnoWeb Browser

GnoWeb is the server software for Gno.land, a browser within a browser for viewing realm data.

Instead of requiring realm applications to return HTML, the convention is to implement a Render() function that returns Markdown. This is to allow the transition away from the bloated HTML standards and browser software and realm data to be browsed even from the console. Note that we don't need HTML XML elements to denote objects: everything in Gno is already an object. This makes Gno.land more like the original World Wide Web that conforms to the Document Object model (DOM).

GnoWeb does support some custom XML elements for improved layout and functionality, such as column layout and form submissions that integrate with browser extensions for transaction signing.

Note that GnoWeb is not yet a general blockchain explorer (e.g. for transactions) nor a general purpose Gno.land state explorer. A Gno.land specific blockchain explorer already exists. GnoWeb can only render markdown returned from Render() functions, and a general purpose state explorer is still desired.

Realm code is not precluded from returning HTML or even JSON for custom browser applications. In the near future the Gno.land node software will support returning JSON encodings of Gno objects. Thus future alternative browser applications may provide more interactive rich user experiences for viewing and mutating Gno.land state without any Markdown intermediary representation; and perhaps leveraging AI for intelligent layout and styling for rich interactivity.

Future Work

Access control systems. A composable library of membership, reputation, and moderation primitives that realms can import and combine without any single mandated identity system. Components include web-of-trust scoring, deposit-based access, viral invitation trees, hierarchical accountability chains, and oracle-backed attestations. The goal is a free market of access control policies rather than a universal gatekeeping layer. GnoAuth is a first step: an OAuth identity oracle that binds Web2.0 accounts (e.g. GitHub) to Gno addresses with signed attestations and sybil-resistance metadata.
Persistent garbage collector. The current implementation persists objects with reference counting and deletes zero-ref-count objects at realm-transaction finalization, but does not yet collect reference cycles. A full persistent cycle-detecting garbage collector will reclaim storage for cyclic structures that become unreachable. A transaction-scoped cyclic GC may also be implemented as a lighter alternative for common cases.
Name registry for realm and package paths. A decentralized naming system for mapping human-readable names to realm and package paths, enabling stable references even when packages are re-deployed or versioned. This would function similarly to DNS but for the Gno package namespace.
Realm upgrading. A mechanism for upgrading mutable realm code while preserving existing state and object references. This requires careful design to maintain type safety across upgrades and to ensure that dependent realms are not broken by upstream changes. Migration functions and versioned type schemas are under consideration.
Realm data browser. A general-purpose state explorer for inspecting any realm's persisted object graph, not limited to Render() output. This would allow developers and users to browse the full object tree, inspect individual objects, view ownership and reference graphs, and trace cross-realm references.
Deterministic concurrency. Extending Gno with deterministic concurrency primitives that preserve the reproducibility required for consensus while enabling parallel execution of independent realm transactions. This could unlock significant throughput improvements without sacrificing the determinism guarantee.
Joeson parser. A general-purpose parser library implemented in Gno for on-chain parsing of structured data formats, domain-specific languages, and protocol messages. This enables realms to define and interpret custom grammars without relying on off-chain tooling.
Gno2. A future major revision of the Gno language incorporating lessons learned from production use. Potential additions include a readonly modifier for function return types, native syntax for cross and cur realm (replacing the current overloaded function argument convention), and further language-level support for multi-user patterns that emerge from ecosystem usage.
Open hardware. Memristor-based memory systems eliminate the distinction between volatile RAM and persistent storage, which aligns naturally with the GnoVM's automatic persistence model. Purpose-built hardware could further simplify the VM and dramatically improve performance. Open hardware designs for validator nodes would also strengthen decentralization by reducing dependence on proprietary chip manufacturers.

How to Participate

The problems outlined in this manifesto are immense but so is the opportunity. Every line of Gno code, every realm deployed, every node operated is a brick in the foundation of a more resilient civilization. Here is how you can contribute:

Learn Gno. If you know Go you already know most of Gno. Start with the examples directory and the Gno by Example tutorials.
Write a realm. Build something useful--a board, a registry, a token, a game, a supply chain tracker, a reputation module. Deploy it to the testnet. The ecosystem grows one realm at a time.
Run a node. Validator nodes secure the network. Full nodes preserve the state. Home chain nodes give you sovereignty. The more nodes the more resilient the network.
Audit and review. Read other people's realms. Find bugs. Suggest improvements. Good code review is as valuable as new code.
Fork. If you disagree with the direction of Gno.land, fork it. The constitution explicitly protects this right. Forkability is not a threat to the project--it is the ultimate guarantee of its integrity.
Build offline-first. Develop applications that work on home chains and mesh networks. When the internet goes down these applications become the infrastructure that communities depend on.
Spread the word. Share this manifesto. Translate it. Discuss it. The ideas here only matter if people know about them.

You do not need permission to participate. That is the point.

Summary

The convergence of AI-driven threats, the collapse of dollar hegemony, the rise of CBDCs and programmable surveillance money, institutional capture of health and information systems, and the fragility of centralized infrastructure all point to the same conclusion: we need to build alternatives now, not after the crisis arrives.

There is only so much that we can do as individuals, and it is not clear what we can do even as a well organized collective when the incentives are stacked against the masses. But we need not feel disheartened because there is much to be built in the domain of open source foundational tooling for our present and future civilizations. We can always find joy in constructing a better future brick by brick, metaphorically speaking.

Gno.land is not merely a blockchain or a programming language. It is an operating system for human coordination that does not require trust in any central authority. Every realm is a small act of sovereignty. Every p-package is a shared agreement that cannot be unilaterally altered. Every home chain is a household that owns its own data and computation. Together they form something that no corporation, government, or rogue AI can easily destroy: a distributed, forkable, accountable foundation for the next civilization.

Gno is the next C for multi-user environments.
Gno.land is the world's new open programmable knowledge base.

Appendix

Gno.land for Mass Awakening

By the time of Trajan in 117 AD, the denarius was only about 85 percent silver, down from Augustus’s 95 percent. ... But the real crisis came after Caracalla, between 258 and 275, in a period of intense civil war and foreign invasions. The emperors simply abandoned, for all practical purposes, a silver coinage. By 268 there was only 0.5 percent silver in the denarius.

Joseph R. Peden, "Inflation and the Fall of the Roman Empire" (link)

Consider the following thought statement tree/graph:

The Federal Reserve and the fiat dollar is unconstitutional and therefore illegitimate.
- The US Constitution Article 1, Section 8, Clause 5 explicitly states that "The Congress shall have Power... To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures."
- The US Constitution Article 1, Section 10, Clause 1 explicitly states that "No state shall ... coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts."
  - The first "greenback" paper dollar issued in 1862 was a bill of credit backed by the federal government's promise to pay the bearer gold or silver.
- Neither Article 1, Section 8, Clause 5 nor Article 1, section 10, Clause 1 of the US Constitution give the federal government the authority to stray from the "bimetalic" spirit of the U.S. Constitution.
- Paper fiat dollar bills are not coins.
  - Paper fiat dollars started off as bills of credit for deposited gold.
  - Paper fiat dollars today are neither bills of credit nor gold/silver coins.
- The Federal Reserve was unconstitutionally ratified in order to debase the people's money from the underlying gold and silver.
  - The Coinage Act of 1873 also known as the "Crime of 1873" eliminated the standard dollar from the list of coins that the U.S. Mint could issue, beginning the demonetization of silver in favor of gold with the new "trade dollar", and later the introduction of the gold dollar coin.
  - The U.S. fiat paper dollar became gold-backed with the passage of the Gold Standard Act on March 14, 1900, which established gold as the exclusive backing for the country’s paper currency. This meant that each dollar bill was convertible into a specific amount of gold.
  - The Bretton Woods system was an international monetary system established in 1944 that set rules for commercial and financial relations among the major industrial states pegging the dollar to gold.
    - It created a system of fixed exchange rates, with the U.S. dollar pegged to gold and other currencies pegged to the dollar, and established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank "to promote economic stability and growth".
    - The system ended in 1971 when the U.S. abandoned the gold standard, leading to a shift to floating exchange rates.
    - The Bretton Woods system ended in 1971 primarily because the U.S. could no longer maintain the dollar's convertibility to gold due to rising inflation and a growing balance of payments deficit, leading to a loss of confidence in the dollar. President Nixon's decision to suspend gold convertibility on August 15, 1971, effectively marked the collapse of the system, transitioning the world to floating exchange rates.
  - The Coinage Act of 1963 removed silver from dimes and quarters and reduced the silver content of half-dollars to 40%, more or less completing the destruction silver coin as money and ending bimetallism.
    - Wikipedia incorrectly states that bimetalism ended with the Coinage Act of 1873, and prevents users from correcting the record.
    - By 1973, the U.S. dollar was fully decoupled from gold, transitioning to a fiat currency not backed by physical commodities.
  - Hypothesis: JP Morgan intentionally sank the Titanic to murder opposition such as Straus and Astor, specifically to debase the dollar and to steal the works of Nikola Tesla.
    - JP Morgan sank the Titanic to debase the dollar.
      - John Jacob Astor IV was the world's richest man; he opposed the Treasury and WWI.
      - Isidor Straus was the elected Treasurer of the New York branch of the National Citizen's League for the promotion of a Sound Banking System who corresponded with the editor of the New York Times and made a call to action in and around 10/16/1911 of the public for open discussion to prevent the adoption of an unaccountable federal reserve act.
      - Less than one year after Isidor Straus declared the call to action to the public, the Titanic sunk in April 15, 1912 after boarding members invited by JP Morgan who himself dipped out of the party at the last minute--knowing that there was an engine room fire as logged by logs.
        
        The Titanic sunk when the engine room exploded as intended; rescue ships that trailed the Titanic did not come to rescue upon seeing emergency SOS flairs allegedly because the red flares were swapped out for white flares that looked like fireworks.
        
        The recent 3D scan of the sunken Titanic reveals an outward blowing out of the ship's hull where the engine room was, exactly where photographs of the Titanic showed fire damage during boarding.
        
        The OceanGate submersible that later imploded on the way to view the Titanic had in its board of directors a Rothschild. (See also Babylon in Banking and The Rothschild Dynasty.)
      - The year following the sinking of the Titanic saw the unconstitutional passage of the Federal Reserve act in December 23, 1913.
        
        The Federal Reserve Act was drafted in secret on Jekyll Island and overseen by banking elites including the Rothschilds.
      - Less than one year after the passage of the Federal Reserve Act began World War I in July 28, 1914; and thus began the significant dilution of the dollar via the sale of government war bonds.
    - Hypothesis: JPMorgan sank the Titanic to steal the works of Nikola Tesla.
      - John Jacob Astor IV was Tesla's primary patron.
      - Tesla died on 7 January 1943, at the age of 86, penniless.
      - Two days after his death the FBI ordered the Alien Property Custodian to seize Tesla’s belongings, even though Tesla was an American citizen.
      - Tesla’s entire estate from the Hotel New Yorker and other New York City hotels was transported to the Manhattan Storage and Warehouse Company under the Office of Alien Property (OAP) seal.
      - John G. Trump, a professor at M.I.T. and a well-known electrical engineer serving as a technical aide to the National Defense Research Committee, was called in to analyze the Tesla items in OAP custody.
        
        John G. Trump was the uncle of Donald J. Trump.
      - After a three-day investigation, Trump’s report concluded that there was nothing which would constitute a hazard in unfriendly hands, stating: “[Tesla’s] thoughts and efforts during at least the past 15 years were primarily of a speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character often concerned with the production and wireless transmission of power; but did not include new, sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results”.
  - The silver dollar used to have 0.7734 troy ounces of silver. At the price of silver today at $84 per troy ounce, a silver dollar today would be worth $64, roughly representing about 6 halvings of the purchasing power of the dollar, or 1.56%.
  - The gold dollar used to weigh 1.672 grams of which 90% was gold. At the price of gold today at $4,590 per troy ounce, a gold dollar today would be worth $244, roughly representing about 8 halvings of the purchasing power of the dollar, or 0.41%.
  - Given 0.7734 troy ounces for a silver dollar and 0.053 troy ounces for a gold dollar the ratio of the value of silver to gold used to be around 1:14.6. Today the ratio is 1:54.6.
  - If the dollar were to be backed by gold and silver as it should, the price of gold and silver would be significantly higher.
  - With the adoption of silver solid-state battery technology and the greater need for silver in industry the ratio of the value of silver to gold will revert to the historical norm or even higher.

(See the appendix on The History of U.S. Silver Coins for more history of U.S. silver-based money.)

All empires fall after debasing its currency. The Roman Empire took centuries to debase their currency to 0.5%. The United States has achieved the same in about half a century--it has only been 55 years since President Nixon ended the convertibility of the dollar to gold. For a modern comparison, the British Empire ended soon after WWI after debasing the silver shilling starting from the 1920's until 1947 when silver content was completely eliminated. It is widely understood that the US empire is in rapid decline and that much of the world will experience economic struggle as the once mighty petrodollar (and thus by extension the fiat money of other nations) collapses.

Furthermore silver is becoming increasingly important for industrial uses, especially with new silver-based solid state batteries entering the market that are superior to other battery systems, making the return of silver coin as money inevitable.

The collapse of dollar hegemony is not a future prediction--it is happening now. The BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and expanding membership) are actively constructing alternatives to the dollar-based financial system. In 2025 BRICS central banks added nearly 800 metric tonnes of gold to their reserves, with combined holdings now exceeding 6,000 tonnes. China and Russia now conduct most of their bilateral trade in yuan and rubles, bypassing the dollar entirely. In October 2025 the bloc piloted the "Unit", a settlement instrument backed by a 40% gold and 60% BRICS-currency basket, signaling a structural move toward de-dollarization. Meanwhile BRICS Pay, a blockchain-based decentralized payment messaging system, is being developed to circumvent Western-controlled systems like SWIFT.

The implications are profound: as the dollar loses reserve status the US government's ability to finance its debt through inflation is curtailed, which means either severe austerity, debt default, or hyperinflation--none of which end well for ordinary people holding dollar-denominated assets. This is not a distant scenario; it is the trajectory we are on. The need for decentralized, sound-money alternatives and the tools to build them is urgent.

Thus far in human history the powers that be have been able to control public consciousness and thus human behavior; even gradually and systematically moving away from the gold and silver coin monetary system mandated by the US constitution; but we live in a different post-singularity era of the information age where complete censorship is all but impossible, and the people have the power to participate in shaping public consciousness by the development and usage of open source software, especially blockchain systems that are much more resilient to censorship than centralized systems.

In the information age it is completely feasible (and eventually inevitable) that we evolve beyond the age of empires and build a global community not based on any centralized global governance system or even based on the might of any military or police force, but instead based on the development, propagation, and voluntary adoption of protocols of game-theoretic Nash equilibrium for the world's benefit. But to solve a civilization level problem first the people need to understand the problem.

The above tree of thought statements regarding the US dollar is but one of many that need to be understood by everyone such that we stop being manipulated for the benefit of others and transcend the cycle of exploitation. There are so many more such statements of facts that must be compiled altogether; each need to be similarly fleshed out into their own subtrees or branches of supporting thought statements. Some statements will be more relevant to people in one location or circumstance while others are more globally applicable.

Open Innovation for Proof-of-Human, Reputation, and Moderation

It is already the case that a significant portion of posts and comments on social media platforms are AI generated. We desperately need to build systems to help distinguish between AI and humans. The way proposed by the powers that be is a universal "Digital ID" system but at the same time we wish not to be subjected to a universal state controlled identification system as they are likely to be used to increasingly censor speech and worse--this is the "mark of the beast" in the book of revelation.

To guarantee our safety in the face of potentially tyrannical governments we need to collectively create a large variety of alternative protocols and applications built from the ground up, and simultaneously avoid using centrally mandated solutions. Even with proof-of-human protocols the AI problem cannot be solved completely because people often use AI to generate the content that they post online; however the worst effects of AI can be mitigated if we can distinguish between content uploaded by people vs those uploaded by AI.

Many WoT (web-of-trust) based reputation systems had been proposed and researched but they are largely not used outside of large centralized companies that keep the information to themselves within walled gardens for their own benefit. The benefit of these walled gardens is that the information is more restricted (which helps preserve privacy to some degree) but the downside as mentioned before is that in reality the data is already being abused to manipulate the masses for profit. Therefore the benefit of open WoT reputation systems is that the information asymmetry in favor of large corporations is nullified.

The obvious downside is that privacy is much reduced unless the reputation system is designed to preserve it. There are ways of implementing limited scale privacy preserving reputation systems using FL (federated learning) and HE or FHE (fully homomorphic encryption) techniques that have been published or is being implemented. In particular FHE based systems are interesting because they may be more quantum resistant.

On E-Voting

While we should be innovating on blockchain-based voting systems to prepare against the worst case scenarios, I cannot yet suggest that blockchains be used for general elections; not until e-voting systems can satisfy some prerequisites. From one survey paper on e-Voting systems:

Functional requirements define the desired end functions and features required by a system. The functional requirements can be directly observed and tested.

Robustness: Any dishonest party cannot disrupt elections.

Fairness: No partial tally is revealed.

Verifiability: The election results cannot be falsified. There are two types of verifiability:

Individual verifiability: The voter can verify whether their vote is included in the final tally.

Universal verifiability: All valid votes are included in the final tally and this is publicly verifiable.

Soundness, completeness and correctness: The final tally included all valid ballots.

Eligibility: Unqualified voters are not allowed to vote.

Dispute-freeness: Any party can publicly verify whether the participant follows the protocol at any phase of the election.

Transparency: Maximise transparency in the vote casting, vote storing and vote counting process while preserving the secrecy of the ballots.

Accuracy: The system is errorless and valid votes must be correctly recorded and counted. This properties can be retained by universal verifiability.

Accountability: If the vote verification process fails, the voter can prove that he has voted and at the same time preserving vote secrecy.

Practicality: The implementation of requirements and assumptions should be able to adapt to large-scale elections.

Scalability: The proposed e-voting scheme should be versatile in terms of computation, communication and storage.

A security requirement is the required security functionality that ensures that the scheme satisfies different security properties to solve a specific security problem or to eliminate potential vulnerabilities. Security requirements serve as fundamental security functionality for a system. Therefore, instead of constructing a custom security approach for every system, the standard security requirements allow researchers and developers to reuse the definitions of security controls and best practices.

Privacy and vote secrecy: The cast votes are anonymous to any party.

Double-voting prevention, unicity and unreusability: Eligible voters cannot vote more than once.

Receipt-freeness: The voter cannot attain any information that can be used to prove how he voted for any party.

Coercion-resistance: Coercers cannot insist that voters vote in a certain way and the voter cannot prove his vote to the information buyer.

Anonymity: The identity of the voter remains anonymous.

Authentication: Only eligible voters were allowed to vote.

Integrity: The system can detect the dishonest party that modifies the election results.

Unlinkability: The voter and his vote cannot be linked

The paper also lists "post-quantum" e-voting schemes, but notes that it is a new area of research (as of 2022) and that few have implemented such a system. I like survey papers like these because they usually have good information in them. I don't agree with all of the conclusions in the paper but it's worth reviewing along with others.

But does e-voting really make sense? Take for example "Coercion-resistance". Some blockchain-based e-voting systems claim to be coercion-resistant but assume that the adversary (coercer, or vote buyer) cannot learn of the voter's private key. When voting in person in a booth theoretically one cannot be coerced if noone besides the voter knows who they voted for (though this is not the case). But in reality desperate people will willingly give up their private keys and devices for money. Therefore arguably in all cases electronic voting that can be performed anywhere are naturally more vulnerable to coercion and vote-buying.

The only fool-proof voting system in my opinion is one where the voter is marked with dye also referred to as "election ink". On the other hand, a mark on the right hand or forehead is the hallmark of the "mark of the beast" in the Book of Revelation. One could avoid the right hand (Ha! some countries use a finger of the left hand) but the key distinguishing factor of the mark of the beast is that everyone is required to participate whether rich or poor.

The Book of Luke starts with the circumstances of Jesus's birth in Bethlehem as it relates to Caesar's universal census registration mandate. The Book of Revelation ends with a new heaven and new earth and New Jerusalem right after the opening of the Lamb's book of life where names and deeds are written of those who are saved. Any system that tries to duplicate any universal identification system for the purpose of local governance voting, UBI, or proof-of-person even to distinguish AI bots from humans has the potential to become a mandated oppressive solution. The key message of the Book of Revelation and the life of Jesus as written is against such universal mandatory registries. In short, any information (identifier) that can be used against someone will be used against them especially in AI armageddon scenarios.

Can Gno.land evolve such that no set of controls is mandated? This is less of a problem for blockchain systems that are designed primarily for monetary transactions of fungible tokens, or for blockchain systems that do not aim to control for any kind of offending material (see one potential solution for monetary systems like Cosmos that defers controls to each zone). Yes, but contingent on GovDAO's good judgement on enforcing a middle ground between insufficient moderation and authoritarian moderation. Not as the day to day arbiter (except in the beginning) but as the final court of justice of a system of controls designed to enforce the spirit of the constitution. If not, GovDAO itself should fork, and failing that, users should fork the chain or seek alternatives.

On Manufactured Discontent

"At the heart of the story are Sigmund Freud's daughter Anna and his nephew Edward Bernays who had invented the profession of public relations. Their ideas were used by the US government, big business and the CIA to develop techniques to manage and control the minds of the American people. Those in power believed that the only way to make democracy work and create a stable society was to repress the savage barbarism that lurked just under the surface of normal American life." - Adam Curtis, BBC Four, 2002. (transcript, youtube)

On Twitter Censorship

Much can be said about all platforms such as Google, Reddit, Meta/Instagram, Wikipedia and so on but I will only comment here about Twitter, also known as "X". Interesting note: the actual name change happened on Tisha B'av, as I was there when it happened and I remember thinking it was an ominous date for Elon with the "beast armor" profile to rename Twitter to the letter of a "mark" (since Tisha B'av is a commemoration of a number of disasters in Jewish history, primarily the destruction of both Solomon's Temple by the Neo-Babylonian Empire and the Second Temple by the Roman Empire in Jerusalem); but furthermore news reports retroactively have tried to change history by claiming that it happened on another date.

By some reason I got to participate in Twitter's Community Notes program so I tried it. The first note I was obligated to rate was of a community note that claimed Elon Musk's wealth did not come from tax payers. Fair enough, but a little suspicious that this is the first one shown.

A few weeks later after I got used to the mechanics of the system I noticed a community note by the alias of "Hilarious Wind Sandgrouse" (everyone is given a pen name to preserve privacy--mine is "Charitable Star Piculet") that seemed interesting by DerrickEvans4WV about Senator Machaela Cavanaugh who the original poster said "vandalized" a Declaration of Independence exhibit at the state capital building. The community note by "Hilarious Wind Sandgrouse" only expressed her point of view and that she said the object was prohibited; but when I read the article referenced by Sandgrouse himself it was made clear that the objects were never prohibited, so therefore she was "vandalizing". So I looked further into his account and discovered that (a) Sandgrouse is a prolific note contributor, and (b) Sandgrouse had been spamming biased community notes with absurd notes regarding a recent anti-ICE incident where he claimed that there is no evidence of race motive or anti-immigration sentiment even though he also wrote that a bullet round had "Anti-ICE" written on it! So did what any responsible person would do--I went over to each of those tweets to comment (only for community note contributors to see) that Sandgrouse is wildly biased with citations and while I wasn't sure what would happen, I didn't expect Twitter to suspend by community note writing privileges claiming that my recent notes have been rated "unhelpful" even though it isn't the case.

So there you have it, Twitter/X censors, and the "Community Notes" won't save us either. For one, it doesn't make it easy to point out obvious bias from people as I did because instead of displaying a discussion tree as in Reddit you are limited to writing more community notes (that won't get shown) just to express a concern to the other community notes contributors (who not only write but also must rank notes); and besides, Twitter controls when community note contributors get to vote on notes and by the time a correction is displayed the tweet may have already peaked in virality. At this point one can almost assume that Twitter does exactly that.

Besides the above, there's a lot more to be said about Twitter but I'll leave a few highlights.

One tweet by @unusual_whales regarding FTX and tokenized shares from Jan 15th, 2023 has many community notes that claim that Twitter had been suppressing the votes by removing likes and retweets.
My followers count has been stuck at around ~26.5K users for years, whereas it used to grow exponentially. This occurred around the time that I started getting vocal about Covid19 vaccines and mandates (and it was revealed that military agencies like DARPA was involved in suppressing accounts).
I have experienced seeing my tweet go viral, with 13 retweets within a few minutes, only to see the retweet count drop down to 2 within seconds.
My account used to show time and time again "shadowban" status as detected by shadowban detection services; but it is clear that my account is now suppressed via means that are not so easily detectable.
This is why I created a new account in the first place, and my old account I can no longer access, and my email address is no longer associated with it.

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Gno.land Manifesto

Table of Contents

Introduction

Gno.land Raison d'Etre

Gno.land, the Gno language, and the Gno VM.

Problem: Misinformation and Loss of Trust

Health Sovereignty

Problem: AI Armageddon

Problem: Central Bank Digital Currencies

Use Case: Gno.land for Data Archival and Processing

Gno Language

Gno vs Existing Smart Contract Platforms

Interrealm Programming

Gno.land Blockchain

Use Case: Open Programmable Knowledge Base

Use Case: Home Computing Chains

Use Case: Supply Chain Transparency and Food Sovereignty

Other Use Cases

Gno.land Constitution

Separation of Church and State

GnoWeb Browser

Future Work

How to Participate

Summary

Appendix

Gno.land for Mass Awakening

Open Innovation for Proof-of-Human, Reputation, and Moderation

On E-Voting

On Manufactured Discontent

On Twitter Censorship

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Gno.land Manifesto

Table of Contents

Introduction

Gno.land Raison d'Etre

Gno.land, the Gno language, and the Gno VM.

Problem: Misinformation and Loss of Trust

Health Sovereignty

Problem: AI Armageddon

Problem: Central Bank Digital Currencies

Use Case: Gno.land for Data Archival and Processing

Gno Language

Gno vs Existing Smart Contract Platforms

Interrealm Programming

Gno.land Blockchain

Use Case: Open Programmable Knowledge Base

Use Case: Home Computing Chains

Use Case: Supply Chain Transparency and Food Sovereignty

Other Use Cases

Gno.land Constitution

Separation of Church and State

GnoWeb Browser

Future Work

How to Participate

Summary

Appendix

Gno.land for Mass Awakening

Open Innovation for Proof-of-Human, Reputation, and Moderation

On E-Voting

On Manufactured Discontent

On Twitter Censorship