What is Safety?

We place substantial significance behind the term "safety", and we rely on that word to anchor technical feature goals behind a human-centric notion:

Safety means any user can rely on the system to perform what they intend without unnecessarily placing them in harms way.

In practice, safety requires many of the more well-known cryptocurrency principles:

Privacy by Default: We believe people should not have to have esoteric knowledge to know which details of their behavior are exposed to which ambient third parties based on technical trivia. So, the technology must protect, as best as possible, the privacy of user behavior so that only the information they intend to disclose is available and only to the parties they intend to disclose it to.

Permissionlessness: If a person comes to rely on a technology only to later discover they are vulnerable to gate-keeping or censorship by a third-party without their consent, that technology fails to provide safety. So the technology must provide permissionless access so that any person is free to use it at any time at their discretion.

Reliability: The technology needs to function reliably at any time so that people can justifiably depend on it.

Resilience: If the network of participants fails to maintain and improve the technology over time, people who rely on it may one day find it no longer works. The technology must remain resilient through time under changing conditions and a variety of adversarial environments.

We posit that other commonly touted blockchain principles such as decentralization, capture resistance, availability, resilient governance, and platform neutrality all stem from these core deeper principles underlying our use of the word safety.

Of particular note is economic sustainability which we frame as a requirement implied by reliability, and resilience, and which permissionlessness facilitates.