Synchronicity’s Values

Trustlessness: reliability is assured through autonomy, incorruptibility, and verifiability rather than trust

• Reliability: consistent and correct performance

  • Reliable systems function as expected over time under both normal and adverse conditions.

• Autonomy: rule compliance guaranteed by internal mechanisms

  • A system is autonomous if its rules are upheld by protocol design and crypto-economics without arbitrary or subjective judgement.

• Incorruptibility: resistance to unauthorized change

  • Incorruptible systems prevent rules from being manipulated and tampered with. Change occurs only through explicitly defined mechanisms and authorized processes, ensuring the system’s integrity cannot be compromised.

• Verifiability: the ability to independently validate correctness

  • A system is verifiable to a participant if they can confirm correctness without trusting any party. Verification is typically enabled by transparency, reproducibility, or zero-knowledge proofs.

Privacy: the ability to control information about oneself

Private: one’s information is under one’s control

One’s privacy can be compromised by the collection, processing, and dissemination of one’s information:

• Collection violations include surveillance and interrogation.
  • Surveillance is the observation or recording of one’s activities.
  • Interrogation consists of questioning or probing for information.
• Processing violations include aggregation, attribution, insecurity, secondary use, and exclusion.
  • Aggregation involves the combination of various pieces of data about a person.
  • Attribution is linking information to particular individuals or identities.
  • Insecurity is insufficient protection of stored information from leaks and improper access.
  • Secondary use is the use of information collected for one purpose for a different purpose without consent.
  • Exclusion is the failure to disclose information about third party access to and use of one’s information.
• Dissemination violations include disclosure, breaches of confidentiality, blackmail, increased accessibility, appropriation, and distortion.
  • Disclosure is revelation of truthful information.
  • Breach of confidentiality is disclosure despite a commitment not to disclose.
  • Blackmail is the threat to disclose information.
  • Increased accessibility is amplifying the accessibility of information.
  • Appropriation is the use of one’s identity or likeness to serve the aims and interests of another.
  • Distortion consists of the dissemination of false or misleading information.

Censorship Resistance: resilience to purposeful prevention of valid actions from being executed reliably

Censorship can take the form of:

1. Centralized points of control: single or coordinated authorities blocking or altering valid operations

2. Availability failures

   • Availability: accessibility and operational readiness

3. Liveness failures

   • Liveness: eventual progress and completion of all valid operations

4. Integrity failures

   • Integrity: correct completion of operations

Software is open source if it is freely available for anyone to:

1. run;
2. study and modify;
3. redistribute in original and modified form.

Intuitiveness: the quality of coming naturally, with minimal complexity or formal instruction

Intuitive technology is predictable, familiar, readily discoverable and consistent across contexts.

Cheapness: the property of having minimal cost per unit of functionality

Permissionlessness: the absence of approval requirements for participation

Permissioned: the quality of requiring approval for participation

Note: Barriers of strict technical capacity do not constitute permissions (e.g. internet connection, gas payment).

Permissionlessness at the network layer allows anyone to build freely. Within permissionless networks, though, trustless permissioning can be utilized by applications and peer-to-peer interactions to establish participation boundaries (e.g. zk proof of age).

Expressivity: the capability to specify, represent, and execute arbitrary computations and state transitions

Frictionlessness: minimal difficulty and effort to achieve a desired action (e.g. not having to send multiple transactions to perform a single action)

Speed: the rate at which functionality is delivered per unit of time

In a system with high speed, read requests are fulfilled quickly and writes occur with minimal information latency, transaction sequencing and transaction finalization times.

Composability: the property of parts being able to be seamlessly rearranged to create new functionality

Composable software is:

1. modular – consists of smaller components
2. interoperable – components can communicate and work together
3. reusable – components can be applied in various contexts
4. loosely coupled – components are minimally dependent on one another

Fairness: impartial treatment of all parties according to agreed upon rules and standards

In a fair market, informed participants act freely and compete on an even playing field.

• Existing competitive advantages are difficult to entrench. ‘Capture’ is difficult, restricted to product or strategy alpha rather than privileged access or anti-competitive techniques.
• Each additional marginal increase in advantage over other participants has increasing marginal costs.
• Latency and information asymmetry are minimal.