Welcome to The Beat, Decential’s weekly breakdown of the music-web3 byway.

Like most things in web3, the music space moves at breakneck speeds, issuing regular bouts of hope, cringe and FOMO. That combination of qualities blur the essence of the movement – the enduring solutions to legacy industry problems and the people building them. Let’s focus on the essence; the rest, as Alex Ross wrote, is noise.

Sybil-cybin

I’ve been reading lately about Sybil resistance, or the ability of a system or network to withstand and prevent Sybil attacks – i.e. when a single malicious entity creates multiple fake identities or nodes to gain control or disrupt the system. It gets a lot of attention in web3 builders’ pursuit of decentralized, trustless systems, because when networks aren’t yet mature, they’re susceptible to malicious actors compromising the consensus mechanism and making off with the treasury. 

While reading, I had a moment of brain fog that re-ordered and expanded ‘sybil’ into ‘psilocybin,’ and I haven’t been able to shake the connection.

When comparing the two, of course there are different principles at play. Fungi in mycelial networks don’t have distinct identities to impersonate (that we can tell) or manipulate, and they’re certainly not digital. But mycelial networks do exhibit a decentralized structure, and they demonstrate resilience and adaptive properties, relying on redundancy and interconnectedness to maintain their functionality – a la Sybil resistance.

Perhaps it’s not by accident, then, that mycelia are common mascots and mirrors across web3. There’s the Mycelia project spearheaded by Imogen Heap, who was one of the first artists to demonstrate how smart contracts could be used to circumvent traditional intermediaries. Identity verification is a key component.

There’s fungi godfather Paul Stamets’ Mycelial Earth project, “a community based initiative…to harness the power of blockchain technology, the core principles of decentralization, and the potential of the Mushroom Kingdom to restore our ecology.” 

There’s even an emergent group of MycoFi enthusiasts, modifying the DeFi and ReFi epithets to invoke mycelia and the economy of the forest . . .

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