Where might the sideways evolution of crypto lead us?

Hummingbirds can fly backwards because flowers evolved to attract insects with nectar.

That’s not how we usually imagine Darwinian evolution, which is typically portrayed as a straight line of trial and error — flowers getting a little brighter; bees getting a little better at spotting them.

But the hummingbird is proof that sometimes change happens sideways, through unpredictable cross-species interactions that reshape creatures not obviously related to the original adaptation.

Steven Johnson has dubbed this “the hummingbird effect.”

Flowers first evolved nectar to lure insects, which in turn shaped insects’ eyes and foraging habits — so far, so Darwinian.

More unexpectedly, however, that same flowery innovation created an opportunity for a much larger, if less efficient pollinator: the hummingbird.

To seize it, hummingbirds developed a novel way of rotating their wings — giving power to the upstroke as well as the downstroke — that allowed them to hover in front of a flower and extract its pollen.

This wasn’t the usual survival-of-the-fittest process of incremental improvements — brighter flowers, sharper insects — but a sideways leap, where a change in one corner of the ecosystem rewired the anatomy of a completely different species.

Human technology can evolve this way, too.

In How We Got to Now, Johnson uses the example of hummingbirds to illustrate how innovation often leaps sideways with unpredictable consequences.

For example, Gutenberg’s printing press of course led to the rapid spread of both books and literacy across Europe.

But it also led to people discovering they were farsighted and therefore needed glasses to read their new books.

Crafting lenses for reading glasses led to the realization they could also be used for magnification, which led to the invention of microscopes.

Microscopes then led to the discovery of microorganisms like germs, and the importance of hygiene.

So here’s the punchline: The sideways hummingbird effect of Gutenberg’s printing press was that doctors began washing their hands.

As Johnson documents, this is a common occurrence.

“Innovations usually begin life with an attempt to solve a specific problem,” he writes, “but once they get into circulation, they end up triggering other changes that would have been extremely difficult to predict.”

Crypto, of course, is very much in circulation.

A hummingbird flaps its wings…

Satoshi invented Bitcoin to enable the bankless, peer-to-peer transmission of value between humans.

But it’s not hard to imagine a world in which machines will be the primary users of crypto.

Many believe AI agents will soon outnumber humans. To be maximally useful, they’ll have to be able to pay for things. Crypto is almost certainly the only way they can do that at scale.

(Last week, Google announced a protocol that allows AI agents to pay each other in stablecoins, and Coinbase has already put it into action.)

Granting billions of agents the ability to pay each other will surely affect how they evolve. 

Without it, they could never become independent economic actors, develop an agent-to-agent economy or incentivize humans to do things for them.

With it, they can.

It’s the same kind of sideways leap found in nature.

Pollinating flowers, aimed at insects, led to birds that fly backwards.

Satoshi’s white paper, aimed at freeing humans from banks, might end up freeing AI agents from humans.

The sideways evolution of crypto could lead to many such surprises.

What, for example, might the advent of USD bank accounts that do not require KYC lead to?

We’ve already had a preview with the rise of crypto-enabled romance scams, but now that a no-KYC banking system (aka, stablecoins) has legal status in the US, it feels like the consequences could be much bigger than that.

Crypto might also infect traditional asset classes with its unique brand of financial nihilism.

Or it might make us better investors by making us more financially literate. How many people knew what the Federal Reserve does before Bitcoiners started yelling about it?

Crypto has empowered a cohort of people with a particular worldview, possibly with unpredictable results — the eccentric crypto billionaire Charles Hoskinson has purchased a sizable portion of Wyoming, for example, and has plans to run for office there.

More speculatively, the invention of Bitcoin might accelerate the development of quantum computing, as it offers a honeypot of money for the first quantum computer to steal. 

With luck, it might also accelerate the development of defenses against quantum attacks.

Perhaps most consequentially, crypto has already accelerated the development of zero-knowledge proofs, and this might prove to be humanity’s savior.

Captchas are not going to stop AI agents from taking over the internet, but zk proofs might.

These are just guesses, of course, and most likely bad ones, because hummingbird effects are inherently unpredictable — even Charles Darwin would not have looked at the evolution of flowers and predicted the advent of birds that fly backwards.

The effects are likely to unfold slowly, as well: “There was no lightbulb moment in the story of the lightbulb,” Johnson notes.

I’m sure he’d agree, however, that crypto has already “expanded the space around us.”

Let’s see what we (and the robots) do with it.

— Byron Gilliam

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