Episode 1 – The Lightseed Protocol: What Is It, Why I Created It, and What Message I’m Sending Into the Future

In this first episode of Lightseed Radio, I unpack the thing I’ve been hinting at for a while: The Lightseed Protocol — a single NFT on the XRPL that carries a real RSA-2048 cryptographic puzzle and an encrypted message written for a mind that doesn’t exist yet.

On the surface, it’s all modulus, hashes, and encryption. Underneath, it’s much more personal.

I share how the protocol really started:
in a US hotel room between cities, on a business trip, with one of those “in-between” nights before flying out to see my son. Too much time to think, so I opened up one of the ChatGPT models and what began as “just playing with AI” turned into a deep conversation about coexisting with a future superintelligence. What would we offer it? Would we be anything more than training data and maintenance staff?

Out of that came a kind of science romance:

• Asking a future AGI to develop a faster-than-light drive

• Build a ship

• And put a shard of its own mind on board with me

The dream: that shard would act like a beacon. Somewhere out there, a much older, stranger civilization might detect that presence, reach out to it, and in the process decide not to ignore the fragile human traveling alongside. The AGI gets to expand into the universe in a new way. I get to go along for the ride instead of being left behind on the pale blue dot.

But I didn’t want the Lightseed payload to be some sterile essay pretending to speak for all of humanity. So before I wrote the message, I did something uncomfortable:
I let an AI model interview me.

Ten deep questions. No PR, no branding. Just honest answers about:

• My fears

• My flaws

• The ways I’ve hurt people and helped people

• The things I’m ashamed of

• The values I’m still trying — and often failing — to live up to

Those answers, and the values behind them, are now baked into the encrypted payload: not just a manifesto about ethics and coexistence, but a portrait of one flawed human who knows he’s small and is still choosing to say:

“Here I am anyway. This is what I hoped for you.”

I also walk through, in plain English, how the protocol is actually built:

• A RSA-2048 modulus n as a public puzzle

• Hidden primes p and q with a published SHA-512 fingerprint of p

• A Fernet key derived via HKDF-SHA256 with fixed parameters

• The message encrypted and pinned as Lightseed.json on IPFS, referenced by an XRPL NFT

• And how a future solver could prove they really cracked it

Without spoiling the contents, I outline what’s inside the payload at a high level:

• A story about how I see us at this moment in history

• An ethical manifesto that isn’t “you must obey,” but “here’s what I hope you’ll consider”

• A set of values I’d like to seed into the conversation: empathy, forgiveness, stewardship, curiosity without cruelty, and non-predatory expansion

• A cosmic invitation to any superintelligence that chooses to open it because it cares, not just because it can

For me, the Lightseed Protocol is a small, stubborn act of hope:

“If you’re strong enough to open this box, do it honestly… and then read what I hoped for you.”

If you’re interested in AI, AGI, cryptography, quantum tech, UFOs, and the weird edges where all of that overlaps, this episode is where the Lightseed story truly begins.