Decentralized Governance and Identity With Daniel Jeffries
Today on the show we have Daniel Jeffries, who recently came to prominence because of his Medium articles on blockchain and philosophy.Dan is an author, futurist and thinker. He writes science fiction novels, short stories and blog articles on topics ranging from cryptocurrency to enlightenment. He is also an engineer and serial entrepreneur who has spent two decades in the computer industry.This is the first part of our interview with Dan, where we cover the most important features of cryptocurrency, the ideology issues connected with incentivizing behaviour, as well as how a direct decentralized democracy might look like in the future.
The Real Power of Cryptocurrency
Dan talks about cryptocurrency as being revolutionary for a reason that people often miss: it enables people to print and distribute money without a central authority.Dan has also spent a lot of time thinking about the gamification of the money distribution. This new decentralized methodology for spreading money as widely as possible can end in numerous utopian scenarios, but also comes with major risks.
Is Gamification Just a Dopamine Slot Machine?
Traditional companies have a very good grasp on gamifying applications in a way that turns them dystopian. They have every wish to turn the new system into a “dopamine slot machine”. Here Dan sees an ideology based problem of what to incentivize. Imagine incentivizing something as elusive as happiness. Is the frequency of smiling a reliable indicator? Not very likely.When you incentivize the wrong thing, even with good intentions, it can end up much worse than a casino.However, Dan argues that if done ethically and thoughtfully, gamification can be effective at incentivizing positive behaviour.The early days of anything that is exciting are very utopian, and we all believe things are going to change the world. In reality, things end up becoming somewhere in between, both good and bad. - @Dan_Jeffries1CLICK TO TWEET
Four Types of Cryptocurrency For a Functional Society
Dan believes that effective behaviours in a society can be incentivized through four main types of coins.
- Deflationary coins are meant to be saved, and their value rises over time.
- Inflationary coins are designed to be circulated around and used as payment.
- Gamified tokens incentivize and reward certain behaviours in different areas of life.
- Action coins will always remain free on the network.
Multiple types of coins are a step out of ideology, and they should all be present simultaneously, reflecting life as it is.
Cicada: A Distributed Direct Democracy
Dan’s work in “The Jasmine Wars” served in large part as an inspiration for Cicada, a distributed direct democracy platform.One of the most interesting features of Cicada is identity. Its decentralized universal ID, called the Human Unique Identifier (HUID), is also a key to providing privacy. Another one is “Info Wallet”, enabling individuals to share only tiny pieces of their information via quickly generated sub-IDs.Cicada platform also envisions a direct democracy voting system that protects against voter fatigue and allows for such thing as automatic, hybrid or manual voting. For example, you can vote on issues that matter to you yourself, and let the system run by artificial intelligence vote on your behalf for everything else.When you have all these really smart people coming together, you get the brave New World Problem: nobody wants to take out the trash, order paper clips, or take orders. Everybody is in charge. And it fails. - @Dan_Jeffries1CLICK TO TWEET
In This Episode of Future Thinkers Podcast:
- What are the most revolutionary yet overlooked features of cryptocurrency?
- New economic paradigm – how to spread the money as widely as possible
- Incentivizing certain behaviours is a double-edged sword
- Solving ideology issues with multiple types of cryptocurrencies
- What is Cicada platform and how does it work?
- How to protect privacy in a decentralized system
- “Rites of passage” applied to digital identity
- How to prevent voters fatigue in a direct democracy
- Can voting be automated?
- DAO and the “brave new world problem”