DAOs, Democracy and Governance: a conversation with crypto legend Ralph Merkle
A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of participating in a conversation with Ralph Merkle, a living legend among CS and cryptography circles, which I recorded and posted on my podcast. We discussed Ethereum, Blockchain, Mars Space Travels, Prediction Markets and the Future of Democracy.
For those of who who don't know, Ralph is a computer scientist, one of the inventors of public key cryptography, the inventor of cryptographic hashing, inventor of "Merkle Trees", which are the basis for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Git, researcher and speaker of cryonics, molecular nanotechnology, and more recently he's shown interest in the blockchain technology and its wider applications.
He recently wrote a paper titled "DAOs, Democracy and Governance".
Paper Abstract
Democracies are typically seen as governments which call upon the governed to make the major decisions of government: who shall lead, what policies to follow, what laws to enact. In all these matters democracies call upon ordinary citizens to make complex decisions with eventful consequences.
We do not call upon ordinary untrained citizens to perform surgery, fly airplanes, design computers, or carry out the other myriad tasks needed to keep society functioning, what makes governance different? The problem is readily understood: if we give governance to “experts” they will make decisions in their own best interests, not in the best interests of us all. As we have seen too often in the past, this leads to enrichment of a small elite and the enslavement or worse of the vast majority. Can we take advantage of the expertise of the best and brightest, while insulating the system from attempts they might make to gain control?
Modern research into “the wisdom of crowds” provides new insights into how to combine the expertise of all participants without handing over control to “experts”. Combined with research on Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), this allows us to design a new form of democracy which is more stable, less prone to erratic behavior, better able to meet the needs of its citizens, and which better uses the expertise of all its citizens to make high-quality decisions. We call this new form of democracy a DAO Democracy.
Conversation recording
The event was organized by my friend Joel at HOLON (AKA the Love Nest, where I was staying for a few weeks), the Decentralized Autonomous Society Meetup (Palo Alto).
It was recently covered by Coindesk and you can listen to the entire thing on my podcast "Reason and Science [Eventually]".
♫ Listen to the conversation (MP3) ♫
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