Ethereum, Blockchains, and Digital Democracy

Tomorrow will be a historic day.

Not just for Ethereum, but for cryptocurrencies as a whole. It’s easy to fall into our tribes - the excitement of money makes us emotionally attached to our own systems. But we are all in this together, trying to build a new world with digital currencies.

And tomorrow, a Democracy is born.

I believe we would be remiss to discount the significance of this moment, to downplay it as simply a “one-time” fix. I think it would also be dishonest, both to ourselves and to our fellow community members, to do so.

We are seeing the birth of a new Democracy. A Decentralized Digital Democracy if you’re a fan of alliteration. A DDD if you’re a fan of TLAs.

Tomorrow the majority is voting to correct what it perceives to be a crime against the community, against Ethereum. Tomorrow thousands of people around the globe are individually choosing to exercise the power given to them by the blockchain, in order to revert a legal transaction (according to the code as law mantra) that was nonetheless an egregious violation of the intent of the contract.

Yet, I thought a primary point of smart contracts was avoiding exactly these sorts of philosophical debates - debates of intent, value, justice.

Have smart contracts failed?

In a way, yes. This crisis has taught us something. Writing smart contracts is fucking hard. But we already knew that. We knew what was at stake. We knew that a bug in the code would lead not to a stack overflow or a 500 error or a blue screen of death, but lost money. Out the door. Gone forever.

No, we knew that.

We learned something else, soon to be immortalized in the history books that will one day be timelessly frozen in crystals of DNA, shipped around the Galaxy to tell the history of Earth, the First Planet.

We learned that the Digital Revolution has finally begun, true in essence to both words. For what else could you call it, when a decentralized majority of individuals, cooperating anonymously and asynchronously around the globe, are able to freeze any account deemed illegitimate? When, in the history of mankind, has the populace had so much power?

Make no mistake, this is a revolution.

It may seem that I am blowing things out of proportion. That I am idealizing an accounting correction, or maybe that I am just being dramatic because I’m high off my rocker.

Let us remember that money is simply information. A very special type of information, but nonetheless just information.

Money is special because it transmits value, and value, combined with a self-interested human desire for wealth, transmits power. Power is the ability to direct other people towards a particular aim, and power cannot be held without money.

Keep in mind, money and power are not the same. Money is not power, at least not directly. But money enforces power, because money can buy violence, the fundamental enforcer of power. A government with no money can have no police, and no military. Without paychecks, a military will quickly fall apart and disband.

And money, the property of government for millennia, now belongs to the people.

Okay okay I’m now definitely getting ahead of myself. The value of cryptocurrencies currently stands at a paltry $13 billion. Governments don’t use cryptocurrencies, and if we shut down all 600+ of them neither Obama nor Putin would lose any sleep.

But good money pushes out bad money, and I predict that in time the governments will adopt these new systems. Because in a digital world, digital money is superior. And if the existing governments do not adapt, they will be replaced.

In a digital world, digital government will rule. And when digital governments rule, digital citizens will reign.