Blockchain Ankle Bracelets for Politicians or the Public?

There’s an old saying that goes, “when the government is free, the people are enslaved, but when the government is enslaved, the people are free”. The general trend over the last couple of centuries has been toward government gaining ever increasing advantages and freedoms and for the people to become oppressed and disadvantaged. Technology has played a significant role in catalyzing an ever increasing imbalance between the top 1% and the majority.

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The other less obvious trend is that technical disintermediation, while starting at the bottom of social status in menial jobs (taken over by automation), has been climbing the ladder of social rank ever since. When will it finally reach the top? The signs are already there of karma coming home to roost. Look at all of the people of high rank who’ve taken a fall lately because of some aspect of technology, especially in Hollywood. Our love for technology has most of us unwilling to reject it, which is why it’s now taking over virtually every aspect of our existence.

This trend has had some of us looking into how technical disintermediation can rid the world of corruption and lack of accountability in high places. But the limits of the technology of our era is forcing an important choice to be made. While bitcoin opened the door to technical disintermediation of political corruption by cracking the unlimited finance model, it was not built to assure consistency of industry logistics. Bitcoin was built as an exit from a corrupt political system, but later models such as Ethereum, NEM and EOS are meant to replace government.

A potential fork in the Crypto-economic Governance model

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Bitcoin sacrificed the potential to become a Turing complete governance model because it wanted to become the premier store of value (SOV). The idea of running entire applications (Distributed Apps or DApps) on the blockchain was an idea proposed by Vitalik Buterin in 2013. The ethereum blockchain was the result which is a combination of some of the technologies underlying bitcoin (such as proof of work) with a fully Turing complete protocol so that all possible theoretic computations can be done.

While this is great for flexibility, one of the downsides is that it’s less secure because with more functions comes a larger footprint to hack the system. Bitcoin has a very small and limited interface which means that hackers have much less to work with, so it is highly secure. Both ethereum and bitcoin were born in the very skeptical environment of the “trustless model” which seems to be what motivated Satoshi Nakamoto to write a fully decentralized trust model in 2008 as a result of the bank bailouts. But they both sacrificed scale (see the scalability trilemma) to achieve decentralized trust. This led @dan to reexamine the model of trust.

What level of Decentralization is sufficient?

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Bitcoin and ethereum both follow the model of complete trustlessness. As a result of making collusion next to impossible, they both suffer from an inability to process transactions quickly. In a sense, both of these technologies are way ahead of their time because they are so advanced that it surpassed the capacity of the hardware. Maybe a hundred years from now, the average smartphone would be able to mine bitcoin and ethereum and process 1 TB blocks on an internet connection inside of 1/10th of a second which would make the scalability trilemma moot, but not today.

What @dan has done is take a close look at how much trust is really needed, and by using a little trust, one can rebalance the scalability trilemma to achieve scale while hopefully still having enough decentralization and security. The models of bitcoin and ethereum essentially say that “humans can’t be trusted” and that we need our AI overlords in order to avoid catastrophic corruption and eventual extinction. The blockchains of @dan say that most people can be trusted as long as 2/3rds are honest, then the DPoS (Delegated Proof of Stake) model will be decentralization enough.

Technological Limitations will likely force a Hybrid Decentralization

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What this means is that we’re likely to have some sort of hybrid between human and machine rulership in the foreseeable future. I doubt that we will be rushing into a governance model that replaces human judgement completely, but at the same time collusion will become much more difficult to achieve than it is now. The politicians of the future may well look upon the current times as the “good old days” where they could sidestep accountability. This is going to become increasingly difficult for authority to avoid in the future.

With the hammer of Bitcoin and Ethereum breathing down government’s backs, they will likely embrace a project such as EOS which allows some semblance of human control while at the same time limiting that control by opt in contracts. If a republic can be forged in code that secures life, liberty and property without the corrupt coercion of democratic process able to bend the code, this can be a major step forward for justice.

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