Protocol Design as a Scaffolding for Organization of Meritocracies - Ethereum's Consensus-Through-Split event

Over the past two years, thousands of people around the world have come together and self-organized around a collection of ideas that go under the name The Ethereum project. The project has worked towards furthering research and development into crypto-economics, and it is now in beta with the release of the Homestead version of Ethereum. The project plans to build on itself as it moves towards the creation of a "world computer", a form of universal crypto-law protocol that implements the idea of smart-contracts, first put forth by the information security researcher Nick Szabo in his 1997 paper Formalizing and Securing Relationships on Public Networks.

The ideas behind the Ethereum project are a continuation of a legacy of ideas that stretches centuries back in time. During his talk The History of the Blockchain, Nick Szabo walks through the history and evolution of currencies and of legal systems, he highlights the work of Friedrich Hayek and his research into the protocol layers of society, the philosophical work of Ayn Rand, and continues with the advent of the personal computer and the grand merger of information security, law and economics.

The trend over time as currencies and law is introduced, and later on merged with information security, is towards decentralization as security, and an increased reliance on protocols over relationships. Economic protocols, including legal protocols, act as a form of scaffolding that extends our cognition and our reach, and enable new types of social organization. Just like any other technology, the technology of law is a form of augmentation of the human species, a cybernetic extension of us and a tool that expands the ways in which we can connect.

Industrial tools extend our muscles, digital tools extend our minds, and law as a tool extends the ways in which we can organize as a society.

---

The Bitcoin project was the first currency to exist on a network that transcended the previous social order. Such systems often go under the name decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). As Bitcoin was introduced into the wild, it served as a form of broadcaster and it attracted individuals from all over the world to join forces around this new social protocol, and Bitcoin gradually came to form its own meritocracy which included those who in some way or form contributed to the existence of the Bitcoin network.

Meritocracies as a cultural expression grow on top of the human species, our tools, our technology and our laws and cultural operative systems, and are part of the phyla of ideas, what Jacques Monod describes as "a kingdom that rises above the biosphere, whose denizens are ideas", and what Darwin described as "social evolution", which was later formalized under the idea of memes, coined by Richard Dawkins in the 70s.

If culture is viewed as a living breathing thing and as an organism, then it becomes clear that the environment in which it reproduces and mutates will shape its memes, much like the environment of a petri dish shapes the growth, filtration, selection and evolution of bacteria cultures. The environment is as big a part of the organism as the genetic programs, or the memes in the case of a cultural organism.

One of my favourite examples of how a socio-technological environment shapes and molds culture is how the end of the decentralized society in ancient greece, and the rise of the centralized roman empire, re-shaped the culture that had formed in the antiques. In his book The Forgotten Revolution - How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why it Had to Be Reborn, Lucio Russo walks us through the changes in the social structure during the rise of the roman empire, and how the roman society forgot and erased the legal protocols of ancient greece. As the greek culture was introduced to this new environment, it did what any organism does when its removed from its natural habitat, it died, through gradual decay and degeneration.

During this cultural regression, the peopling of individuals within the roman ecosystem would fail to understand and to process the memes that they had inherited, and so they incorporated the parts of the memes that they did understand into the culture that was native to their ecosystem. These are the origins of for example the epicycles model of the solar system from the work of Ptolemy, or the practice of astrology as roman people attempted to explain things that they had been told by their ancestors.

The human-technology "computer" of the roman age failed to process the cultural software of the past.

---

If we assume that the core of the Ethereum project is not technological as in the bits that encode the system, but is instead made up of the social protocol that is encoded into the system, the legal and economic protocols, then we could go on to predict that the main attractors of Ethereum is its protocol design, and the main scaffold on top of which a meritocracy would organize is on top of the crypto-law idea and the implementation of the crypto-law protocols.

This brings into question what would happen if some force were to change the protocol, as in for example the introduction of new rules. The Ethereum blockchain recently launched a spin-off chain with the intent to break the protocol, and to move funds from one contract to another without providing the crypto-legal signatures to do so. This new chain has mutated to a new type of environment, and is now as an attractor signaling new types of people and peopling. The spin-off chain has broken a number of rules within the crypto-law ethos, and will as such give fruit to a different type of culture.

I argued in a recent article on possible naivity about the costs of centralization that changes that fundamentally alter the main structure of an environment may have larger effects than could have been foretold. Cultural regression seldom happens instantaneously, instead, it's a gradual process and a silent process, to the point where people are not even aware that they are going through it.

Could it be that the spin-off chain have underestimated the costs of "altering the engine itself"? Does building a crypto-law system require one to actually be immersed within a strict ethos of, as Nick Szabo described it in his whitepaper, "Automata as Authority", or would the same ideas that led to the Ethereum project have emerged within a less decentralized culture like, say, Microsoft? Is the brain capable of processing both statism and anarchy at the same time, or will it gradually corrupt, shut down the imagination, and regress into a culture more capable of surviving the centralized protocols of a statist society?

If we look at the history of ideas from what now falls under crypto-law, both the Bitcoin project and later on the Ethereum project have gestated within outliers that lived outside of the dominant culture. It was only within these individuals that ideas such as those could form and grow. With the "application rescue fork", the legacy seems to now have moved into the mainstream, and it also seems to have severed its ties to the past and its roots. From an attractor perspective, and using the demographics of the crypto-anarchy movement over time, would it be possible to predict which fork and which idea will attract the most intelligence ?

---

I'll leave you with this talk from Gavin Wood on allegality.