Cincinnatus, Incentives and Choice

Enter Cincinnatus: Hero of Rome

Any student of the classics will eventually encounter Livy's Ab Urbe Condita Libri. In the third book, one will find the sublime story of Cincinnatus. The ultimate paragon of civic virtue rising from a humble farmer to a dictator savior of Rome at the battle of Mons Algidus. Perhaps apocryphally, Livy asserts our dear farmer hero rose to absolute power, beat the Aequi and then resumed the simple life in just 16 days.

Of course, it always helps to add an extra dose of epicness by repeating the feat for a second time and being so loved that Cincinnatus's son escaped punishment for military incompetence by pointing out someone would have to tell his father of the guilty verdict- If only Sulla could have followed the model.

There seems to be a human need for great leadership and guidance. It's a preference that has followed us throughout history and yet paradoxically we also applaud those who step away from great power. The United States enjoys its status as a constitutional republic only because George Washington declined to stage a post revolution coup (a crisis involving unpaid pensions in 1783 would have made an attempt quite easy).

Yet, we seem to be also trapped with situations that do require decisive judgement, quelling of dissent, and the courage to accept responsibility in the face of uncertainty. In the context of developing protocols that are inherently decentralized and made to remove human judgement wherever possible, how does one reconcile the need for the "good dictator"?

The New Boss

Cryptocurrencies and their derivatives are quickly asserting domain over value, identity, reputation and even becoming oracles of objective history. Their continued adoption will force their integration into commercial and criminal law as well as the governance of people. Thus we are now faced with the possibility of having systems lead us that are leaderless by design. How do we engineer the need for exceptions? Should we even do so?

Following the point, how should we decide changes, upgrades and those human needed exceptions for the ephemeral good dictators? Voting perhaps could provide some insight. It is a rich field that naturally decomposes into subtopics such as costs, incentives, frequency, conditions for eligibility and auditing. A good survey of these topics can be found with Professor Halderman's excellent course Securing Digital Democracy.

A concise summary is that for any system with rules that could change, one needs to decide the methods and actors needed to change them. Methods comprise the set of techniques such as the Condorcet Method or Borda Counts that enable a system to choose between two or more competing choices. The actors are those eligible to participate in the methods. This set can range from an Ochlocratic horde to an Oligarchy of power brokers. There are even some interesting notions of delegation such as liquid feedback.

Decentralized protocols are like digital constitutions in that they are by design extremely difficult to change. But, unlike constitutions, no cryptocurrencies on the market as of August of 2016, have the built in capacity to facilitate their own evolution.

So we are apparently left to traverse a treacherous digital canyon of being controlled by decentralized protocols, but lacking the means to evolve them to more useful means without the revolution of the fork. Surely we could do better?

Evolution: The Original Resilience Maker

I propose we tackle the lack of control by utilizing a concept known as competitive evolution. First, implement several configurations of a particular system with an intended service (say a payment system like bitcoin) with different parameterizations of methods, sets participatory actors and incentive structures. Second, pick the most successful paradigms (say by market capitalization, liquidity and user population), blend them and repeat the process.

Black swan events and bizarre edge cases will serve to test the fragility of the systems and systematic evolution should result in the best adapted system; however, it's important to point out that this process may result in a governance system that we are totally unaccustomed, and perhaps even violates our notion of fairness, reciprocity or basic human rights.

Return to the Mountain

This last point returns us to the good dictator. Events and systems out of control are a reality of humanity. We seem to always need the good dictator to save us from something eventually. Competitive evolution- like the code is law paradigm- gives us an emergent construct that transcends human intuition. Sometimes we need to slay the construct.

With respect to systems like Ethereum, this dictator could be a supermajority pulled kill switch for Gygesian applications. With respect to governance systems, one could override rulings presented by machine arbitration via a collective of elected judges. In a more distant sense, it could be a soft AI programmed to represent a community's ethical inclinations based upon years of studying their facebook profiles and communications.

The magic for me of these systems is that they seem to simultaneously push us into a completely foreign future while at the same time resurrecting the past for a bit of perspective and wisdom. We don't seem capable of shedding our humanity, but we do seem capable of interacting and learning from constructs that don't share it. Turning our governance over to competitive evolution with the occasional dictator might end up being the 21st century's democracy.