RE: On ethics in decentralized systems
I think it is interesting that you use DDOS as an example. It is the moral equivalent of an assassination market. Perhaps inadvertently, in your argument you state the following:
And such is the trouble of emergent behaviors. Just like the event’s funding, the responsibility for the event is shared among a large group of which no member is directly responsible.
Isn't this exactly what happens when people vote to pass laws. No individual is responsible for the innocent people killed on death row, or the millions of people killed in wars started by the people they voted for. No one is responsible for the taxes stolen from the population.
You see, the market is decentralized and these emergent technologies are actually countermeasures against other emergent ills created by government. So the question of which ill is worse: prohibition or selling illegal drugs? Someone killed by political processes or someone killed by an assassination market?
Perhaps the resultant assassination markets will be the markets solution to corrupt government officials? Perhaps they will save more life on the balance than the corrupt systems we have today.
So when you think of the ills these systems create, ask yourself why we need them in the first place. What ills have motivated the free market to produce this technology?
The solution to combat the ills is to legalize and deregulate activities currently outlawed. This would allow more efficient centralized solutions to emerge that can outcompete the decentralized systems that enable the negative outcomes described here.
Thanks for the response! Some comments:
In some sense, yes, it is the same. However, in decentralized systems, there may also be an element of inadvertent outcomes. In lawmaking, the distribution of responsibility is intentional. The system may work or it may not, and no one will be individually blamed (in theory). In decentralized systems, with the assumption that some emergent behavior came about by accident, the distribution of responsibility is a bug. There is difficult or little recourse for big disasters at scale.
Check out Alex Bulkin's article on this (https://blog.coinfund.io/elephant-in-the-room-ethical-blockchains-and-the-conundrum-of-governance-a11d0f9c4c56#.h42j3147z). To him, the conundrum of governance is that "a system designed to counteract power imbalances can be used to create them."
Perhaps. But are we ready for such a system? If you look at Colombia, their government works in this way today. If a politician goes against the cartels, he is assassinated. Is this a good system? And that's exactly the point: without studying, understanding, and counteracting issues that come about with large-scale decentralization (i.e. solving all the Sybil attack vectors, understanding reputation and identity, and counteracting oligopolistic tendencies that have so far arisen in every "decentralized system" from Bitcoin to the DAO), we probably should not put a bet measured in human lives that this system works.
There is no question in my mind that this technology is a response to a system that has stopped working in our modern technological context. I am inviting everyone to discuss the best way to transition into this system, which should be slowly and in a measured way that takes all of the side effects into account.