Response to Dan Larimer's "The Limits of Crypto-economic Governance"
Earlier today Dan issued a post on medium with the titleThe Limits of Crypto-economic Governance. The post was a response to Vitalik's one that criticized DPOS (Delegated Proof of stake).
Vitalik entrusts artificially intelligent systems while Dan seems to rely more on the good will of the people. As an anthropologist, I find Dan's blind trust in humans to be naive. Most people or (2/3) as he assumes, do not have good intentions. Even Dan would agree that all people are primarily selfish and self-interested as he pointed plenty of times in his own posts. People, all people, are opportunists. If they can game a system for their own benefit they will, and they do. DPOS systems will always be gamed by those who control the majority share. The only difference with the current political system is that the gaming will be less obvious due to technology acting as an intermediary.
Governance systems of reputation and of voting power will always have the same problems. Whether it is EOS or Steemit, the story is much the same. A few individuals that have the economic power will govern and control the ecosystem and as the Steemit experiment demonstrated, it will be gamed.
DPOS systems enhance plutocracy much like in the real world. it is literally the ability to print your own money in your own little ecosystem and crown yourself king. Greatest proof if the transference of the investors of Bitshares into Steemit, having a whale status, becoming "community leaders" and such. No difference in the real world where power is transferred generation after generation to the same families while their wealth increases. Check the trending page of steemit if you are in doubt. Check who is voting who. Those who have money are featured more and 2/3 of them are neither "good" or "bad". They are just opportunists.
Another part that I don't find intellectually honest from Dan's post is the political tone and wording. The mantra "My entire mission in life is based upon finding crypto-economic solutions for securing life, liberty, property, and justice for all" is literally bullshitology. In general the entire "heart" symbol of EOS, Brock Pierce's douchebaggery and fakery about changing the world, all that crap makes EOS sound more like a political campaign where the customers are desperate morons looking for a saviour. Same as with politics or self help seminars.
What does it even mean to secure "life"? Biologically? Are people threatened to be killed? Will the EOS system prevent death somehow? What does liberty mean? Liberty and security are very abstract words that have different meanings in people's minds. Same applies to property or justice. All these are marketing words that politicians use in order to lure naive and hopeless minds into their own narrative. They are neither intellectually honest or clear about their message. Every single dictator that ever lived on this earth could say the exact same sentence and be correct. Because in reality some always get sacrificed so that some of those people can have life, liberty, property and justice.
Dan then goes forward explaining how Proof of Stake is superior to proof of Work:
Proof of Stake systems give each person a percentage of the air time proportional to the amount of stake they have. This eliminates the need for a massive power station to override everyone else’s signal, but still requires you to have the ability to operate your transmitter 24/7 so it is ready to transmit when the time arrives. Those without the technological ability to operate a transmitter must buy airtime from those with ability. Those with 51% of the stake can ignore those with 49%. This is rule by plutocracy.
Based on simple gaussian distribution and based on the pareto principle that Dan himself adheres to, the vast majority of people will have no voice. No stake. This begins primarily from the one year ico that is heavily gamed. Those with more economic power will own more EOS and thus ensure more governance. As the market adjusts the whales can take advantage of the average Joe even more, ensuring more power for themselves. This is true even with Bitcoin. The rich whales get richer and gap widens even if the wealth gets more distributed. The distribution happens from the middle of towards the poor while the upper 20% gain even more power. Claiming that DPOS can solve this is ridiculous. The game is zero sum. The tokens are limited as much as the wealth. What matters is the gap between the rich and the poor not if everyone holds one token. Everyone holds a few dollars as well but almost no one has control over the financial system.
Delegated Proof of Stake systems give each stakeholder the power to vote for the people who control the transmitter. This voting process is also stake weighted, but due to the nature of approval voting simply having a large stake is not sufficient to guarantee you some control over the transmitter. You must have approval by the majority of the voting stake to have control over the transmitter, this is a significantly higher threshold of approval than pure proof of stake. Unlike, pure Proof of Stake, it is possible for the voters to create a system where airtime cannot be purchased, but where the elected transmitters are expected to give everyone their fair share of air-time based upon their stake.
Here Dan admits that the masses will kiss whale ass, much like it happens in Steemit or in the real world. Higher approval numbers is irrelevant since the effect of democratisation is rather a snowball phenomenon. Those with the economic power will control whatever happens and gather the most people, far more than 51%.
As as far as humans leaders go, whenever there is massive power there is also abuse. We already see this wil practical experiments both in crypto and in the real world, from Nelson Mandela to Hitler.
DPOS doesn't solve any governance problem. At best It gives the ability of the founder of the system and those with economic power to create their own little worlds where they are crowned kings.
Vitalik's approach, although more dark, is surely the correct way to go. Human governance, much like everything else in our life, can be enhanced by finely tuned artificial intelligence. Hollywood has stupified many people believing in some kind of apocalypse if we leave artificial intelligence take over. I beg to differ. Human emotion is far more dangerous than artificial intelligence. Emotion is what causes massive wars, love, hate and everything in between that make a system inherently unstable. Governance cannot rely in the unpredictability of human emotions nor the whim or assumption that 2/3 of random people under any ecosystem can be entrusted to be "good". Hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution prove exactly the opposite.
I disagree with your conclusions but I think the debate is an important and interesting one.
Not that DPOS is better than what centuries of experiments in human governance have managed to achieve in the real world. It is not. But "governance by algorithm" on the other hand is pure lunacy and dangerous delusion.
First of all, whether human emotion is "far more dangerous than articificial intelligence" is pure bullshit on your side because you have no idea how dangerous AI can be - it is only beginning and it can evolve in ways that you have absolutely no chance to predict. You simply cannot say how dangerous AI can turn out to be. On the other hand, with respect to how dangerous human emotions could be, our observations go back 25 - 30 centuries. Although
it is safe to assume that a certain degree of unpredictablity remains, it's much harder to argue that we can ALL be spectacularly wrong. Hence saying that Vitalik approach is "surely" the correct way to go is utter bullshitness again - you cannot say that for sure - you can feel it in your guts, with your emotion, but not more than that.
Secondly, and more importantly, saying such a thing gets the axiology backwards: the only reason we are even discussing governance is for humanity's sake. While each of us is entitled to an opinion, it is the humankind, in aggregate, that is the ultimate arbiter, not any one of us. And pretending that something that evolves autonomously, as AI does or will soon do, can be better aligned with the interests of the humankind than humankind ITSELF, is peddling untruths.
The truth is that, whatever the dashed hopes of Satoshi and Vitalik, blockchains and cryptocurrency CANNOT escape the failures of human politics if only because they are built and evolved by ... groups of humans. They can nevertheless help alleviate the weaknesses of human politics, if only they adopt that as a (very worthy if not utopian) goal.
Vitalik is young and naive.
Politics= many pests. There are a thousand good ideas that can be attributed to people, and each good idea (republic/self-government/consent of the governed or a pitcher for water) can be abused and inverted on its head, but there's no denying that you cannot code harmony, exactly how you cannot legislate morality. AI is dealing with the problem of inter-personal relationships by the exclusion of the personal aspect for the invariably cold and calculating machine mind whos emotional intelligence is neither emotional nor intelligence.
I know how dangerous A.I can be because it can be programmed with specifications
I don't know how dangerous humans can be because human emotion is unpredictable.
on can be controlled. The other is irrational.
guess which one is the most dangerous.
The AI. can be tamed to run like an autistic brain. Not like something that it evolves. There can be many kinds of AI.
the problems begin with deep learning when AI can evolve (auto-program itself). Yes the humans are irrational but with 30 centuries of hindsight one can say that they are "irrational" in an almost "bounded" way - the boundary is a bit fuzzy but not completely non-deterministic. There is a large encasing where you can be pretty sure you can fit the whole irrationality of humans (with a 8-9 sigma probability)
During cold war a nuclear missile failed to launch due to one person's insubordination. It is cool to speak in hindsight when everything roles out good.
An A.I can be programmed with levels of function. Humans cannot
AI can be just an unpredictable as humans. It is very hard to comprehensively imagine how dangerous A.I. could be, for the most part, it is not the obvious things that A.I. are programmed to do that are dangerous, it is the unintended consequences of directives that seem normal to us humans but result is the classic paper clip maximizer problem. You claim that "Human emotion is far more dangerous than artificial intelligence." This seems like a statement you should have less confidence in. Human emotion is dangerous, A.I. is dangerous. And we know a hell of a lot more about how and why human emotion is dangerous than about the dangers of A.I.
You say "The AI. can be tamed to run like an autistic brain. Not like something that it evolves. There can be many kinds of AI."
This is confusing, especially as you almost contradict yourself by saying "There can be many kinds of AI" at the end. Yea, one of those kinds, is A.I's that evolve, and another is those you can't "tame". And yes, people are building both kinds.
This issue is very complicated and clearly we want some balance of human influence/goals and AI in our governance systems, as i'm sure both Dan and Vitlalik would agree (yes balance would be different based on their approach). But reading your simplistic interpretation of this issue, i can't help but agree with you, whatever emotions guided you to write this post are dangerous, much more dangerous than whatever A.I. you'll probably never make.
Yet you don't talk about the off chance that the programming fails and/or glitches out, because how likely is that something doesn't act according to programming, or does so but in a very autistic and obtuse way.
"The rich whales get richer and gap widens even if the wealth gets more distributed"
I grew from 70 bought SP to 1300+ earned SP thx to my activity in 8 months and conetent. I strongly doubt ANY whale did this kind of growth.
As long as new users have the opportunity to grow faster than whales upvoing just each other - the system works in my opinion.
I dont care if the earn just because of self voting. It will always be less than honest content creators can earn through valuable work.
I don't get the notion that everyone should have an equal voice regardless of stake. Some risk more than others, get in earlier and thus should have a proportionally larger influence.
same applies about the real world. exactly my point
I think it's time to stop worrying about the manner and form of governance and start looking at how people are raised. It doesn't matter what form of government you choose, if people are raised with violence, they will be violent. If people are raised to be abusive or rude, they will carry that environment to adulthood because that behavior is famil-iar.
While it is possible to create new forms of government, fairer forms of government, even with AI, one must still take note of the neuroses of our so-called leaders, their circle of friends and collaborators and be aware that even with good intentions they will fail, unless and until treating people with respect and respecting human rights is a way of life, not just a habit.
I wrote this article months ago to reflect on that very point:
https://steemit.com/monopoly/@digitalfirehose/government-isn-t-the-problem-people-are-the-problem-let-s-solve-our-problems-together
I suggest that your post proves my point. It doesn't matter if it's proof of stake or proof of work, there will always be people who want to game the system. And when people game the system, they must cast empathy for others aside. There is no other way. Now I'd say that "gaming the system" is a sign of psychopathy, albeit a very mild form of it, to say the least.
Further proving my point, is that every study I've ever read on the evolution of our species, indeed of all animals, has shown that natural selection favors cooperation over selfishness. Therefore, I submit to you that selfish behavior is learned behavior, learned by the children from their parents and passed on, generation after generation. Selfishness is a habit.
Once everyone in the human race can think through selfish behavior to its ultimate conclusion, we can see that in the long run, we do not benefit from behavior that disadvantages our brothers and sisters. I want to make a distinction here with the term selfishness and distinguish it from self-care. There is self-care in the sense of maintenance, and there is selfish behavior that works to the disadvantage of everyone else. One them keeps mankind alive. The other does not.
I think this is the finer point. When one person, or a small minority of people, work towards the end of putting everyone else at a disadvantage, the line that distinguishes selfish behavior has been crossed.
I'm not sure of the solution to how to end that behavior, but I have some ideas on how to get started, here:
https://steemit.com/humanity/@digitalfirehose/plan-b-for-humanity
How we raise our kids determines how they manage their emotions and decide whether or not or how to act on them. This is the key point I have made in many of my posts. If you want good government, you must raise people to respect the rights of others as a way of life. I can't think of a better way.
You have here a great post with great insight into crypto governance. I hope you find what I wrote here informative. Keep digging.
Human nature will always make people violent and antagonistic. Unless we escape out current physical form, DNA and all that makes us human, nothing else will change.
Remember. The same chemicals that make us love also make us hate
It is often assumed that humans are by nature violent. I have seen enough evidence to prove to me at least, that violence is not human nature. It is human habit.
A recent study of the historical record of violence over the last 200 years shows that war, defined as group on group violence, was actually pretty rare. The authors of the study came to the conclusion that war is really just a habit, not a natural tendency of humans.
I guess you could call me an optimist if you want. But I'm fairly convinced that human to human violence is really just learned behavior. The success of our species is supported by the preponderance of evidence, and that evidence shows that cooperation is what makes our species so successful.
Language was born out of the need for greater cooperation, and that in turn furthered our success as a species (I use the term "success" rather loosely here). If cooperation were not that important, then I doubt humans would have ever adopted language as a means of communication.
I think it is fair to say that we've been fooled into thinking that violence is human nature as a way to advance war, to advance an agenda for profit by people who value money more than people. I also think it is fair to question the mental capacity of those who would advance war for any cause as an initiating aggressor.
I think that for humanity to survive, we must err on the side of peace.
Everything is learned. Via experience. Which is determined by the will or instinct to survive. Which is physiological or evolutionary. So if a human needs to do something to survive it will. Violence. Love. Hate. Emotion is instinctive. Why do other animals cry or wine? Becaue they are slightly parasitic or reliant on something else to take care of it. This emotion is a survival instinct. Agression is an emotion that is fear driven in order to protect the host from threat. Etc etc.
not about violence but about self interest. reason for humans not being as violent back then was because they lived in remote distances from each other and had plenty of resources. Once competition kicks in then you have wars, gaming of system and all that.
Explain how Zomia has had an anarchist society free from War for 2000 years, free from government and they are 100 million strong? I think you missed the point, it's learned not inherited, that's why you can take a vicious animal and if you rear its children they will be pets and if you do that enough their physical characteristics will evolve too, such as foxes becoming dogs.
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Provocative article and great discussion here! On one hand, i fully agree with the conclusion, that DPOS in itself isn't the solution to governance. On the other hand, as one earlier commentator, as well as Dan mentioned in his post, an AI would be always programmed by a human, and with that, again, would all factors of fallacy, manipulation and corruption would come in, so i don't believe this is the solution. What makes the difference, as the crypto world is a pluralistic one, there is always a choice which tech you use, and people would naturally go to the more efficient/cheap/beneficial one, and not the one which is corrupted (where the whales suck in excessive share of funds). This only works with Steemit currently, as it is a monopoly if it comes to onchain social networks, but that is due to change rapidly.
You can program it so that it avoids such pitfalls. That's the point of programming. It enhances some aspects of human nature while downplaying others.
Of course, but programming too isn't a perfect endeavour, there are bugs, and you can even insert loopholes etc. An AI itself will always be as good as its creator makes it.
But who will program the A.I. ?
This could turn into the Travelers dilemma.
Anyone can program it and even edit it in a fashion that wikipedia works.
Hence good luck getting anything approved by the Jimmy Wales censorship control team.
Anyone, except everyone.
"Governance cannot rely in the unpredictability of human emotions nor the whim or assumption that 2/3 of random people under any ecosystem can be entrusted to be "good"."
What does to be "good" even mean? Something other than keeping your word and honoring your commitments? Isn't that enough since the blockchain will enforce compliance and agreements will be transparent?
In my opinion, putting an end to the fraud of fractional reserve banking is enough of an improvement over the current monetary system to justify switching to dpos. And dpos is vastly superior to pow because of the energy savings. The fact that the distribution of wealth may not be siginificantly improved is perhaps just a demonstration that the 80/20 rule manifests here just as in almost every other sphere that we encounter.
Putting full faith in AI to govern us has potentially terrifying consequences that you don't seem to have taken into consideration in your article (although you glancingly allude to some Hollywood scaremongering).
"Good" is abstract. Honoring commitments in the blockchain is rather redundant since the voters will decide whether you are doing it or not. And you can still be "bad" but be voted as "good" because it is all about who holds the power.
Energy savings is not a problem. All systems demand energy. Even EOS needs energy from satellites, computers, the heaters the the programmers will need in Scandinavia to code. The energy thing is just a meme. Not a real problem.
The fractional reserve banking issues money just like EOS does. The only difference is the ecosystem. Nothing else. One can choose which umbrella to live under based on where they have better economic power. Obviously someone who holds a lot of FIAT will choose the dollar where someone who invested in Bitcoin early or EOS will choose the latter.
I trust AI more because it can be programmed to judge without emotion. And I don't think any AI can do more horrors than a human.
My dpos experience is with bitshares and steem. But I would be surprised to learn that EOS issues money at interest! Is it so? Regardless, that is at the central banking level. I am referring to the practice of lending out multiples of the currency actually held in a bank, at interest, yet telling depositors that they can withdraw their deposit at any time (unless locked in a term deposit). That is fraud.
Yes, all systems demand energy. So what? The POW system is incredibly energy intensive compared to dpos which requires minimum energy in comparison to secure the blockchain and transact. The energy thus saved from the operation of the blockchain can then be put to other productive uses.
Finally, do you contend that emotion has no useful information to contribute to otherwise purely logical decisions? In other words, judging without information coming from emotion being taken into account is always a good thing? Really?
The interest part is the same as the staking model. different narrative.
Depends on the bank how much you can withdraw. Even current DPOS systems hae a locking mechanism. Look at Steemit for example. you still need to wait to power down.
Energy is up to the consumer. At the end of the day is all about averaging down costs.
I contend that emotion has nothing to do with the intricacies of governance. it is a hurdle. Governance through the blockchain is a mathematical problem. Emotion in governance makes everything buggy because humans are unpredictable. logic isn't.
The problem is that humans are unpredictable? How do you resolve the maxim of law that decrees that Anger is temporary insanity? How can Emotion be removed from governance (the public good), it cannot get more absurd than decreeing fire to be useless because it burns and equally absurd as emotion is useless in the affairs of men because it's not logic! Because people hate we should abolish love.
Rejoice.
If AI can be programmed to judge without emotion who would listen to such judgement.
Here's some maxims of law (judging) that will throw it for a loop:
To the point. DPOS is a remake of what we are confronted with in every day life.
but what will the AI need us for?
it doesn't have to have needs
if it becomes self aware it will realize it does have needs.