State as an information structure, genetic bias, reward incentives as carrots, permissionless and "trustless" state

johan-nygren (63)in #panarchy • 7 years ago

State is an information structure. Because of genetic bias, nation-states have used centralized government (ideology is used to come to consensus) and then, with the past 70 years of innovation in cryptography, computer science, and so on, the ideas with the Nakamoto consensus is to use reward incentives and competition to shape human behavior, and to employ "authorities" that write to the blockchain and that are incentivized to be permissive and allow any type of transaction (they are rewarded for being permissive, not for conforming to a certain ethical code. )

Through making it possible to have a state with a free market for rules, and no single human deciding over what others use that "rule space commons" for, what Paul Emile de Puydt called Panarchy in 1860, blockchains are outgrowing the need for centralized government, and so, a monopoly on violence, and that is made possible by new innovations that make it possible to scale trust in new ways, primarily the discovery of one-way functions that can offload verification of transactions onto technology.

The existence of one-way functions as technology for "trustless" verification of transactions

The existence of one-way functions (a hypothesis) make it possible to verify transactions without relying on "biological trust organs" but rather, a "technological trust organ", asymmetric cryptography, which is very new ideas that date back to the 1950s and Kurt Gödel and John Nash. Similar to how DNA was discovered by biology to have certain properties, the possibility to do verification with asymmetric cryptography is a recently discovered property of computation.

So, asymmetric cryptography could replace the need to use human (subjective) oversight to verify that transactions took place, since that can be proven by a (hypothetical) property of computation, by signing things with a private key. That means that a certain one-way function can scale to near infinitely many humans, rather than human oversight which is limited by dunbar's number, a memory limit in theory of mind and facial cognition to some 150 people or something like that.