Blockchain and Futures of Human Interaction: What is a Decentralized Autonomous Society?
Blockchains, the engine behind Bitcoin, is proving to allow many revolutionary technologies. Blockchains allows humans and computers to share and control information in a way that is transparent and decentralized.
This article is intended for people who are still grappling with the magical algorithm that is allowing new ways of human interactions.
Conveying how much change Blockchains will bring to our plante is difficult. Imagine the Internet back in the late 80's. It was hard to explain to most people, and there weren't many clear uses for it yet. None the less, many people worked hard to manifest the Internet's potential, and soon the Web reshaped the way humans interact.
Blockchain is similar to the Internet because both promote Decentralization. They distribute power and information to many. This is a reversal of the centuries-long trend of Centralization; of consolidation of power into states and then super states.
Super states like the US and EU are collapsing, even if the TV pundits are continuing to pretend as if everything is normal. The Centralization proved too fragile; it was easily co-opted by an oligarchy.
There is a way out of this mess, without the dangers inherent in a traditional revolution. Traditional governments need tax revenue and belief in their legitimacy to continue to exist. Without these external sources of energy, these parasitic systems will wither and die.
This is not to say that governments do not provide important services.
We can provide many of the same government services using Blockchain.
With Blockchain powering governance, transactions become more visible so that they are much more resistant to corruption.
Bitcoin, and similar cryptocurrencies based on Blockchain, offer us a way of exchanging goods and services that is independent of a central control point. This makes corruption much more difficult. The technology at the heart of Bitcoin - the Blockchain - permits us to do more than just generate currency secure, decentralized manner.
A Blockchain is a network of distributed information; a shared ledger copied and worked on by all participating in the network. Many Blockchains reside on thousands of computers, across the world. BLOCKS of Changes to the ledger are shared and processed collectively, and once the results are verified by many computers, the BLOCK is added to the CHAIN. Each Blockchain is transparent because everybody hosting the network has a copy of all of the transactions. However, it is secure because in order to manipulate your own data, you need a complex password called a private key that can prove it was you who requested an action.
With Bitcoin, the private key allows you to transfer your Bitcoin to someone else, while a public key is an address where anyone can send Bitcoin. In future systems, a private key will be used to verify when we sign a document, or voted, or request arbitration during a dispute.
There are already groups such as BitNation that offer Identification and Notarization services based on Blockchains. Soon, reputation and dispute resolution systems will give humans an alternative to the legacy-state court system, which in the U.S. is at best financially inaccessible, and at worst a for-profit enterprise in human slavery.
Within ten years it will be as easy to create a new society - with its own currency, legislature, dispute resolution, reputation system, etc - as it is to make a Facebook group. Once that happens, why would we continue dumping tax money into systems that we know are no longer serving the greater good? Why would we continue voting for politicians that we know do not care about our well being?
We can take our power back, one decision at a time.
If you're eager for this future, check out the Decentralized Autonomous Society Facebook group. And follow this account for more detailed posts as we explore the challenges and triumphs that will come with the future of human interaction.
What would be your objectives if you were living in a DAS ? What would you do that you cannot do today in the country where you are living ? Where are you living ?
The possibilities for what you would be able to do, which you cannot do today, are as many as the possibilities that came with the general purpose computer, or the internet.
Decentralized Autonomous Virtual States (DAVS) such as Ethereum free up cognitive resources, in the same that representative government was a liberating organization, which enabled people to do things they could not do in the previous organization (monarchy, empires, religions, etc).
As long as laws needed the brain, and therefore, the genes to survive and propagate, laws that were loudest in ordering genes to replicate them had a survival advantage. Such laws would propagate by threatening annihilation of the genes on one hand and promising “eternal life” on the other, religion being prime examples.
The trend is towards liberation from gene-based imperatives. By moving law from the confines of brains that are dependent on gene multiplication, into legal systems, representative democracy as we know it being an early experiment in that, there is less need for laws to co-opt genes for their purpose, and it becomes possible to imagine, design and create new types of laws.
Everything that modern civilization takes for granted is the result of a gradual externalization of law, and liberation from gene-based imperatives, in a bootstrapping process which gradually led to things like female voting rights, racial equality, the internet, BitTorrent, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and so on. The trend is towards a liberation of mind and intelligence, enabling ever more complex forms of organization.
With Decentralized Autonomous Societies, people will enjoy even more externalization of law than they did during the nation-state, and this will free them to do things and to organize in ways that would have been previously impossible. The major theme is that law is shaped by the human mind, and the brain is shaped by gene-based imperatives, and by externalizing law into legal systems, it becomes possible to imagine new organization, because the brain is liberated from processing law. Like any other technology, legal systems build on itself.
Another major theme is that nation-state law was only a partial externalization, and it still ran on gene-based imperatives such as fear. With DAS, fear-based law will be made a thing of the past, continuing a process that has been going on for the past hundred years. Execution for example used to be common, and was then replaced with other incentives. Universal Basic Income will come to replace survival-mode incentives, and if you remove fear from the equation, that will change a lot, as it already has through advanced in representative government.
^^ PREACH IT BROTHER ^^
YES ! :)
@chrisaiki imagine a world where whatever you felt like doing, whenever you felt like doing it, you could do that. The flow in that world would be much more friction-less than in the nation-state organization, often conceptualized as "hyper-economics". When humans follow their passion and enter flow, they are 10x more productive than if running on gene-based imperatives.
The increase in growth and productivity leads to increased health and security, and as the world around you becomes less filled with suffering, you're liberated empathically. This further frees up resources, and leads to ever better forms of organization.
When we moved from the middle ages into the nation-state, that is how transformed the world will be a decade from now. It has already changed beyond recognition in the past 10 years.
The friction I observed these last weeks between two people who were running for presidency did not depend on a scarcity of their incomes. Their programs were different when they had the same genes and few allelic differences. If you look at my posts, you can see that I am pro basic income and I have subscribed for the Grantcoin UBI. I have read many interesting things about basic incomes but the problem remain : how do you build up objectives inside a community once every member have a basic knowledge of the influence of fear on their decisions. I think that my brain is not a computer, does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories.
Yes they had the same gene-based imperatives, and they had both been conditioned during an age before the internet, and most of their dominant memeplex and their dominant selfplex is rooted in that world.
The brain and its memes are co-dependent with its genes, and extra-cerebral memes (Leigh, 2010) is a relatively new extension of the brain. The web 2.0 has liberated the brain in many ways, but it is still not liberated from fear-based law, and is in many ways incapable of knowing anything about what the world would be like on the other side of a legal reformation.
On incentives for universal basic income, I've proposed a system which I call Resilience, which would not require community consensus, but be self-organizing and based on gene-based imperatives, greed basically,
https://steemit.com/resilience/@johan-nygren/resilience-game-theory-of-incentive-based-basic-income-using-taxemes-and-branching-schemes
I think of it more in terms of "WHAT WOULD I NOT BE DOING if I lived in a DAS"
but I wanna reply in the affirmative to because it makes me think.
A) Make connections between my DAS and other societies that are beneficial to both groups, like an ambassador
B) Collaborate on and fund projects that benefit the group, on a more item by item level
C) Work with the existing governments to offload many of their tasks to these smaller societies (so that the legacy states can focus on what they should actually be doing!)
...I live mostly in the US but am frustrated by the concept of borders and passports even though mine is relatively privileged!