Can we tokenize behavior?
arnoldwaldstein.com
arnoldwaldstein.com
By my reading -- and this is hard to glean -- the central thesis seems to be that cryptocurrencies shouldn't be used to one-to-one reimplement currently present systems of digital social interaction; instead, think about what can be accomplished from the ground-up when your individual, small-time holders are vested.
It's both cutely observant, and painfully oblivious to nearly all of human history, where individuals pooled together resources to build, invest, serve as a patron to the arts, etc -- a range of activities from basic survival to abstract societal good.
Turns out, as Schneier himself long ago realized, it’s more complicated than that, and the combination of malicious actors and human nature render every technological solution ultimately fallible.
The blockchain is not going to solve the basic issues of human fallibility and gaps in trust. Further attempts to quantify human experience, this time into cryptographic tokens, will not change the goals or capabilities of governments, criminals, corporations, or individuals.
We won’t code our way out of our problems. We need to stop fooling ourselves and start looking for real solutions.
Yet here we are. With a globally traded decentralized token. What more evidence do you need that “the game has changed”?
It's difficult to claim "Something has changed the game", if it can't even accomplish being noticable in its absence.
It exists, and it can sometimes be used, and some people think it will be used. Thats about all you can say about it.
That is, bitcoin doesn't yet justify its own existence. A new one will replace it, but hardly out of necessity, rather simply because it is trivial to do so. If its existence was suddenly erased, few systems would be affected (mostly layer 1 actors, those directly associated with bitcoin: miners, coin devs, a few startups, etc) and most corrected quite quickly. there's not yet a true dependency on cryptocoins or blockchaind; the game is the almost exactly the same as it was with or without the bitcoin paper.
Its not yet changed.
But it won’t vanish. I’m still waiting. If you can make bitcoin vanish I’d give you some credibility. Until then you’re amongst a sea of journalists declaring the death of crypto. I’m waiting for it and I mean that sincerely. Yet here we are.
The phrase "paradigm shift" seems to be thrown around quite a bit ;)
'Think not of how to replumb or rewire the world, but how to create the environment where interactions can be different, social, within a new economic order.'
This gets me thinking of the episode Fifteen Million Merits (S1, Ep2) of Black Mirror.
Here is a shorter piece of the interview that focuses a bit more on the specific idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4j-jRDTlJg
If anyone has links to more discussion about this subject, I would love to hear about it.
Ultimately, "too cheap to meter" was the problem they encountered, so they stripped out the tit-for-tat portion and Bittorrent was released.
https://elaineou.com/2017/10/14/the-transaction-costs-of-tok...
> Like the inevitability of collective micro-ownership of commodities like real estate, art, storage, even energy. These feel natural to the innate structure of the blockchain itself [...]
Using "inevitable" and "feel natural" is meant to convey that no argument will be forthcoming.
It's a good model and has been scaled up to large multinational corporation size in the Mondragon Corporation, but we don't need blockchain or cryptocurrency to do it.
I've been incredibly well-served by both credit unions and cooperative grocery stores.
Corporations exist to serve the interests of their shareholders. If you are a customer or employee of a corporation that you are not a shareholder of, then that corporation is not necessarily trying to do business in my interest but quite possibly could be operating at the expense of my interests in order to serve the interest of the shareholders. We hope that these interests are aligned, but often we see that they aren't. Cooperative businesses naturally align these interests by making the workers or consumers (or both) shareholders. And they remain voluntary.
It addresses many of the drawbacks of unionization, of traditional capitalist corporations, and socialism. It really should be copied more widely. Given my positive experiences with the cooperative business model, I would gladly seek out such businesses if they were more widely available.
Crypto allows you to tokenize assets on a much more efficient, streamlined approach than structuring an entire business model in a formal co-op. The two are similar only in vague terms.
> "Democratic Governance. Although token holders will not have equity or voting rights in the Foundation itself, they will be allowed to vote on specific decisions affecting the Platform. The decisions subject to holder vote will be limited at first, but will eventually expand to a point where the token holders and the Foundation share nearly equal control of all aspects of the Platform’s functionality. Even in the Platform’s early stages, following the token sale, token holders will be able to rate the AI Services they use, affecting the success of those services and providing feedback that is necessary for the service to improve. This role further contributes to the continued improvement of the Platform and its offerings, without any involvement of the Foundation."
Well, we have plenty of successful business models for open source software now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-sourc....
I agree that at the current point in time, blockchain-based projects are experimental and risky. Even Steemit, known to be one of the more successful late-gen blockchain projects, is not without its critics to this day. But there will emerge successful business models just as with the free software movement.