It's a lot easier to find prior art that new technology can improve on once you've found a good metaphor for it. Here's the one I use: Scribes once wrote the h

It's a lot easier to find prior art that new technology can improve on once you've found a good metaphor for it. Here's the one I use: Scribes once wrote the history that coordinated societies on scrolls. Ethereum is a digital scroll in the cloud that any app can write permanent entries to. Lots of social problems became much easier to solve once we had written records with a trusted source of truth, and now we can have trusted records for literally any interaction between people that we're willing to make public. As a bonus, there are no scribes we have to trust because the economics of blockchains allow us to hire arbitrary scribes off the street who lose money if they attempt to manipulate records. All individuals can interact as equals without an overseer. The social problem I'm using Ethereum to solve is our drastic underinvestment in public goods—goods that are non-rivalrous and non-excludable, so they're hard to get people to pay for. My hypothesis is that we can put contributions on a digital scroll to unite people in purpose, and perhaps we can build a society that checks the scroll to reward people who have contributed to public goods. Developers who know how to wield these digital scrolls can have as much impact on their society as those who controlled the physical scrolls, but since we can't force people to acknowledge our scrolls, we can only have an impact if we build interactions people actually want to adopt voluntarily. Digital scrolls tie our hands—overt attempts to control users will be routed around.