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I feel like the extreme decentralization people just ignore human nature which history has revealed time and time again. The wild west no existing power struct

I feel like the extreme decentralization people just ignore human nature which history has revealed time and time again. The wild west no existing power structure idea is great until some entity inevitably comes along and controls it and its not so decentralized anymore. Decentralization exists when a small enough community can be self-policing and actors have noble goals. That all changes when you get a single bad actor who takes advantage off their weaknesses and well-meaning nature and controls the new system (see Mancur Olson's 1993 article on roving bandits). Or look at Gilded Age America or numerous political leaders who have consolidated power out of chaos, or the Bitcoin mining system which is controlled by a very small set of miners. This is even worse in the blockchain system because it's so intrinsically tied to wealth. It makes the entire community centered around making money. Goodbye, critical thinking? And despite all the emphasis centered on democratizing democracy, overly simple systems have been manipulated and argued against since at least Plato. But here we are 2500 years later building systems that are just as simplistic in their assumptions about human nature. Ethereum is the defacto dictator of their ecosystem and they've exercised that right several times. So how free is it?

Willamin 10y ago
> That all changes when you get a single bad actor who takes advantage off their weaknesses and well-meaning nature and controls the new system I think part of the goal of these new decentralization movements is to create a system that has no weaknesses, despite how impossible that may seem. For example, using paper money has the weakness that people can counterfeit it. A naïve solution to that problem is putting security threads, serial numbers, and watermarks on the cash to make it harder to counterfeit. A more complete solution would be something like a blockchain-type ledger. You cannot counterfeit an entry in a log that everyone in the world shares without corrupting enough people in the world to support you.
- bbctol 10y ago
  But the weakness that causes people to take control of the Wild West isn't counterfeiting, it's just the inevitable end result of the chaos. The issue isn't fraud, it's that even people accumulating money honestly turns harmful over time; you acquire money because you're good at business, you use that money to buy out competitors, you pass that money on to your children as is your right, your children use it to consolidate more power... power is often a positive feedback loop, and no matter how solid the system of exchanges, it loops back to feudalism without regulation.
  - visarga 10y ago
    So redistribution of money is necessary to prevent the accumulation of power. Blockchain is trying to do the same thing essentially - not allowing a single actor to operate more than 50% of the computing power. When power concentrates too much, the system breaks down.
    - Crespyl 10y ago
      And we already can seen bitcoin mining pools in China that collectively approach or exceed 50%. It's almost impossible to avoid concentration of power in any system that provides value to power-holders.
      - spacehacker 10y ago
        Indeed, the most powerful agents do not have any correction signals to fear from above. They can rather impose rules on the system themselves. One can only avoid such dynamics by empathy (which is a very weak guarantee) or by making the government being controlled by the people and stronger than the most powerful players (which is democracy).
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  Your comment completely disregards the parents entire thrust. And boils down to: because blochchain Pass the kool-aid.
eternalban 10y ago
> Goodbye, critical thinking? Looks like it: Trump an 'outsider', Wikileaks "decentralized", and blockchain tech to the rescue of Siemmens' controllers.
- CyberDildonics 10y ago
  Who has claimed wikileaks is decentralized?
  - eternalban 10y ago
    "From Wikileaks to Anonymous, decentralized actors can exert ..."
- denom 10y ago
  It's the spirit of pure corruption. The subtext of the blockchain 'spiritualism' is to have market forces unleashed without regards to ethical or legal systems.
wslh 10y ago
> Decentralization exists when a small enough community can be self-policing and actors have noble goals. That all changes when you get a single bad actor who takes advantage off their weaknesses and well-meaning nature and controls the new system I found that Internet expanded this small enough community to a new scale. Call it an Internet social contract. I have a great experience doing business with people around the world that never met before. Obviously, there is a negotiation phase where you filter the ones that don't match certain criteria, but, beyond this, I think people is learning how to be decentralized.
drcode 10y ago
> decentralization exists when a small enough community can be self-policing and actors have noble goals. Well, the idea is to build decentralized systems that are self-policing in an automated fashion, such as with smart contracts. The thought is that previous efforts failed because the bookkeeping involved in decentralization is prohibitive without such automation. Admittedly, a lot of work remains to prove this can work in practice.
solatic 10y ago
You need to remember that Bitcoin wasn't designed with modern mining clusters in mind. Once upon a time you could actually get Bitcoin mining with a laptop, of course that's ancient history now, but Bitcoin was originally designed with the intention that if you were a Bitcoin user, you were probably running a machine that was running a mining client. You are correct that history hasn't been very favorable to the notion of finding stability in anarchy. And true anarchies are indeed unstable. With that said... history isn't too favorable to the global empires either. Caesar, Attila, Xerxes... none of them managed to unite the globe under a single flag. Today, global control is pretty decentralized (at least if you're not a conspiracy theorist). I think your original premise is flawed. The problem isn't so much that Bitcoin tried to enforce decentralized governance, but that its fundamental assumption was flawed, which was that no entity could take over the majority of computational power. Can we create a blockchain which limits the influence of any one source, to ensure that the distributed computation of the blockchain stays democratic? I'd imagine there might be a way with memory-hard hashing, the kind used to prevent an attacker from throwing too much processing power at a table of scrypt hashes and getting the original passwords, but this is already deeply out of my depth...
- lacker 10y ago
  Bitcoin was originally designed with the intention that if you were a Bitcoin user, you were probably running a machine that was running a mining client. This is not true - from early on Satoshi was describing how you could have thinner clients that didn't run a full node.
- MBCook 10y ago
  > Bitcoin was originally designed with the intention that if you were a Bitcoin user, you were probably running a machine that was running a mining client. Isn't that a flawed premise though? There are clear incentives. As soon as Bitcoin had any value, it seems obvious it would start an arms race for people to mine the coins as fast as possible. At that point any normal computer would quickly become almost useless. It seems like it's inevitable that anything like Bitcoin would quickly lead to mining pools and GPUs and ASICs and other fancy stuff. You'd need some sort of algorithm that required a minimum amount of CPU power but didn't scale at all so that it doesn't mater if you throw more RAM/CPU at it you still mine at the same rate. Even then people would just be incentivized to use lots of minimum spec machines to increase their relative payouts to a 'normal user'.
erikpukinskis 10y ago
> The wild west no existing power structure idea is Let me stop you right there. Decentralization isn't about no power structures, it's about decentralized power structures. Let's say you walk into the barn, slit a goat's throat, and throw it on the back of your horse to ride off back to your camp. I shoot you dead. In the Wild West, no one really knows how everyone will react. Who cares about you? Who cares about me? Who cares about the goat? Who else has guns? In capitalism, everyone knows what will happen. The owner of the goat will summon the (centralized) state to track me down, extract what value it can, and punish me. In a decentralized system, everyone already knows exactly why you are dead. They take note, and the go back to their work. They know my family almost starved last year. They know we were relying on that goat to survive. They know I consider any attack on that goat to be an attack on my family. They know that everyone in town except for Jeff also agrees that an attack on the goat is a violent attack on me. They know that except for three people, everyone believes I'm justified in using capital violence against someone who would kill that goat. Two of those three, Betty and Jun, think I should use violence, but everyone knows they also won't use violence against me. The third is your cousin, who is rarely around since they're drunk most of the time. If they were to come around, at least 14 other townspeople would defend me to the death, because this was a posted, cut and dry case of self defense for that many. Everyone already knows these things because they've opted into thousands of organizational structures over time that distribute information about what around them people need, what people believe, and why they believe it. Not everyone needs to know this information at all times, but everyone is familiar with how to get it, and it's there to see at any time. Not always published openly, but distributed through a web of trust so that it's accessible where it needs to be. > Decentralization exists when a small enough community can be self-policing and actors have noble goals Bitcoin proves that wrong. Bitcoin has actors with non-noble goals, and is a quite large community. Christmas is another example. Lots of people have non-noble goals with respect to Christmas, and it's a huge community, and yet it seems to soldier on just fine without any real central control. > This is even worse in the blockchain system because it's so intrinsically tied to wealth. You are still thinking of the blockchain as "just currency". It's not. It's a decentralized banking system. Let's say I want to rent shares in sheep in my sheep farm. You are thinking I need wealth to buy bitcoins with so I can run a bitcoin business with my sheep. Not true. If I have four sheep, and I want to do quarter shares... I just need 16 satoshi, or $0.0001 (and a phone). Now I can issue shares in those sheep that can be traded and cryptographically verified. That's banking. I made a bank. For a hundredth of a penny. Bitcoin is not valuable because of the wealth it contains, it is valuable for the ways in which it can facilitate financial transactions. The market cap of BTC is the total number of dollars that you could trade it for, which is related to the amount of money needed to float pending transactions, plus some speculative value. But that's an average according to the market, it doesn't necessarily reflect the value of Bitcoin to any specific individual. The value of Bitcoin to you is what you can do with it. And you don't have to be wealthy to do things with Bitcoin that you used to need a banker to do for you. And you do need to be wealthy to get a banker to do something for you. > Ethereum is the defacto dictator of their ecosystem and they've exercised that right several times. OK, let's think about three words we might use to describe Ethereum: Dictatorship, Anarchism, Democrasy. 1) Miners on the main branch have voted several times to make a hard fork. The branch didn't fork until they voted for it. Unless you think those votes were fraudulent, I'd say that looks a lot like democrasy. 2) The old branches still exist! Ethereum Classic is the entire Ethereum universe, except people voted no on the forks. It's even supported on exchanges. That is what anarchism looks like. When someone makes a decision, only the people who agree go along with them. 3) The Ethereum Foundation, and core members of the community form a kind of cultural center of mass, where they have a lot of influence when they speak up, and they know the code better than most, and they have access to information quicker than others in the community. In this sense, they have a vague kind of dictatorial control. They can attempt to wield undue influence. Honestly though, that's as much a dictatorship as Goldman Sachs is a dictatorship over the U.S. Which... it's kind of true, if I squint my eyes, I'll give you that. But #1 and #2 are actually reasonable high level characterizations of the basic political systems. #3 is at best an interesting metaphor.
smokeyj 10y ago
Your arguments are: 1) Decentralized proponents just don't understand human nature 2) Decentralized power structures can't work because the wild west 3) Blockchains are only about making money If this is the best HN could upvote I'm pretty optimistic about this whole decentralization movement.
openfuture 10y ago
Every political discussion always boils down to the opposition 'not understanding human nature' or 'the world' this is always backed up by 'history'. I won't accuse you of not understanding humans since it seems none of us do (and it drives us mad!) but I think it's fairly clear what an ideal society looks like: Free. Now do we want to accomplish this with thought policing (something we've been trying to build forever and we're getting closer) or by giving individuals more responsibility along with the education needed to handle it. For me that is the only question. Edit: I realize the irony of calling a thought policed society free but the Utopian vision of authoritarians is one where they can destroy all the people and knowledge that don't fit with their vision and thereby reach a 'steady state'. Libertarians definitely have the harder problem to solve: Creating a fundamentally agnostic society. The point is that both complete authority and complete liberty are unsolved problemsm, but we (as a society) seem to be much more excited to solve the first one. This worries me and others like me and so we say "Hey what about we use all of our amazing technology to answer that second question instead" - it really rubs me the wrong way when the answers we get are some defeatist attitude about 'human nature' and the impossibility of equality. I recommend reading 'The Dominant Man: The pecking order of human society' for some interesting perspectives on human nature. There's no doubt in my mind that we can design a decentralized global society where the only hierarchy is the one we naturally (read: unconsciously) establish within our tribes.
openfuture 10y ago
Every political discussion always boils down to the opposition 'not understanding human nature' or 'the world' this is always backed up by 'history'. I won't accuse you of not understanding humans since it seems none of us do (and it drives us mad!) but I think it's fairly clear what an ideal society looks like: Free. Now do we want to accomplish this with thought policing (something we've been trying to build forever and we're getting closer) or by giving individuals more responsibility along with the education needed to handle it. For me that is the only question. The point is that both complete authority and complete liberty are unsolved problemsm, but we (as a society) seem to be much more excited to solve the first one. This worries me and others like me and so we say "Hey what about we use all of our amazing technology to answer that second question instead" - it really rubs me the wrong way when the answers we get are some defeatist attitude about 'human nature' and the impossibility of equality. I recommend reading 'The Dominant Man: The pecking order of human society' for some interesting perspectives on human nature. There's no doubt in my mind that we can design a decentralized global society where the only hierarchy is the one we naturally (read: unconsciously) establish within our tribes.
openfuture 10y ago
Every political discussion always boils down to the opposition 'not understanding human nature' or 'the world' this is always backed up by 'history'. I won't accuse you of not understanding humans since it seems none of us do (and it drives us mad!) but I think it's fairly clear what an ideal society looks like: Free. Now do we want to accomplish this with thought policing (something we've been trying to build forever and we're getting closer) or by giving individuals more responsibility along with the education needed to handle it. For me that is the only question. The point is that both complete authority and complete liberty are unsolved problemsm, but we (as a society) seem to be much more excited to solve the first one. This worries me and others like me and so we say "Hey what about we use all of our amazing technology to answer that second question instead" - it really rubs me the wrong way when the answers we get are some defeatist attitude about 'human nature' and the impossibility of equality. I recommend reading 'The Dominant Man: The pecking order of human society' for some interesting perspectives on human nature. There's no doubt in my mind that we can design a decentralized global society where the only hierarchy is the one we naturally (read: unconsciously) establish within our tribes.
orly_bookz 10y ago
"Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development" : http://www.svt.ntnu.no/iss/Indra.de.Soysa/POL3503H05/olson.pdf http://www.svt.ntnu.no/iss/Indra.de.Soysa/POL3503H05/olson.p...
kordless 10y ago
> I feel like the extreme decentralization people just ignore I think people need to stop speaking for other people's feelings while using a bunch of biased arguments to pass off their beliefs as something valid. Nothing you said here more than just saying "trust can't be decentralized". Wealth is stored trust. Critical thinking is stored trust. Democracy is (supposed to be) stored trust. The blockchain provides decently reliable trust in the form of decentralized consensus. The less trustworthy fiat it's tied to has ZERO to do with this conversation. Google "Rai Stones" for proof social consensus works. If you think a bad actor can take over a well thought out, public, technically backed consensus mechanism, then you don't understand how consensus mechanisms like the blockchain work. It's fair enough to say you don't trust it if you don't understand it, but if you (and a bunch of other people like you) don't actually go through those motions, what you (and they) do is end up making a bunch of biased (and conflicted) arguments that people then respond to in a negative way.

Willamin 10y ago

> That all changes when you get a single bad actor who takes advantage off their weaknesses and well-meaning nature and controls the new system I think part of the goal of these new decentralization movements is to create a system that has no weaknesses, despite how impossible that may seem. For example, using paper money has the weakness that people can counterfeit it. A naïve solution to that problem is putting security threads, serial numbers, and watermarks on the cash to make it harder to counterfeit. A more complete solution would be something like a blockchain-type ledger. You cannot counterfeit an entry in a log that everyone in the world shares without corrupting enough people in the world to support you.

bbctol 10y ago
But the weakness that causes people to take control of the Wild West isn't counterfeiting, it's just the inevitable end result of the chaos. The issue isn't fraud, it's that even people accumulating money honestly turns harmful over time; you acquire money because you're good at business, you use that money to buy out competitors, you pass that money on to your children as is your right, your children use it to consolidate more power... power is often a positive feedback loop, and no matter how solid the system of exchanges, it loops back to feudalism without regulation.
- visarga 10y ago
  So redistribution of money is necessary to prevent the accumulation of power. Blockchain is trying to do the same thing essentially - not allowing a single actor to operate more than 50% of the computing power. When power concentrates too much, the system breaks down.
  - Crespyl 10y ago
    And we already can seen bitcoin mining pools in China that collectively approach or exceed 50%. It's almost impossible to avoid concentration of power in any system that provides value to power-holders.
    - spacehacker 10y ago
      Indeed, the most powerful agents do not have any correction signals to fear from above. They can rather impose rules on the system themselves. One can only avoid such dynamics by empathy (which is a very weak guarantee) or by making the government being controlled by the people and stronger than the most powerful players (which is democracy).
TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
Your comment completely disregards the parents entire thrust. And boils down to: because blochchain Pass the kool-aid.

eternalban 10y ago

> Goodbye, critical thinking? Looks like it: Trump an 'outsider', Wikileaks "decentralized", and blockchain tech to the rescue of Siemmens' controllers.

CyberDildonics 10y ago
Who has claimed wikileaks is decentralized?
- eternalban 10y ago
  "From Wikileaks to Anonymous, decentralized actors can exert ..."
denom 10y ago
It's the spirit of pure corruption. The subtext of the blockchain 'spiritualism' is to have market forces unleashed without regards to ethical or legal systems.

wslh 10y ago

> Decentralization exists when a small enough community can be self-policing and actors have noble goals. That all changes when you get a single bad actor who takes advantage off their weaknesses and well-meaning nature and controls the new system I found that Internet expanded this small enough community to a new scale. Call it an Internet social contract. I have a great experience doing business with people around the world that never met before. Obviously, there is a negotiation phase where you filter the ones that don't match certain criteria, but, beyond this, I think people is learning how to be decentralized.

drcode 10y ago

> decentralization exists when a small enough community can be self-policing and actors have noble goals. Well, the idea is to build decentralized systems that are self-policing in an automated fashion, such as with smart contracts. The thought is that previous efforts failed because the bookkeeping involved in decentralization is prohibitive without such automation. Admittedly, a lot of work remains to prove this can work in practice.

solatic 10y ago

You need to remember that Bitcoin wasn't designed with modern mining clusters in mind. Once upon a time you could actually get Bitcoin mining with a laptop, of course that's ancient history now, but Bitcoin was originally designed with the intention that if you were a Bitcoin user, you were probably running a machine that was running a mining client. You are correct that history hasn't been very favorable to the notion of finding stability in anarchy. And true anarchies are indeed unstable. With that said... history isn't too favorable to the global empires either. Caesar, Attila, Xerxes... none of them managed to unite the globe under a single flag. Today, global control is pretty decentralized (at least if you're not a conspiracy theorist). I think your original premise is flawed. The problem isn't so much that Bitcoin tried to enforce decentralized governance, but that its fundamental assumption was flawed, which was that no entity could take over the majority of computational power. Can we create a blockchain which limits the influence of any one source, to ensure that the distributed computation of the blockchain stays democratic? I'd imagine there might be a way with memory-hard hashing, the kind used to prevent an attacker from throwing too much processing power at a table of scrypt hashes and getting the original passwords, but this is already deeply out of my depth...

lacker 10y ago
Bitcoin was originally designed with the intention that if you were a Bitcoin user, you were probably running a machine that was running a mining client. This is not true - from early on Satoshi was describing how you could have thinner clients that didn't run a full node.
MBCook 10y ago
> Bitcoin was originally designed with the intention that if you were a Bitcoin user, you were probably running a machine that was running a mining client. Isn't that a flawed premise though? There are clear incentives. As soon as Bitcoin had any value, it seems obvious it would start an arms race for people to mine the coins as fast as possible. At that point any normal computer would quickly become almost useless. It seems like it's inevitable that anything like Bitcoin would quickly lead to mining pools and GPUs and ASICs and other fancy stuff. You'd need some sort of algorithm that required a minimum amount of CPU power but didn't scale at all so that it doesn't mater if you throw more RAM/CPU at it you still mine at the same rate. Even then people would just be incentivized to use lots of minimum spec machines to increase their relative payouts to a 'normal user'.

erikpukinskis 10y ago

> The wild west no existing power structure idea is Let me stop you right there. Decentralization isn't about no power structures, it's about decentralized power structures. Let's say you walk into the barn, slit a goat's throat, and throw it on the back of your horse to ride off back to your camp. I shoot you dead. In the Wild West, no one really knows how everyone will react. Who cares about you? Who cares about me? Who cares about the goat? Who else has guns? In capitalism, everyone knows what will happen. The owner of the goat will summon the (centralized) state to track me down, extract what value it can, and punish me. In a decentralized system, everyone already knows exactly why you are dead. They take note, and the go back to their work. They know my family almost starved last year. They know we were relying on that goat to survive. They know I consider any attack on that goat to be an attack on my family. They know that everyone in town except for Jeff also agrees that an attack on the goat is a violent attack on me. They know that except for three people, everyone believes I'm justified in using capital violence against someone who would kill that goat. Two of those three, Betty and Jun, think I should use violence, but everyone knows they also won't use violence against me. The third is your cousin, who is rarely around since they're drunk most of the time. If they were to come around, at least 14 other townspeople would defend me to the death, because this was a posted, cut and dry case of self defense for that many. Everyone already knows these things because they've opted into thousands of organizational structures over time that distribute information about what around them people need, what people believe, and why they believe it. Not everyone needs to know this information at all times, but everyone is familiar with how to get it, and it's there to see at any time. Not always published openly, but distributed through a web of trust so that it's accessible where it needs to be. > Decentralization exists when a small enough community can be self-policing and actors have noble goals Bitcoin proves that wrong. Bitcoin has actors with non-noble goals, and is a quite large community. Christmas is another example. Lots of people have non-noble goals with respect to Christmas, and it's a huge community, and yet it seems to soldier on just fine without any real central control. > This is even worse in the blockchain system because it's so intrinsically tied to wealth. You are still thinking of the blockchain as "just currency". It's not. It's a decentralized banking system. Let's say I want to rent shares in sheep in my sheep farm. You are thinking I need wealth to buy bitcoins with so I can run a bitcoin business with my sheep. Not true. If I have four sheep, and I want to do quarter shares... I just need 16 satoshi, or $0.0001 (and a phone). Now I can issue shares in those sheep that can be traded and cryptographically verified. That's banking. I made a bank. For a hundredth of a penny. Bitcoin is not valuable because of the wealth it contains, it is valuable for the ways in which it can facilitate financial transactions. The market cap of BTC is the total number of dollars that you could trade it for, which is related to the amount of money needed to float pending transactions, plus some speculative value. But that's an average according to the market, it doesn't necessarily reflect the value of Bitcoin to any specific individual. The value of Bitcoin to you is what you can do with it. And you don't have to be wealthy to do things with Bitcoin that you used to need a banker to do for you. And you do need to be wealthy to get a banker to do something for you. > Ethereum is the defacto dictator of their ecosystem and they've exercised that right several times. OK, let's think about three words we might use to describe Ethereum: Dictatorship, Anarchism, Democrasy. 1) Miners on the main branch have voted several times to make a hard fork. The branch didn't fork until they voted for it. Unless you think those votes were fraudulent, I'd say that looks a lot like democrasy. 2) The old branches still exist! Ethereum Classic is the entire Ethereum universe, except people voted no on the forks. It's even supported on exchanges. That is what anarchism looks like. When someone makes a decision, only the people who agree go along with them. 3) The Ethereum Foundation, and core members of the community form a kind of cultural center of mass, where they have a lot of influence when they speak up, and they know the code better than most, and they have access to information quicker than others in the community. In this sense, they have a vague kind of dictatorial control. They can attempt to wield undue influence. Honestly though, that's as much a dictatorship as Goldman Sachs is a dictatorship over the U.S. Which... it's kind of true, if I squint my eyes, I'll give you that. But #1 and #2 are actually reasonable high level characterizations of the basic political systems. #3 is at best an interesting metaphor.

smokeyj 10y ago

Your arguments are: 1) Decentralized proponents just don't understand human nature 2) Decentralized power structures can't work because the wild west 3) Blockchains are only about making money If this is the best HN could upvote I'm pretty optimistic about this whole decentralization movement.

openfuture 10y ago

Every political discussion always boils down to the opposition 'not understanding human nature' or 'the world' this is always backed up by 'history'. I won't accuse you of not understanding humans since it seems none of us do (and it drives us mad!) but I think it's fairly clear what an ideal society looks like: Free. Now do we want to accomplish this with thought policing (something we've been trying to build forever and we're getting closer) or by giving individuals more responsibility along with the education needed to handle it. For me that is the only question. Edit: I realize the irony of calling a thought policed society free but the Utopian vision of authoritarians is one where they can destroy all the people and knowledge that don't fit with their vision and thereby reach a 'steady state'. Libertarians definitely have the harder problem to solve: Creating a fundamentally agnostic society. The point is that both complete authority and complete liberty are unsolved problemsm, but we (as a society) seem to be much more excited to solve the first one. This worries me and others like me and so we say "Hey what about we use all of our amazing technology to answer that second question instead" - it really rubs me the wrong way when the answers we get are some defeatist attitude about 'human nature' and the impossibility of equality. I recommend reading 'The Dominant Man: The pecking order of human society' for some interesting perspectives on human nature. There's no doubt in my mind that we can design a decentralized global society where the only hierarchy is the one we naturally (read: unconsciously) establish within our tribes.

openfuture 10y ago

Every political discussion always boils down to the opposition 'not understanding human nature' or 'the world' this is always backed up by 'history'. I won't accuse you of not understanding humans since it seems none of us do (and it drives us mad!) but I think it's fairly clear what an ideal society looks like: Free. Now do we want to accomplish this with thought policing (something we've been trying to build forever and we're getting closer) or by giving individuals more responsibility along with the education needed to handle it. For me that is the only question. The point is that both complete authority and complete liberty are unsolved problemsm, but we (as a society) seem to be much more excited to solve the first one. This worries me and others like me and so we say "Hey what about we use all of our amazing technology to answer that second question instead" - it really rubs me the wrong way when the answers we get are some defeatist attitude about 'human nature' and the impossibility of equality. I recommend reading 'The Dominant Man: The pecking order of human society' for some interesting perspectives on human nature. There's no doubt in my mind that we can design a decentralized global society where the only hierarchy is the one we naturally (read: unconsciously) establish within our tribes.

openfuture 10y ago

Every political discussion always boils down to the opposition 'not understanding human nature' or 'the world' this is always backed up by 'history'. I won't accuse you of not understanding humans since it seems none of us do (and it drives us mad!) but I think it's fairly clear what an ideal society looks like: Free. Now do we want to accomplish this with thought policing (something we've been trying to build forever and we're getting closer) or by giving individuals more responsibility along with the education needed to handle it. For me that is the only question. The point is that both complete authority and complete liberty are unsolved problemsm, but we (as a society) seem to be much more excited to solve the first one. This worries me and others like me and so we say "Hey what about we use all of our amazing technology to answer that second question instead" - it really rubs me the wrong way when the answers we get are some defeatist attitude about 'human nature' and the impossibility of equality. I recommend reading 'The Dominant Man: The pecking order of human society' for some interesting perspectives on human nature. There's no doubt in my mind that we can design a decentralized global society where the only hierarchy is the one we naturally (read: unconsciously) establish within our tribes.

orly_bookz 10y ago

"Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development" : http://www.svt.ntnu.no/iss/Indra.de.Soysa/POL3503H05/olson.pdf http://www.svt.ntnu.no/iss/Indra.de.Soysa/POL3503H05/olson.p...

kordless 10y ago

> I feel like the extreme decentralization people just ignore I think people need to stop speaking for other people's feelings while using a bunch of biased arguments to pass off their beliefs as something valid. Nothing you said here more than just saying "trust can't be decentralized". Wealth is stored trust. Critical thinking is stored trust. Democracy is (supposed to be) stored trust. The blockchain provides decently reliable trust in the form of decentralized consensus. The less trustworthy fiat it's tied to has ZERO to do with this conversation. Google "Rai Stones" for proof social consensus works. If you think a bad actor can take over a well thought out, public, technically backed consensus mechanism, then you don't understand how consensus mechanisms like the blockchain work. It's fair enough to say you don't trust it if you don't understand it, but if you (and a bunch of other people like you) don't actually go through those motions, what you (and they) do is end up making a bunch of biased (and conflicted) arguments that people then respond to in a negative way.