7 ms·

Can we tokenize behavior?

39 points by kawera 9y ago

niftich 9y ago
There is some good substance buried here, but it's phrased in a voice thick with hype and slathered with emergent jargon/slang pidgin of folks mentally and emotionally invested in the loftier suppositions of the cryptocurrency movement. It's indistinguishable from a parody, but it's probably sincere. 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.
tw1010 9y ago
Bret Weinstein, the evolutionary biologist, recently discussed similar ideas in this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzAgSp_O03I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzAgSp_O03I 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 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.
CodeMage 9y ago
I stopped at 4th paragraph because I couldn't understand the author's ideas. Can anyone explain the following bit to me? > 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 [...]
- trophycase 9y ago
  This relates to the tokenization of all forms of ownership so it becomes easy to sell fractional ownership of otherwise difficult things.
  - Robotbeat 9y ago
    We already have this, though: cooperative businesses. The most common being credit unions. Some grocery stores operate on this principle. 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.
    - seibelj 9y ago
      “Why do we need Facebook? Friendster already did social networks. Why do we need google? Alta Vista already did search.” 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.
      - Robotbeat 9y ago
        That'd be missing much of the benefit, though. If you don't restructure the business as a co-op, then the consumer or worker is not likely to see the same benefits. The structure of the co-op gives its small-time shareholders a similar level of acknowledgement/voice that big-time shareholders would have in a conventional business (and similar to what a union does for workers, except without the large amount of friction and unnecessary antipathy between management and the workers). Simply tokenizing ownership would not have this benefit.
- lolc 9y ago
  I read it as "it is inevitable that all ownership will be codified in blockchains as this is the natural solution." Using "inevitable" and "feel natural" is meant to convey that no argument will be forthcoming.
macawfish 9y ago
All this because we still haven't learned how to share?
- zardo 9y ago
  We know how to share. We also know naively scaling up sharing to 7-billion participants doesn't work.
mt3ck 9y ago
I think we need to be careful about integrating blockchain into the fabric of societies, especially the social and emotional aspects. '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.
- Nuzzerino 9y ago
  Given the clusterfuck that was Facebook, I fear that there is less incentive to be careful than one would hope.
skywhopper 9y ago
I can’t really find any substance here to latch onto. But the idea of distributed crypto remaking society is nothing new. I first ran into it in the early nineties via Bruce Schneier’s “Applied Cryptography”. All these algorithms could provably make voting, anonymous cash, messaging, and more totally secure and unbreakable! We were on the cusp of a technolibertarian utopia! The internet was going to make it happen and this new “world wide web” would make it accessible to the masses. 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.
- smokeyj 9y ago
  > The blockchain is not going to solve the basic issues of human fallibility and gaps in trust Yet here we are. With a globally traded decentralized token. What more evidence do you need that “the game has changed”?
  - setr 9y ago
    Time; the coin sees little use in any fundamental market. If it were to crash and vanish tomorrow, relatively little would be affected. 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.
    - smokeyj 9y ago
      I'm speaking broadly to decentralized "blockchains". If any or all were to crash a new one will replace it. In that sense the cat is out of the bag and "the game has changed". It doesn't matter if any websites from the 90's still operates, the internet was a game changing invention regardless of when mass adoption took place.
root_axis 9y ago
> Like the inevitability of collective micro-ownership of commodities like real estate, art, storage, even energy Unnecessary, unworkable, absurd. The fact that the author thinks we should accept this premise as a given without providing any justification is laughable. The rest of the article is just an exercise in mental-masturbation, most of it doesn't even mean anything. > There is a grounded naturalness inherent in behavioral socialization that simply couldn’t be stimulated no matter how well programmed or marketed. ... Whenever a crypto-token enthusiast openly laments "why is HN so hostile cryptos?", point them to this blog post - having that kind of nonsense littered into the comment section of every blockchain related post is the explanation.
Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
I was hoping this was tokenize as in compiler theory, and was about interpreting body language with ML or so. Disappointed :(
JamesLeonis 9y ago
We would do well to remember that BitTorrent came from Mojo Nation, which attempted to tokenize distribution long before Filecoin and the like. 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-tokenizing-everything/ https://elaineou.com/2017/10/14/the-transaction-costs-of-tok...

39 points by kawera 9y ago

There is some good substance buried here, but it's phrased in a voice thick with hype and slathered with emergent jargon/slang pidgin of folks mentally and emotionally invested in the loftier suppositions of the cryptocurrency movement. It's indistinguishable from a parody, but it's probably sincere. 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.

tw1010 9y ago

Bret Weinstein, the evolutionary biologist, recently discussed similar ideas in this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzAgSp_O03I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzAgSp_O03I 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 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.

CodeMage 9y ago

I stopped at 4th paragraph because I couldn't understand the author's ideas. Can anyone explain the following bit to me? > 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 [...]

trophycase 9y ago
This relates to the tokenization of all forms of ownership so it becomes easy to sell fractional ownership of otherwise difficult things.
- Robotbeat 9y ago
  We already have this, though: cooperative businesses. The most common being credit unions. Some grocery stores operate on this principle. 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.
  - seibelj 9y ago
    “Why do we need Facebook? Friendster already did social networks. Why do we need google? Alta Vista already did search.” 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.
    - Robotbeat 9y ago
      That'd be missing much of the benefit, though. If you don't restructure the business as a co-op, then the consumer or worker is not likely to see the same benefits. The structure of the co-op gives its small-time shareholders a similar level of acknowledgement/voice that big-time shareholders would have in a conventional business (and similar to what a union does for workers, except without the large amount of friction and unnecessary antipathy between management and the workers). Simply tokenizing ownership would not have this benefit.
lolc 9y ago
I read it as "it is inevitable that all ownership will be codified in blockchains as this is the natural solution." Using "inevitable" and "feel natural" is meant to convey that no argument will be forthcoming.

macawfish 9y ago

All this because we still haven't learned how to share?

zardo 9y ago
We know how to share. We also know naively scaling up sharing to 7-billion participants doesn't work.

mt3ck 9y ago

I think we need to be careful about integrating blockchain into the fabric of societies, especially the social and emotional aspects. '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.

Nuzzerino 9y ago
Given the clusterfuck that was Facebook, I fear that there is less incentive to be careful than one would hope.

skywhopper 9y ago

I can’t really find any substance here to latch onto. But the idea of distributed crypto remaking society is nothing new. I first ran into it in the early nineties via Bruce Schneier’s “Applied Cryptography”. All these algorithms could provably make voting, anonymous cash, messaging, and more totally secure and unbreakable! We were on the cusp of a technolibertarian utopia! The internet was going to make it happen and this new “world wide web” would make it accessible to the masses. 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.

smokeyj 9y ago
> The blockchain is not going to solve the basic issues of human fallibility and gaps in trust Yet here we are. With a globally traded decentralized token. What more evidence do you need that “the game has changed”?
- setr 9y ago
  Time; the coin sees little use in any fundamental market. If it were to crash and vanish tomorrow, relatively little would be affected. 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.
  - smokeyj 9y ago
    I'm speaking broadly to decentralized "blockchains". If any or all were to crash a new one will replace it. In that sense the cat is out of the bag and "the game has changed". It doesn't matter if any websites from the 90's still operates, the internet was a game changing invention regardless of when mass adoption took place.

root_axis 9y ago

> Like the inevitability of collective micro-ownership of commodities like real estate, art, storage, even energy Unnecessary, unworkable, absurd. The fact that the author thinks we should accept this premise as a given without providing any justification is laughable. The rest of the article is just an exercise in mental-masturbation, most of it doesn't even mean anything. > There is a grounded naturalness inherent in behavioral socialization that simply couldn’t be stimulated no matter how well programmed or marketed. ... Whenever a crypto-token enthusiast openly laments "why is HN so hostile cryptos?", point them to this blog post - having that kind of nonsense littered into the comment section of every blockchain related post is the explanation.

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

I was hoping this was tokenize as in compiler theory, and was about interpreting body language with ML or so. Disappointed :(

JamesLeonis 9y ago

We would do well to remember that BitTorrent came from Mojo Nation, which attempted to tokenize distribution long before Filecoin and the like. 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-tokenizing-everything/ https://elaineou.com/2017/10/14/the-transaction-costs-of-tok...