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Flix 1y ago

People yearn for the tribe. All our instincts pull us to a small, high trust, homogeneous groups where reputation matters.

High civilisation requires more complex institutions that scale beyond these reputation and trust based relationships.

Authoritarians think that we can scale identity and reputation via facial recognition, social credit score and other automated impersonal replacements for trust. Their way leads to horrifying dystopia.

There is a better way. The Bitcoin way. A way to reduce the need for trust through openness, clear universal rules and equal access. Replace identity and reputation with institutions that make it difficult and costly to do evil.

Instead of universal surveillance and authoritarian control to keep people in check, which are inevitably abused by those in control of the system, decentralisation and trust minimised relations allow for massive scale societal interaction with freedom and low risk of deceit or abuse.

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Flix 1y ago

A good example of this is the institution of money.

Social credit and reputation can work well in a small community.

But what do you do in a large market with 1000s of participants?

The stupid, costly, tyrannical way to do it is to put a cop on every entrance, register everyones identity, keep huge ledgers of all the credits between participants, spend huge amounts on enforcement to crack down hard on those who don't pay.

The institution of money was a better solution. Once the buyer receives the merchandise and the seller receives the money the exchange is complete. No need to keep track of anything or identify everyone. Enforcement is needed only in a tiny minority of cases. You only need negative reputation (ie: keep track of a few thieves and scammers) but most honest participants can move freely.

You reduce cost of enforcement, maximise freedom for everyone and increase the openness and scope of the market.

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Flix 1y ago

Of course another, even more stupid way to manage the market is to limit who can buy and sell. In the limit having a monopoly seller. Since "only authority can be trusted", only authority can license someone to sell (or buy).

Unfortunately we see many examples of this in our world.

It is inevitably abused by the monopoly holder to extract rents and exploit those forced to buy from it.

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pseudo~u *likes nostr already* 1y ago

Social media / networks are another good example.

Really i think you can argue money is a special case of the social network - one in which past transactions are agreed upon universally.

Eg nostr is a general social network, consisting of identities that can sign messages, and a neutral network that relays them. If that had been invented first it would seem like a natural idea to add PoW to make a universally agreed history of transactions which would serve as money - bitcoin.

Going back to the general case, and trying to loosely follow your vector, the critical development is going to be the algorithms which create our networks. Maybe we don't need to care so much about the individuals we are connected to as much as their general characteristics, the values they embody.

In that world you interact with a feed of recommendations from the algorithm, rather than from your follows.

Obviously giving away that kind of control in a centralized system is the road to evil - which is where youtube, tiktok etc are taking us.

Eg: note1efngaru078022jlx9eag6qpqau4cmzfpfcxu8zwjxcv4rw6yuhdq26klcg

But in a free social network we will build our own algorithms, or consciously select those built by others. Possibly paying for what we want - and getting for the community we want based on our values. Of course you can add money back on that and what you get is a sort of self-selected virtual sovereign nation. I think that's where we are going.

It's very exciting.