Some people have grown cynical with democracy (and various types of representative government broadly, e.g. including constitutional democratic republics that enshrine certain rights to protect liberty against the masses), viewing this method as promoting short-term leadership with bad incentives.

I have a different take.

Prior to the printing press and then the telegraph and radio, running a democratic society over long distances wasn’t even feasible. The concept of having people democratically participate in their government relies on people being relatively connected information-wise so that they can use their access to information to know what’s happening and to then select between different options, which you couldn’t do across the entirety of a country before people were literate and election materials or other publications could be mass produced. In the pre-press age of handwritten books, making written documents was expensive, and so literacy was a niche skill.

So, that era was ruled by kings and queens, council oligopolies, and so forth. Representative government, to the extent that it existed, only applied to small city states where people could literally gather in a town square, or to “elites” in a capital. There was literally no way to run an election over very broad distances on a regular basis. The printing press helped change that, and then the telegraph, radio, and other tech further reinforced it.

But ironically, as I discuss in Broken Money, those technologies also started to break our money. The printing press and telegraph allowed the transaction layer (the movement of IOUs between individuals and entities) to grow exponentially more efficient both domestically and globally, while our settlement layer (gold) remained basically unchanged. This broadening gap between fast transactions and slow settlements was increasingly bridged with centralization and credit, and the gap eventually became so wide that every nation dropped the settlement layer of gold almost entirely, except as a reserve asset.

So the same technologies that enabled widespread representative government also enabled the proliferation of softer money. Prior to these technologies, broad democracy wasn’t possible. And after these technologies, sound money was too slow to keep up. Oof.

But over a long enough timeframe, our technology became good enough that we finally figured out how to do fast settlements as well. Bitcoin. People can send value to each other quickly over long distances, in ways that no central entity can prevent or reverse, and with a unit that no central entity can debase. The first sound money of the Information Age.

If Bitcoin is successful over the coming decades and becomes a much larger and less volatile money, than it is now, fully entrenched in society, then that would be the first era where technology is at such a state where broad democracy and fast sound money can coexist. Or put more universally, it will be the first era where information spreads quickly without breaking the money, and thus both fast information and good money could coexist.

I, for one, would be curious to see how that develops.

As a non technical person, this is how I presented see it too.

Comparing with bitcoin it seems as though relays play a role which could be likened to the role miners play. For a decentralised social network to work they would need to be rewarded the work they do in storing data and responding to requests.

A cost which ultimately must be paid for by users.

Climate doomsday bollox is the biggest scam in the history of man, no matter how much they gaslight.

BTW, companies trying to become Trust Anchors are the most common thing in the DID world. It's the only network-effect monopoly you can try to own on a decentralized spec. Everything else is a race to the bottom.

The 'Great Wall' on the Mexican border: I propose we instead build that wall around D.C. It would be 1/100th of the distance, so we could make it 100 times higher for the same cost. That's two miles high. Ain't no-one escaping from that. We'd be safe.

'member?

Tell me, please: what objective evidence do you have that any branch of our government actually serves us?

#grownostr

First tune of the day…

Everything is a tradeoff.

I have zero reach on Nostr by the way.