SFSandra
commented
6 years ago @mairwilliams - so well put, "The whole experience of all cryptocurrencies (from design to present time) has been essentially about freedom: finding out how to validate, agree upon and trust a collective infrastructure for information without government (without forcing anybody to obey)"
just read from Andreas Antonopolous: "For millenia, sovereignty defined currency. The monopolistic control of currency has been the basis of sovereignty. After 2008, currency creates sovereignty."
Cryptocurrency enables people to express their sovereignty of themselves and their community through the use of currency; cryptocurrency turns the internet into a virtual global agora where everyone on the planet can show up to vote.
paula-berman
santisiri
There's something here that i think needs to be highlighted and is about to emerge both in the last paragraph of sovereginty and all through intelligence: it's that freedom is a possibility only if you're able to say no - and go for a new order of things.
Freedom is the fundamental notion that attracts both anarchists and different kinds of liberals towards Bitcoin. The word appears only twice (!) in the paper, but the whole experience of all cryptocurrencies (from design to present time) has been essentially about it: finding out how to validate, agree upon and trust a collective infrastructure for information without government (without forcing anybody to obey). Why do we need voting on the blockchain? Because some of us would like to see protocols that allow for collectives to organize without coercion and for individuals to determine if/when to break apart from them. The DAO is fundamental to understanding blockchain history because it makes visible the gap between social consensus and computational consensus. It's the goal of DEF to think harder on this issue. When in the last part of DAOs you go "the need for governance cannot be abstracted" it's left unsaid that voting matters because it sublimates armed conflict. So, yes, the need for governance is there, but not the need for political obligation. Freedom consists in picking through our own initiative a set of rules to live by. And the good thing about blockchains is they technologically allow for exactly that (not only because of hard promises, but also because it's interoperable in spite of current jurisdictional borders).
The intuitive dimension of this paper is richer than I can grasp, but the rational argument can still be crafted to render the organic function of blockchain governance more explicit. It's freedom.
idk, feel free to use this if/where you see fit, @santisiri.