In which I argue that “tightly coupled” on-chain voting is overrated, the status quo of “informal governance” as practiced by Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Zcash and similar systems is much less bad than commonly thought, that people who think that the purpose of blockchains is to completely expunge soft mushy human intuitions and feelings in favor of completely algorithmic governance (emphasis on “completely”) are absolutely crazy, and loosely coupled voting as done by Carbonvotes and similar systems is underrated, as well as describe what framework should be used when thinking about blockchain governance in the first place.See also: https://medium.com/@Vlad_Zamfir/against-on-chain-governance-a4ceacd040ca
The problem with voting
I read, with great interest, Fred Ehrsam’s post on blockchain governance, as well as Vlad Zamfir and Vitalik Buterin’s responses.
Blockchain Governance: Programming Our Future
This post describes why blockchain governance design is one of the most important problems out there, its critical components, current…
Digital Democracy in Decentralised Autonomous Organisations
Decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) are institutional technologies that enable democratic governance innovation. They inherit key democratic principles such as procedural transparency and immutable records from being based on blockchain technology. This paper conducts a systematic literature review to examine governance mechanisms and challenges of digital democracy in DAOs. While issues like power concentration and coordination failures exist in current implementations, we argue that the concept of DAOs offers new opportunities for transparent governance and participatory decision-making. As testbeds for governance experiments, we find that DAOs have the potential to reshape democratic processes and foster innovative governance models in the digital era. Calling for interdisciplinary collaboration, further research is needed around Sybil-resistant voting mechanisms, ideological path dependencies and deliberation mechanisms.
Turing-Complete Governance — The Collective Intelligence Project
It is fiendishly difficult to get lots of people to make decisions and work together both non-hierarchically and effectively. Because blockchain technology enables decentralized consensus at scale, the implications for human decision-making and coordination are immensely promising; if we can use it
The rules to make the rules
My journey to understand blockchain political systems continues.
Modular Politics: Toward a Governance Layer for Online Communities
Governance in online communities is an increasingly high-stakes challenge, and yet many basic features of offline governance legacies--juries, political parties, term limits, and formal debates, to name a few--are not in the feature-sets of the software most community platforms use. Drawing on the paradigm of Institutional Analysis and Development, this paper proposes a strategy for addressing this lapse by specifying basic features of a generalizable paradigm for online governance called Modular Politics. Whereas classical governance typologies tend to present a choice among wholesale ideologies, such as democracy or oligarchy, Modular Politics would enable platform operators and their users to build bottom-up governance processes from computational components that are modular and composable, highly versatile in their expressiveness, portable from one context to another, and interoperable across platforms. This kind of approach could implement pre-digital governance systems as well as accelerate innovation in uniquely digital techniques. As diverse communities share and connect their components and data, governance could occur through a ubiquitous network layer. To that end, this paper proposes the development of an open standard for networked governance.
Online Governance Surfaces and Attention Economies
This paper considers the intersection of governance and attention in digital contexts. In particular, it argues for the relevance of ‘attention economies’, or the analysis of human attention as a resource, to ‘governance surfaces’, or the means available for organisational adaptation and action. Existing theoretical frameworks for the governance of community-managed resources lack adequate consideration for how people’s attention is engaged and directed. To address this gap, this paper proposes heuristics that assess how attention relates to governance in online organisations. The heuristics are informed by literature on attention economies and governance, as well as three case studies that consider recent attempts to address attention in the design of governance surfaces in blockchain-based systems. The resulting heuristics serve as analytical and normative tools to enable researchers and system designers to better understand attention in a governance system. They invite consideration of whether the structure of attention in a system is appropriate, efficient, and just.
How to choose a governance system for your organization
Is your nonprofit, small business, or volunteer group looking for a new way to make decisions? Many groups are questioning our mainstream systems — and that includes the systems by which we make decisions. Governance used to be one of the things we’d all take for granted, and now it’s one of the cho
Money, blockchains, and social scalability
Introduction Blockchains are all the rage. The oldest and biggest blockchain of them all is Bitcoin , which over its eight-year hist...
Money, blockchains, and social scalability
Introduction Blockchains are all the rage. The oldest and biggest blockchain of them all is Bitcoin , which over its eight-year hist...
The Truth About Blockchain
Contracts, transactions, and records of them provide critical structure in our economic system, but they haven’t kept up with the world’s digital transformation. They’re like rush-hour gridlock trapping a Formula 1 race car. Blockchain promises to solve this problem. The technology behind bitcoin, blockchain is an open, distributed ledger that records transactions safely, permanently, and very efficiently. For instance, while the transfer of a share of stock can now take up to a week, with blockchain it could happen in seconds. Blockchain could slash the cost of transactions and eliminate intermediaries like lawyers and bankers, and that could transform the economy. But, like the adoption of more internet technologies, blockchain’s adoption will require broad coordination and will take years. In this article the authors describe the path that blockchain is likely to follow and explain how firms should think about investments in it.
Trust Revolution
Unfiltered conversations with builders, thinkers, and operators in Bitcoin and beyond. Exploring systems we trust, why they work (or don't), and what's next.
Trust: the inside story of the rise and fall of Ethereum | Aeon Essays
Blockchain enthusiasts crave a world without bankers, lawyers or fat-cat executives. There’s just one problem: trust
Metagov Seminar - Online Governance Surfaces and Attention Economy
The Future Is Forked - kwokchain
Author’s note: I originally wrote this essay a number of months ago. Since then there’s been a bunch of discussion around governance thanks to essays from Fred Erhsam, Vlad Zamfir, Will Warren, and others. As well as debates within the Ethereum community. While I haven’t addressed any of these recent events in this piece—or how … Continue reading The Future Is Forked →
Liquid democracy uses blockchain to fix politics, and now you can vote for it | TechCrunch
Abraham Lincoln famously said that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” but looking around these
