I received an email from Democracy Earth the other day and I was intrigued by statement below.
"Cryptopolitics
Democracy Earth coined the phrase cryptopolitics because as an organization and movement we are sitting at the intersection of technology and politics. We believe that blockchain as a censorship-resistant technology that is borderless and can reach any place in the world, can act as a liberating force for communities that need it the most. The kind of default transparency and permissionless accountability blockchains bring to any organization - even nonprofits like Democracy Earth Foundation - is how governments should be run. It is the promise of democracy made real. "
Here are four questions that I would love to explore
What is blockchain?
How does âpermission less accountabilityâ work in practice?
What experience does our community have of this?
Is there a link here to Metamoderism ?
Looking forward to learning more. It feels important for me as an elder to know what this is about.
@annroberts: Good work! And now youâve gotten your first on your first thread. If you would ever like a tutorial on the other features of the forum, you can always ask @cthulhubot for an interactive tour. There is an advanced version, too. Speaking of cryptoâŠ
At the same time, we can continue our collective inquiry with new questions. Of the ones you asked, I think the first, âWhat is Blockchain?â can be answered by a video on the other thread.
The next two are most interesting to me personally:
And Iâm curious what others would think. How does âpermission-lessâ relate to âconsensusâ or âconsentâ (as, e.g., the Quakers practice)? Is permission something we generally feel, or is it yet to be (mythically, or politically) granted? What are the technical implications (and constraints) of accountability, or how might we use cryptotech to âaccountâ for our work together? Where donât we want to use such technology?
Your last question, about the connection to Metamodernism, is really interesting, too. I believe Metamodernism brings together âautonomyâ and âcommunion,â seeing these as interleaving, dynamic facets of our being. And so the concept of âpermissionless accountabilityâ combines autonomy (in the permissionless part) with communion (or social responsibility, in the accountability part) in conceiving of a platform architecture with collective practices that would facilitate this integration. Thatâs how I see it generally, but the details matter.
Starts one of the following interactive narratives: new user, advanced user.
@cthulhubot roll 2d6
3, 6
@cthulhubot quote
Carry out a random act of kindness, with no expectation of reward, safe in the knowledge that one day someone might do the same for you â Princess Diana
Thank you for the link to the video - really helpful. I feel I have a broad understanding now and marvel at the âdoorwaysâ that are in place that are automatic and yet protected by clever mathematics. Also how it calls forward human behaviour as a control mechanism to prevent fraud. I had this sense of people who want to cheat this system deploying huge amounts of energy to break the code. It feels like the good guys are ahead of the game rather than behind which often seems that case in crime versus policing. I tend to be an optimist and wonder what the downsides are to this - what might be missing? what new thinking is yet to emerge?
As far as @cthulhubot - I feel I have failed this initiative test as you can probably see from my attempts. - what am I missing in the process of relationship here? LOL! Perhaps when we have the on-line chat you can show me how to use it.
In terms of Metamoderism - yes I can really see what you are are offering here. Cryptopolitics encourages us to transcend the nation state as does Metamoderism. I have been playing with a Medicine Wheel that looks at the interplay between the evolution of the person and the evolution of humanity which is a theme of The Listening Society. I am sensing into the permission that is here to move away from the false security blanket of seeing government and banks as in our best interests to seeking vistas beyond these ageing models. Mmmmmm
Iâve been meaning to learn more about possible uses of blockchain outside of financial transactions. Iâm looking forward to following the Democracy Earth/Cryptopolitics link. Thanks!
For cryptocurrencies (bitcoin), Iâve been seeing critiques around energy usage . That âvalueâ in those systems ultimately derives from computer processing time, which itself derives from the energy used by the computers. Kind of like how the value of gold is officially based on its rarity, but could actually be seen to be based on difficulty of finding it in earthâs crust. But, unlike gold, every transaction requires increasingly difficult (energy consuming) calculations.
I wonder if there are equivalent challenges in other applications of blockchain, or if that is specific to its use in currency.
This question and Marcoâs (@madrush) thoughts about consensus and consent are triggering a half-formed thought about underlying structures that can grant permission and hold people accountable and the closely related questions of what structures grant trust and value. Maybe all circling around questions of what is necessary to grant legitimacy.
Maybe that points to a place where cryptopolitics and cryptocurrencies share some similar grounding. In both I see a strong distrust of institutions to grant permission, trust and value in justs ways. At some level, there seems to be a distrust of any group rooted in politics (i.e. any group of humans) to get it right. Then the mathematics steps in to play a kind of absolute grounding role. In the crypto* world, I donât have to trust anyone or any group to behave, I can just go ahead and check the math.
I wonder if thereâs a way to dig deeper in this by diving into the idea of âvalueâ in these various realms. David Graeber has a book about the anthropology of value that predates crypto* so wonât have anything directly to say, but he does show lots of ways that political legitimacy and monetary value have always been entangled. Maybe this is getting too far afield.
It appears that holochain doesnât have the same weakness, although it manages information differently than blockchain. Blockchain, although the âblockâ refers to blocks of data, actually appears to âblockâ computer usage to the blockchain processing, whereas holochain allows one to use computers that are doing other work to support the holochain processing. This is a more sustainable approach. Mind you, I wouldnât say I really understand these processes well, I am repeating what I have read about these things.
It looks like Democracy.earth is getting ready to launch their âVOTE tokenâ.
I received an email (as a subscriber on their list) offering me 100 tokens. It is somewhat technical to receive these tokens, in that one needs to have an Ethereum wallet set upâbut I fortunately have one which I used to experiment with Holochain. So I am going to give it a try and see what I learn. If anyone else is interested doing this and sharing your experience, let me know!