I feel like Bitcoin has some pretty interesting
Philosophies about democracies that are baked into the consensus level and so I'm curious to hear your thoughts on
I guess democracy and then the intersection between blockchain and democracy, and then democracy on a blockchain
Yeah, I mean democracy is a loaded word, and democracy is a loaded word because for most people
we project onto Democracy what we think
we want or believe democracy to be
I'm Greek we invented it
When we invented it under some very specific circumstances?
three thousands land owning slave owning white males got to decide for themselves and
the one hundred and fifty thousand slaves women and children who they owned as property
That's Democracy
I don't believe in Democracy
Democracy is
51% of the population having the ability to decide to kill the other 49 because they're inconvenient
homosexual
Jewish
Whatever, right?
Democracy without
restraints without Human rights without Civil rights without constitutional
protections is a brutal system of oppression where once you get that sliver of
majority you can eradicate everybody else
Strictly speaking that's what democracy is. Now, most people have
constitutional republic and democracies
Parliamentary democracies, and other means of sweetening that system a bit to ensure the minorities don't get oppressed
How well does it work? I don't know bitcoin isn't a democracy
Not even in the mining
Bitcoin is a system of
Super majority Consensus
when it takes a very large percentage of the
deciding groups the five constituencies of consensus in order to make change, which makes change very difficult
bitcoin is a system that
decentralizes power radically
Politically many people call that cyberpunk, crypto-anarchy other words we don't get half
Bitcoin is redefining
political and organizational
systems not just bitcoin open public blog change this technology born out of the internet and expressing
some of the radically egalitarian
open Philosophies a free flow of information
freedom of speech freedom of Association on the transnational
basis that transcends not just borders, but every aspect of identity
without identity
That's a radical new political system. It started with the internet. It's now happening to money, and we don't get half good words for it
So some people might call it democracy. I don't think that's what it is
Democracy mostly in developed worlds today is a system of hierarchical and
Institutional organizational principles that was born out of the era of industrialization in the 18th and 19th
Century it does not scale anymore
It doesn't serve a planet of seven and a half billion people where we have enough food to feed everyone
And we just can't distribute it
Where we have the ability to produce energy
for everyone, and we just can't distribute it. Where we can solve problems like climate change
So hierarchical systems are failing
flat, network based, collaborative
decentralized ad-hocracies, on the internet
may be the new thing. who knows? It will be fun find out
So I'm along for the ride
Q: To follow on essentially from what you are saying, you talked about
the different constituencies within the ecosystem and about the fact that the consensus on
forks is formed by groups
So it might sound like to sort of chaotic
consensus algorithm
Whereas I wonder I mean is it really distribution? Or are there
coalition's that are able to force a consensus. What is the structure of a consensus if you look at within
at the level of those two consistencies
It actually gets broader than that because you look at take more fine-grained view of the system
it's more players, but take a look a level of those constituencies
And what's the structure of a consensus formation at that level, do you think?
We don't know yet
We're finding out and here's the interesting thing
You've got layers of this, right?
so there's a political layer which has to do with
public statements, unraveling the troops and signing agreements and
Negotiating with others who you think are in power or may have enough power to sway others and using
influences and
Persuaders and pundits. right? I don't play that game that some do in trying to create these Coalition's
You know, pick your venn diagram across these five constituencies and say here it is
This is the new big blocker constituency. This is the small blocker constituency. This is the "we haven't given it a name yet"
constituency. All of that noise
doesn't change the bitcoin consensus rules at the end of the day
It's going to play out
under Network protocol with nodes that are participating
that express the
economic interests of their users
Through choices about which set of consensus rules they use, on their live systems and with their transactions
So money, on the system
choices of the Software you use
Choices of the software you mine with, if you're a miner. All of those things in the undetermined
And it's not going to be sometimes a clear-cut
determination it may involve a prolonged tug-of-war. It may involve a realignment of
Incentives, my prediction is that talk is cheap in a lot of this
People will say anything
At that last moment
When push comes to shove and you see that the consensus rules are moving one way
you know you stick your finger in the air, and you detect which way the wind is blowing and
suddenly your very sacred principled opinions. Go straight out the window, and you follow your pocket
Because you can be right and you can be wrong
but if you break the consensus rules, you are poor either way and
that
overriding
economic, practical, right now, game theory that plays out on the network
overrides everything else
people may say one thing and run different software, they may signal they want one thing and then
execute something else. They may hold on
until they start losing a lot of money and then change their minds, and we don't know how this is going to play out
We're going to find out hopefully in a not too disruptive way. We may end up with two camps taking their own path
That's what it ethereum did. I don't like that particular solution for bitcoin, but some others do