Money doesn’t buy happiness. But what is happiness then?
The general, primary, perception of happiness has been around for quite a while and seems to be shared among many other living beings: sleeping, eating and breeding to give birth to more beings like yourself and your mate, for whichever reason. Basically, if you’re alive there’s some chance you can be happy, and if you don’t, we can’t say (usually no).
Wealth became the necessary requirement to fulfill those physiological necessities, which nowadays still constitute the basis for higher level accomplishment. But why is that? Why did we have to resort to capitalism and end up precluding essential resources which should be naturally accessible to everyone? Wasn’t there a better way?
The answer is: probably, but currencies and free markets have been providing the best quantification of consensus to date, which is what modern societies are made of. Let me get there briefly.
We found out pretty soon that negotiation was a more efficient way to obtain goods than killing their owner, and thus societies, or social contracts, were first established. But what if the cabbage you wanted to exchange with my two carrots was a bit mushy and you were overvaluing it? Self-administered barter would have been both impractical and subjective, and with the enlargement of communities and thus increase of competition for goods, higher precision and assurance were needed. Actually, it wasn’t only the cabbage traders who couldn’t objectively establish prices. In lack of insights on the state of the market, no one could do so without inevitably coming into conflict with the counterparty. Thus state-controlled currencies were born: to reassure everyone that what they were getting was right in measure and indisputable, upon penalty of exclusion from the consensus (read: imprisonment, execution).
After a while, people started realizing that putting someone, who likes possessing things, in charge of distributing to others the things he can keep to himself wasn’t an astute deal, and thus representative republics were put in place so that larger groups of people could distribute the same guilt in smaller individual doses.
Nowadays, thanks to transistors and underwater cables, everyone can access the data of global markets directly from their computer and assess prices in complete autonomy. Lately, with the dawn of peer-to-peer protocols, we even figured how to make those virtual accountants work together with each other, accordingly to global laws (code) abided by each participant of the network, giving back to the factual owner the control of his property.
“Let’s replace those dumb centralized state structures of the past already!” you might think. Still, most of the executive roles undertaken by governments can’t be addressed coherently by blockchains alone. Law enforcement, internal and external affairs still require interacting with very physical entities which don’t interface well with the few electrons we are in control of.
Nevertheless, as for financial ministries, while being sufficiently independent from physical assets, they still adhere to the principles of the same social contract while administering consensus, aka money and ultimately fixed-point values.
Initial Coin Offerings are becoming the main drain of capital from state-controlled economies, involving both indebted college student and wealthy venture capitalists. Nevertheless, old school ICOs (while running on smart contracts) aren’t much smarter than the social contracts of the aforementioned prehistoric communities: “Let’s trade, then you can either hope for a fair return or better luck next time.”
Now, should we wait for someone to tell us he can administer our tokens until proven wrong, or should we JUST skip ahead a couple of years and write those laws ourselves?
