CRE8 | Governance

Support What Is Valuable

James Waugh
Sep 4, 2018 · 6 min read

“The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” — Daniel Boorstin

Cosmic Cantina ~ Chapel Hill, NC

What Is Governance in the Context of a Blockchain?

Governance is the process of making decisions about shared resources, e.g. nodes and software. As we all know, checks and balances are necessary to have fair and equal representation. Voting only a few times a year is not enough. Public discourse may or may not lead to consensus in a timely manner. Dialogue is of the utmost importance.

In this post, I’m going to present Vlad Zamfir’s definition of governance, and I’ll discuss why it’s a useful approach to think in terms of legitimacy. Then, I’ll attempt to explain how this approach fails to capture critical aspect of any governance model: sustainability. Our intention is to promote transparency maximalism for greater accountability.

Zamfir’s definition: Governance is the process by which people establish and maintain the legitimacy of decision-making processes. In this context, legitimacy simply means common knowledge that a governance process will be used, rather than abandoned or replaced.

Zamfir is the lead researcher working on the Casper protocol.

What does it mean to be persuaded? According to Vlad, whose dedication to abstract generalization inspires my work, “If you want to be uncompromising and want unanimous consensus, you better hope no uncompromising people disagree with you.” I’d have to agree ~ we need to discover what peers believe in order to compromise. It’s often difficult to smoothly implement a change to any protocol, even if a majority of the community is aligned.

At some point, every decision has to be final. We can’t risk having tightly-coupled voting procedures that inextricably bind users to a governance model. Government still matters. Democracy involves all voters, but fails to account for the magnitude of individual preferences. Many scholars like Glen Weyl have proposed quadratic voting to solve this problem. Our team believes that “dimensional voting” is another potential solution.

Dimensional Voting: Using the 888 token structure, CRE8 enables dimensional reputation based on context-specific work that is validated.

Questions To Ponder While Reading:

Where do we come from? Where are we going? What do you believe is good? What is your degree of conviction? Who listens to whom? Who talks to whom? How (and why) do people coordinate? What is valuable to you?

“Ideally, everyone would independently decide on the same choice without having to communicate.” — Zamfir

Zamfir’s very reasonable trilemma between latency, overhead and the number of validator nodes participating.

Individualism vs. Collectivism

There are just two ways to understand the relationship between individuals in a group: objectivism and subjectivism. Participants (upstream) need to consider the belief systems of all stakeholders (downstream)! Together, we maximize our potential with multi-perspective thinking. Collectively, individuals make compromises to add extrinsic value. Let’s drive progress through creativity.

What is the societal purpose of blockchain? Many would say it reduces transaction costs, powering trustless utility and circumventing systems of control. However, our answer is a bit more controversial: Blockchains empower transparent organizations to create value and see where it goes. Actions beget intentions, and imagination is potential energy.

Inherently, the structure of a governance process is a coordination game. Layers of information and functionality result in emergent outcomes within specific domains. Generally, the purpose of any crypto-economic system is to model how various behaviors (strategy profiles) lead to actual decisions, but token designers have a big problem: information asymmetry. We simply don’t have a complete picture of everyone’s true mindset.

How should we develop common knowledge about people’s intentions and expectations? Currently, a limited number of privately controlled entities (Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.) have access to “walled gardens,” unprecedented amounts of information they leverage to extract value from people. Conversely, our team believes technology should be a public utility. Much like love, data is a non-rivalrous good.

Human Validated Proof of Work

We all have a subjective sense of likelihood, risk and value. Still, we can’t possibly know what it feels like to be somebody else. All the solutions are out there, intangible ideas just floating around. Let’s connect, collaborate and create together!

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

— Albert Einstein

Multidimensional Governance

Since the beginning, people have wondered about the meaning of life. Why are we all here? Is there a purpose? How should I behave? Many of us choose to evaluate outcomes, rather than our intentions. By analyzing both effects and causes of our actions, we develop a greater understanding of truth. We may not be doomed to repeat history. Studying the past will help us answer such timeless questions.

https://www.instagram.com/cre8uk

Building on this concept, we must question whether thoughts should be classified as material objects or events. Historically, the separation of body and mind has troubled philosophers. As DesCartes famously argued, “Cogito ergo sum,” which means “I think, therefore I am.” Naturally, we can’t access other perspectives; we just know the contents of our own minds. But I’m certainly not a solipsist. Maybe the saying ought to be “Cogito ergo same.”

Flipping the Script

What if the outcome-driven approach is problematic? Within a diverse group of subjective opinions, it’s hard to determine actual impact. For instance, how might you measure happiness of the global community? Health and wealth are somewhat ambiguous too. Everything depends on the assessment of value or knowledge. There is not a single description of reality. Although you may think everyone agreed on what happened, others might have experienced the situation differently. Observation leads to personal interpretation of meaning, but individuals can’t define what is good in a universal context.

When we know and reach a consensus on this manifest energy and its forthcoming knowledge, we are able to act within the dimensions of information that we know. Thus, we can effectively coordinate gestalt interactions, exponentially increasing how much value is created.

Gestalt Principles in UI Design by Eleana Gkogka (from left to right): Proximity, Common Fate, Continuity, Similarity, Closure, Common Region and Symmetry

Market intelligence determines liquidity for public, tokenized actions. We create income sources for the community through economic initiatives to engender civic engagement and public service. Imagine actual productivity as the basis of universal income. CRE8 drives real progress by encouraging participants to support each other with positivity. For example, to incentivize soccer players, we could tokenize goals; bidders would provide liquidity for these “goalTokens” when they score. We can even tokenize passes and steals.

I think Vlad would agree that authoritarian governance is not legitimate. Benevolent dictators are vulnerable to ignorance. Sustainable feedback loops are necessary to drive progress. Privately-controlled monetization algorithms (e.g. the Federal Reserve) limit cultural freedom. They hold everyone back. With self-sovereignty and transparent coordination, society could effectively reach consensus on what needs to be done.

Let’s CRE8!

Bidio hereby proposes a definition of CRE8 as the most generalized purpose of humankind. Collectively, our minds cause it all to happen. We’re building an open-source utility for exchanging specific, tokenized actions within a multidimensional reputation system. Once the idea of decentralized governance becomes legitimately formalized, we can effectively institutionalize the protocol as a multi-DAO. Participants will set goals, define responsibilities, then start working on specific tasks. Market makers are incentivized to reward contributors who make a difference.

Populating the Multi-Market

Governance of multidimensional exchanges will have to incorporate dimensional voting, which relies on dimensional reputation. Protocols are specific to various categories or levels, i.e. projects, goals, tasks, work, locations, etc.

You can help us populate the value map! Sign up to make decisions and get some liquidity. Anyone can participate by expressing what is valuable to them. Together, we’re intentionally developing a vision for sustainable governance that efficiently spreads information through collaboration and creativity.

Join Today!

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade