Decentralization and Egalitarianism Legacies from 9000 Years Ago (PART III)

New Open, Inclusive, Decentralized Economy

The Bitcoin Space

Please remember that I characterized Çatalhöyük’s history by emphasizing the space is a social phenomenon and provides convenient places for social relations, production, labor, and organizational networks.

Civilization develops in the spaces and the characteristics of space, namely geography, shape civilization.

In Çatalhöyük, supported by the power of space, production started with agriculture and animal husbandry, surplus products emerged because of production, and many phenomena occurred in the social, economic, architectural, religious, and cultural fields. [1]

Just as space played an important role in making Çatalhöyük an egalitarian society, establishing the first trade, and developing strong architectures, the Bitcoin blockchain has the potential to provide us a space with a paradigm shift in building a sovereign, decentralized and reliable platforms such as DeFi, dApps, DAOs, etc.

Co-opetition in Decentralized Finance

As I mentioned in the first part of this post, Çatalhöyük was a proto city in Anatolia that existed from 7400 to 6000 BC, with an estimated 8000 people. Çatalhöyük represents a stable and successful egalitarian system that is notable for gender and economic equality. And they managed to maintain egalitarianism over about 1400 years. [2]

According to a report in Hürriyet Daily News (2014), Ian Hodder, a Stanford archeologist who led the excavation of the Çatalhöyük site between 1993 — 2018, explains:

“People lived with the principle of equality in Çatalhöyük, especially considering the hierarchy that appeared in other settlements in the Middle East. This makes Çatalhöyük different. There was no leader, government or administrative building; men and women were equal.[3]

Çatalhöyük was not an isolated city. Large-scale trade was carried out with distant places, such as pottery exports. And they did not consider that the most productive members of society should live in big houses within fences.

Somehow, everyone managed to get by without the need for policies that promoted a so-called liberal economy. There was no hierarchy where someone makes the so-called best decisions on behalf of the community. [2]

This is notable. It was as if the people of Çatalhöyük were required to provide the necessary living standards for everyone to live a prosperous life. Indeed, there were no privileged or poor people in Çatalhöyük. [2]

You can think that it’s just a proto-city and the model could not scale up to the world. I’m not trying to refer to the existing socialism and capitalism fallacy, yet I’m just trying to emphasize the current money or value proposition of capitalism in terms of competition.

Paul Rubin, Emeritus Professor of economics at Emory University, emphasizes in his book, The Capitalism Paradox, that brains evolved to solve problems our nomadic early human ancestors faced at a time of “little specialization and division of labor, little capital, low technological change, and little or no economic growth.”

Rubin argues that modern humans have an innate mental architecture that focuses solely on justice and competition, lacking abstractions that can appreciate the social benefits of innovation, economic growth, investment, and change. [4]

The word “competition” brings to mind the metaphor of a sport where one person can only win against another, with winners and losers. Likewise, the idea that game theory evokes in minds is that it is conducted like war strategies and tactics.

On the contrary, game theory, as being in Bitcoin PoW, goes beyond the concepts of competition and cooperation, making it possible to arrive at a view of cooperative competition (co-opetition) that is much more appropriate to the opportunities of our crypto economy time.

While competition is important in markets, Rubin emphasizes that what people compete with is the right to cooperate. Sellers compete with other sellers for the right to cooperate with buyers by producing something they value.

We must accept that the capital system is not zero-sum and that cooperation is a win-win situation. We can then acknowledge that the cooperative competition (co-opetition) capitalist system would be the most successful economy the world has ever seen. [5]

Capitalism doesn’t create markets. Competitive capitalism creates a system in which people can own infrastructure and thus make money for doing nothing! — which doesn’t work, remember that from the Bitcoin philosophy in the 2nd part: Time & Energy.

Sure, money is a fundamental building block of humanity. Sure, money civilized us. But we gamble trillions of dollars in the stock or crypto market at the touch of a button.

We take risks, then we either win or lose.

We are mentally addicted to money. The more dependent you are on something, the more you can be controlled by those who provide it!

In game theory, hierarchy is worse than a zero-sum game. Because once the hierarchy is centered, there is no end to how far the levels can diverge from each other. There are billions of people outside the economic hierarchical levels, who do not have access to financial instruments or even access to banks.

In this context, we need decentralized financial initiatives that will provide equal opportunities for everyone in the formation of an egalitarian and decentralized inclusive economy, have the potential to remove economic hierarchical levels, and access financial instruments on a global scale from anywhere.

Homo Economicus

Rational actors (miners) who try to achieve income maximization, which I mentioned in the scope of game theory in this article, can also be considered as “homo economicus”, which is the basic assumption of classical and neo-classical economics and means individuals who act rationally to maximize their welfare in economic life.

As Professor of Economics Paul Rubin has emphasized, however, people associate economic rationality with the process of competition because of our selfish genes encoded in the desire for justice.

Therefore, although our moral norms programmed for the negativity of the relationship of interests cause us to act in a tendency to cooperate, in fact, we cannot yet realize that it is possible for competitiveness to evolve into positive action on the way to cooperation.

Mechanisms that affect people’s economic decision-making; sometimes cognitive development, sometimes acquired thought patterns, habits, and sometimes moral and social norms. Of course, people have behavioral, and psychological projections according to their sensations, intuitions, thoughts, and emotions in all kinds of decision-making processes. This behavioral process can show differences (irrationality) in every situation.

In the article, in which I tried to explain the evolution of trust with the discipline of game theory, I basically discussed three types of human behavior patterns. These were altruistic (cooperater), rational (copycat), and malicious (cheater).

If we cannot diagnose rational incentive mechanisms that will maximize individual well-being for the benefit of society at the scale of trust establishment; behavioral irrationality with the basic patterns I mentioned, society prepares the ground for the proliferation of useless forces (rationals). This ground becomes an uncontrolled space that can allow speculation or trends to be created in the sense that they have no scientific basis, and manipulate the masses for the sake of their interests.

On the ground I mentioned, we can talk about an economic vortex that evolves into a paralysis of altruistic or collaborative actors (economic impasse), chronic inertia of rationals (anxious income rationality), and wasteful income (society is useless, unequal) by malicious or always cheaters.

Of course, with a single economic model, irrational human behaviors cannot be expected to evolve into economic people (homo economicus) in the context of human psychological nature.

So what could be the solution?

I’m sure economists will have many economic reform proposals. However, we have been testing over the years that economic reforms cannot go beyond a cyclical deadlock, that is, a whirlpool effect, since reforms are implemented as “just changing the form without harming the old one” due to the status quo tendency in human nature.

In addition, we are watching today how the most well-known economies on a global scale may become fragile; maybe is because the pandemic triggers the breaking of supply chains, or the war factor shuffles the cards on the re-establishment of highly dependent energy balances, or the expiring of the inflationary trends.

As I emphasized in my previous article, the old would have to be destroyed in order for the new to come. In the words of the ancients; “You can’t make an omelet without breaking an egg.” In other words, the success of the new one depends on the failure (disruption) of the previous old one.

Although most economists do not accept that humans can be rational economic people (homo economicus) for the benefit of society, as seen in behavioral economics experiments, especially in the game theory discipline, the establishment of co-opetition (competitive and cooperation) based on the evolution of trust at the individual scale can allow the redefinition of financial markets as open, inclusive and decentralized.

Such a revolutionary solution has been “experimentally” tested for 13 years with the Bitcoin Blockchain. And this was somehow achieved at Çatalhöyük 9000 years ago.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• About 9000 years ago our ancestors, who settled in Çatalhöyük for about 1,400 years, lived in a very different world where although they did what we know, they had a completely different meaning in terms of egalitarianism.
• As a metaphor, the Bitcoin blockchain provides a relational space to be settled in which a secure deal of connectedness, interrelatedness, and intersections.
• Energy consumption on Bitcoin proof of work mechanism is not a shortcoming that is unforeseen or the overlooked should be factored in. Rather, energy consumption is the operating currency of Bitcoin security mechanisms. That is, the energy-time absolute is a value proposition.
• Bitcoin is not an isolated blockchain platform mathematically established, it’s a revolution of egalitarianism, where competition and cooperation (co-opetition) to be scaled globally through new social contracts.
• On the basis of Bitcoin blockchain mechanisms, we can build a new open, decentralized, inclusive economy by simplifying crypto financial access tools and with innovative mechanisms that will encourage billions of different behavioral psychologies to become economic people (homo economicus) in reaching them.

Of course, for all of these, it is obvious that our understanding of the socio-economic heritage of our ancestors, who achieved firsts in many fields 9000 years ago, and embracing the new economic structure, the first steps of which were taken with Bitcoin mechanisms, will benefit our modern humanity.

Post Parts

PART I | Çatalhöyük — a Decentralized, Egalitarian Proto-City
PART II | Bitcoin Revolution in Time & Energy Space
PART III | RSK’s Everyday DeFi Opportunity for Everyone (You are here)

[REFERENCES]

[1] WEB SITE: Neolithic Site of Çatalhöyük, UNESCO World Heritage Convention, accessed in July 2022.

[2] BOOK: The Leopard’s Tale: Revealing the Mysteries of Çatalhöyük by Ian Hodder, 2011

[3] NEWS: Çatalhöyük excavations reveal gender equality in ancient settled life, Hürriyet Daily News, October 02, 2014

[4] BOOK — The Capitalism Paradox: How Cooperation Enables Free Market Competition by Paul H. Rubin, July 30, 2019

[5] BOOK: The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good by Robert H. Frank, 2011

[6] WEB SITE: RIF, RSK Infrastructure Framework, accessed in July 2022.