Introducing Capabul

Welcome to the first Capabul article! A new publication exploring highly social applications of blockchain technology.

For most of my adult life, I’ve been striving to:

• Better connect with reality, whether through comedy or education.
• Help empower my fellow people, whether through politics or technology.

These two goals have recently become more tightly interconnected than ever for me through my work in blockchain technology, and I’ve found myself assembling a considerable number of nearly-finished articles that I wasn’t sure where I would put.

Thematically I have been exploring the social implications of a variety of economic devices, given the assumptions of strong peer to peer currency technologies in the near future.

If you wanted to track my work in-the-trenches of these technologies and their limitations today, you could follow my work on MetaMask, but rather than confusing the average reader, who should care more about social implications, and the opportunities that this technology may afford themselves in the long term, I have started this publication.

While many places are discussing the computational mechanics of blockchain protocols, and the field of cryptoeconomics is full of “network tokens”, which can be formally verified with careful analysis, in this publication I will be focusing on what I consider “soft protocols”: Applications of cryptocurrency that cannot be formally verified with computers alone. Which aspects of these new networks fundamentally rely on types of human trust?

There is a rich field of mechanism design to help help explore these topics, but sometimes even perfect mechanisms assume players who perfectly play the game. What games are truly teachable? What powerful human capabilities can mechanism designers harness to simplify their designs, and better understand their risks? When do the players define the game, and what social practices can we develop to empower people to best define the games they play?

Why the name?

Names are fun, and imbue life into a new project, so I’ve been keeping a list of possible names for this project for a while, but Capabul jumped out once I had it. It combines a variety of qualities I like:

It’s a new word spelling, so domain registrations are cheap! (I’ve got the .com and the .eth, although the Twitter was taken, so this project will tweet under @Capabulity)

Why Capable as a Root?

Blockchains are an awful word for the social potential that underlie them. I’ve been chasing the indivisible unit of social cohesion that I’d like to most explore in this publication, and I believe it is the sharing of a capability. Sharing a capability has a specific and powerful definition in computer systems, representing a unit of power, or permission, as it can be extended to others and shared. Once you have a capability, you are entrusted to use it responsibly, and one of the themes I plan to explore in this blog is the development of a human culture where we share our capabilities as fully with each other as possible. The only limit is how much we can trust each other.

Why a Bull

Bulls naturally have a very loaded definition in the field of markets and wall street, symbolizing enthusiasm, sometimes to a fault.

It’s a Pun

Between “Capable” and “Cape-a-bull”. I didn’t say it was a funny pun. More a play on words, I guess.

Why a Cape

Is the cape on this bull imbuing it with the powers of a super hero, or is this a matador’s cape, dictating the bull’s movement? Maybe the bull is our exuberance, and the cape is our ability to master its direction. Through cryptoeconomics, we have the opportunity to invent completely new systems of value exchange (instead of, say, money). By designing our own incentives, we dictate our own direction, and doesn’t that give you a bit of a super power?

Does the Red Cape have any significance?

“From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”

— Karl Marx

What do you have to offer? What do you need in exchange? From these two basic questions, I believe we can begin to build new value economies that are much more efficient than traditional markets today. I don’t think we need to bog ourselves up in the language of different ideologies. I think the ideas I will present here will be similarly appealing to socialists, libertarians, liberals, conservatives, anarchists, and anyone with common sense.

My goal is not to tell you what is right, it is to demonstrate some tools that are very powerful that allow very efficient cooperation. I believe by using tools of cooperation, most of us will find ourselves much better off than with any other strategy.

Are the Horns Satanic?

Sure, why not? There was a funny quote in a recent episode of Silicon Valley:

If you want to imagine these are the horns of rebellion against tyranny, I’m all for it. Other than that, it’s a coincidence. I’m not actually well read on Satanism.

That’s enough of a preface. I’ll begin laying out the real content soon, I’m excited to have begun laying a nest for these ideas.