Governance is Needed When Goals Aren’t Defined
Bitcoin doesn’t need governance but smart contract platforms do
In a fireside chat between Sam Harris and Yuval Noah Harari (author of Sapiens), Yuval states that the reason we need democracy (or other forms of governance) is to agree on problems and goals. Once we know these, governance is no longer needed; all that’s required are experts to address the defined problems and goals. For example, landing an airplane is a concrete goal that requires an expert pilot.
Full Waking up podcast here: The Edge of Humanity (with Yuval Noah Harari)
This got me thinking about goals, blockchains, and governance…
Starting with bitcoin. Governance isn’t needed because the goal is clear, which is to create a digital asset of value (e.g. e-cash or digital gold) without relying on a trusted third party so that the cryptocurrency can’t be censored. Although there are debates within the community, these do not question bitcoin’s fundamental goal and they’re essentially centered around executional details such as block size.
On the other hand, more generalized projects such as Ethereum, EOS, or Tezos aren’t solving any particular problem and thus have no clear goal, which would explain why governance of these platforms has become such a hot topic.
Today many of these projects resemble each other, all aiming to create a scalable Turing complete platforms. The key to differentiation and success for these will therefore depend on: (a) how well they’ll integrate and manage governance to address contentious problems, and (b) building an engaged community that’ll want to be involved in defining the platform’s goals. Until then, the question remains: “will these cryptonetworks ever have a killer application and thus goal?” Time will tell.
From around the web
The Four Horsemen of Centralization (outlast.me) — Nothing new but a good introduction to “decentralization.”
Unpacking Bitcoin’s Social Contract (Medium) by Hsu — Looks at bitcoin’s social contract and uses it to explain bitcoin’s unique historical position, its resilience to bugs and forks, and more.
A CBC Casper Tutorial (Vitalik.ca) — CBC Casper explained using a concrete example. Post is written to help more people understand the “other version of Casper,” which is different from the one Vitalik is working on.
Peer Review: CBC Casper (Medium) by Muneeb Ali — Related to the above, Blockstack team highlights the shortfalls of the CBC Casper paper.
22 Ideas to explore with 0x (0x blog) — some interesting, original, and creative ideas.
Uniswap — A Unique Exchange (Medium) — compelling “protocol for trading tokens that has some nifty advantages over traditional DEXes.”
Four Days Trapped at Sea With Crypto’s Nouveau Riche (Breakermag) — Long entertaining (and disheartening) article written by award winning feminist journalist Laurie Penny.
Chart of the week 📈
Weekly newsletter published internally at Google. The views expressed are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of my employer.
