Centralization or Decentralization: Dystopia or Utopia?
Neither the tyranny of the elite nor the tyranny of the masses — Plato
Plato famously rejected democracy, because he thought the masses were not educated enough to make laws to guide society.
But Plato did not know about blockchain technology.
We can sort various forms of societal organization along a spectrum, between centralized and decentralized poles. On the centralized extreme would be the single autocratic leader, and on the decentralized extreme would be the great unwashed masses. Both extremes have always threatened societal failure.
After all, despotic tyranny threatens a totalitarian rigidity that imposes the tyrant’s vision of utopia on everyone else, trampling individual rights and leading only to dystopian nightmares.
On the other hand, mob rule is irrational and threatens to collapse the rule of law into a brute battle for power, resulting in chaos and catastrophe.
As Robert Nozick notes in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, the state must find a way to balance between the extremes of decentralized anarchy and centralized would-be utopias.
One way to highlight each extreme is to contrast them in terms of knowledge. On one hand, a single person might have some knowledge critical to lead society. On the other hand, the knowledge held by the masses is a chaotic set of contradictions.
However, with blockchain it is now possible to extract usable information from the entire body of societal knowledge.
In this way, Knowledgecoin’s decentralization protocol delivers a general formula that promises to bring about the sort of balance between totalitarian dystopia and anarchistic catastrophe that an ideal state could use as a working model.
Knowledgecoin breaks down all claims into their basic elements and distributes them across its DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) jurors.
These jurors each individually validate or invalidate the information presented to them. Knowledgecoin algorithms analyze the competence of each juror and assigns a “knowledge-competence rating”, which determines the juror’s eligibility to be randomly selected for future jury assignments.
Our decentralized knowledge-validating procedures emulate the scientific method to retrieve valid knowledge from wherever it can be extracted in society.
The protocol prevents bias and incompetence from playing a role in knowledge-validation, guaranteeing that the system is reliable. And to ensure robustness, any user who points out an error is rewarded for doing so.
Over time, this protocol creates a validated knowledge base that incorporates competence from all sources while filtering out the multitude of erroneous opinions that led Plato to worry about democracy.
Similar models can be designed to produce decentralized, competence-based protocols for any complex information-based organizational system, such as: the health industry, law, business, and the political process.
Knowledgecoin: decentralized knowledge extraction for a better a world.
About the Authors:
Rick Repetti: Professor of Philosophy at CUNY, Vice President at the American Philosophical Practitioners Association (APPA), and Chief Philosophy Officer at Knowledgecoin.io.
Mark Gleason: Mark Gleason is a Chief Enterprise Architect, Venture Capitalist, and Board Member at Knowledgecoin.io.
