Introducing our First Version of Decentralized Governance
One of the fallbacks of Bitcoin is that it cannot be changed. Well, it certainly can and certainly has, but there isn’t a baked in method for participants to modify and mutate aspects of the network in consensus and altogether. What this had led to are high transaction fees, slow processing times, and large mempools. Why? Because no one oversees the development process singularly, and adoption of new versions of the software is reliant not on the developers, but the miners and nodes that make up the network. This means that policies good for the long term of Bitcoin might not be good by the short-sighted profit motives of miners.
Ethereum seems to have a better approach to this problem. Instead of decentralizing the rollout and release of new updates, a centralized community forces people to adopt new versions. This works when you support the developers. However, when you don’t, it leads to forks such as Ethereum Classic.
These two approaches sit on two polar opposites and neither one is particularly the end-all-be-all solution. So Lamden has decided to take a hybrid approach.
Today, we release the specifications for the Lamden governance model. We’ve identified that a lot of problems caused in Bitcoin are over very simple details (for example, the block size.) The current solution to this problem is to just fork Bitcoin which just leads to a ton of minor and competing standards. This is not efficient.
Furthermore, the community cannot respond to new changes very quickly. If a new release over-extends a certain principle, then there is not a very good way to refine the change somewhere in the middle of the original status quo and the new solution. Thus, it is extremely hard to come to balance in the current rigid systems.
This is also true for Ethereum. The Ethereum Foundation has no idea what is really going to work for their software. They can propose solutions and glean social sentiment from their channels, but until the thing is actually operating, they cannot really understand the impacts.
A perfect of example of this is Casper. Casper is a massive change. It’s unreal to assume that everything in Casper is going to be perfectly tuned for success. What is the way to then properly tune Casper once it is rolled out? How do the developers know what is the best tuning for the system? Being outsiders and non-participants, developers have no way of knowing what’s best for their users. Until now…
Lamden is baking in these metavariables into a voting mechanism that is strictly tied to the consensus of a blockchain. Each ‘policy’ as we call them effects the content of each block. If someone does not agree with the voted on policy and wants to try to defect, they will instantly be out of consensus. This allows us to create mutable variables that can be voted on and can actually change over time.
What this also means is that variables can adapt to outside ebbs and flows. If a transaction cost is too high and the userbase starts to suffer, participants who have an economic incentive to retain a high userbase can vote to lower the transaction cost. However, if the transaction cost is too low, those participants don’t have an incentive to participate anymore. Thus, they themselves will find the perfect balance between over and underpriced costs. A developer from the outside can never adjust these values to the responsiveness and appropriateness that the participants can themselves.
This is very much in line with the DAO philosophy of self-governing systems and actually is a better system than a decentralized or centralized one. Bitcoin is decentralized and it can’t get anything done. Ethereum is centralized and can’t propose the perfect changes to their system. Lamden can introduce policies and metavariables that can be voted on so that the developers can still introduce updates, but the behavior of those updates can be tuned and adopted by the people they effect directly.
This is a new way to look at decentralized systems that will lead to more innovation in the real world. We all know how a blockchain works, but what does the governance system for a decentralized YouTube look like? If you follow the politics of YouTube, you know that they are demonetizing a lot of great content that doesn’t align with their corporate goals. How do you design a decentralized system with policies that ban and block violent and extreme content without blocking innovative content and controversial commentary?
One of our goals as a software company is to provide the scaffolding for any person to construct their own governance systems such that we can create the next generation of internet services that are not tied down by monolithic giants. This will allow innovation to prosper and carry forward. Think of the early days of Facebook and YouTube and how innovative and free they were. How do those feelings line up against our views of those products today? What has changed? How do we introduce mutable systems that can perform and morph to the needs of the users?
With Lamden, we believe we can demonstrate the best decentralized governance system on our main blockchain as a model for new systems to be produced.
Stay tuned for more expression of this governance system in later releases of our testnet and software.
Check out the first version of our governance policies here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17jDOqc62T6NWXlioGfO3bn4UplO6resjfXaPzYPN2f0/edit?usp=sharing
