How blockchain is rewriting the social contract
It is very rare to have a clear outcome of where a technology will lead, when still in its infancy. The advent of blockchain technology is not an exception.
Ironically, what made the blockchain technology popular is the same thing that is misguiding popular perception right now — Bitcoin.
Of course, Bitcoin is more than the actual cryptocurrency. It is a placeholder symbol in mass-media, representing all cryptocurrencies — an alternative value transfer system, aimed to solve the flaws of centralized state currencies. Mass media knows it in connection to underground illicit markets, huge trade volatility, crypto-anarchists and a handful of IT nerds. Of course, in reality, it is much more than that and we can all be thankful for the pioneering work of Satoshi Nakamoto. In many ways, his work with Bitcoin was the spark that ignited an entire technological and social revolution.
But we must also understand that the potential of blockchain goes far beyond cryptocurrencies. It goes even beyond Ethereum and its innovative smart contract system (some call it Blockchain 2.0). It even goes beyond the real-world use cases that we see today, decentralized business models fueled by utility tokens.
Blockchain, in its essence, is a way of creating trust between people. And this, even if we don’t realize immediately, it is something amazing.
As human individuals, we do not share one single mind. We have our own private thoughts and actions. Even amongst the closest family members, trust is something that is continuously built and cared for. But out there, outside of your family or tribe, people had no intrinsic reasons for believing each other, for trusting each other. This is why we have built a society.
Almost all, social institutions are built to compensate for that lack of innate trust. We created systems of checks and balances, we empowered institutions to punish individuals that don’t play along nicely and we build more and more complex systems to ensure nobody breaks the written or unwritten covenants of our society.
This has worked very well for the past 5000 years or so. But now, as we are moving forward to climb on the civilizational ladder and to face the complex problems of the 21st century, we need to bring some changes in the very fibre of our social structure. The problems that we are facing (climate change, the advent of AI, globalization etc), they all require a much more fluent and interconnected social structure. We need to have organizations far larger and far more agile than those bound together by institutional trust.
We can no longer count on individual states and national institutions to solve all the problems. We can no longer expect for corporations, dictated by the interests of the board and shareholders to act in the interest of the public.
We need to radically rethink the way our society is built and how we work and live together, the very concept of trust.
And this is exactly what blockchain does. Besides the amazing technical ingeniosity of ever-more complex blockchain architectures and types of consensus, there is a single underlying principle — people and companies voluntarily bind themselves and their resources to a decentralized (or acentric) consensus that dictates “the will of the network”. Becoming a holon (a self-sufficient part of a bigger system) in a larger system, we can go beyond the constraints of classical game theory, such as those in the Prisoner’s Dilemma — when trust is not an issue anymore, both parties can optimise their outcome.
For those interested in Game Theory, it would mean moving from Nash Equilibrium (all players choose the best potential option of acting when not knowing/not being able to control the way other individual act — in other words when there is no trust) to Pareto optimal (best possible scenario when cooperating).
In simple terms, in the long term, it means moving from:
closer to:
This is the exact reason why we set up the Romanian Blockchain Association at the beginning of 2018 — to foster the adoption of a technology that has the potential to change not just Romania, but the entire world.
And in just one year, we have managed not just to bring together the blockchain business community and the crypto enthusiasts, but also to initiate a very constructive dialogue with the Romanian Government and to initiate multiple educational projects.
But perhaps the crowning achievement has been organizing the Romanian Blockchain Summit:
Over 100 international speakers of the highest professional calibre, 22 rich panels, two full days in the Palace of the Parliament and over 1500 attendees.
Not only did the event put Romania on the map of the pioneering countries in the field, but it once again proved that our country all the resources and human creativity needed to play an important role worldwide.
This is just the beginning, as we will continue to push forward in promoting a transparent and meritocratic society.
If you wish to get involved with the Romanian Blockchain Association, or to become a member, do not hesitate to contact us on Facebook. For any potential partnership or if you are an entity interested in gaining access to our expert advice, you can contact Adrian Stratulat, Executive Manager at adrian.stratulat@asociatiablockchain.ro.
