My thinking about the blockchain/cryptocurrency space shifted significantly when I changed my perspective from thinking about technology to thinking about problems.
The web caught on because in the late 80s, the biggest problem in the world was that we were starved for information. We didn't know it yet, because we'd never lived in any other world, but once we could fire up Netscape and view homepages from people who lived across the world, or talk in real-time on AIM with people half a world away, or ask any question of Google and get answers, or find whole communities of people who were interested in that incredibly niche interest that we'd despaired of ever meeting someone else to share it with, or view the satellite & street view images of any address on earth, or order any product off Amazon and have it delivered tomorrow to our front door, it was apparent what we were missing out on. And that has spawned multiple trillion-$ companies.
The biggest problem in the world today is lack of trust and the failure of institutions. (Which, ironically, may have been been caused by the web and the huge amount of information it made available.) And blockchains address this. They don't solve it - actually, my biggest resistance to Bitcoin & blockchain hype earlier, and my biggest risk factor now, is that Bitcoin doesn't actually solve the problem it's purporting to solve. People still get screwed when transacting in Bitcoin, they just get screwed by scammers & hackers rather than the government & big corporations.
But the problem still exists, and people are aware of it now. Satoshi's greatest contribution was to create something that could semi-plausibly fix it and then release it into the world, which generates all sorts of attention from other entrepreneurs. Just like Tim Berners-Lee's original WWW browser was pretty clunky by modern standards, Bitcoin is pretty clunky by modern standards. But it's attracted a lot of minds into refining & replacing it, and as long as there's a problem, there's a market, and there's a good chance that eventually somebody will figure it out.
(Or not. Who knows, in the 60s everyone was sure there was a market for flying cars and robot vacuum cleaners. We did eventually get both flying cars and robot vacuum cleaners, but so far the market for them is much smaller than anticipated.)
Because of what's happening in [government, media, science, public spaces, labor markets]. I view all of them as examples of the same underlying phenomena.
In government, you have the UK voting to remove itself from the EU, and then when the referendum passed, the prime minister resigning, all of the major proponents of the referendum resigning, and Scotland threatening to secede from the UK (again). You have a U.S. president who starts his term with under 50% approval rates, the lowest since WW2 [1], to cries of "not my president", and Congressional approval ratings below 20%. You've got continued polarization - instead of converging on compromise candidates in the center, the Republicans has moved rightwards toward nominating actual Nazis (5 running in 2018) [2], and the Democrats have moved leftwards toward nominating actual socialists [3].
In the media, you've got an Overton Window that doesn't overlap - no matter where you are on the spectrum, there are publications with a large readership who are publishing what you perceive to be blatant falsehoods. Take a look at the comment sections of the same story on Breitbart [4] and News & Guts [5]. Could you imagine a reader of one reading the other with any sort of any open mind? Would you consider anything you read there an example of trust?
In science, you have movements such as anti-vaxxers who would reject one of the most important health advances of the last century because they don't trust it. You have continued rejection of climate science, largely because it's inconvenient. You have a replication crisis in many social scientists.
In public spaces - go to an airport and listen to the loudspeaker say "Please report any unattended baggage or suspicious persons to the nearest TSA agent" and think about what that's saying about the level of trust in society and the constant messages of fear. There was another recent story on HN about air marshals secretly tailing random civilians [6]; that's not exactly something that happens in a society that trusts its citizens. There's also continuing helicopter parenting [7] and the assumption that everything around you is dangerous, which tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And in labor markets - I did a bunch of market research on a startup to fix unemployment a couple years ago. My hypothesis was that with all the startups desperate for workers, and workers desperate for jobs, it was a simple information problem to match up supply to demand and make everything efficient. What I found was that hiring isn't really an information problem, it's a trust problem - employers are terrified of getting a bad hire and so reject a lot of candidates that with a little training could be great employees, and similarly employees are terrified of ending up in a career dead-end and so are unwilling to invest in significant self-study or commit to a career path or potential employer. End result - unemployment and underemployment even though there are both workers and jobs available.
All of these are pretty far afield from cryptocurrencies, but you asked why I believe the #1 problem in the world is lack of trust, and that's why. A world where people trust each other is one where they're willing to take risks on the assumption that they won't be taken advantage of, and that is...very far from the state of the world right now.
Trust has always been a problem. A trustless currency doesn't solve the problem any more than anything else has. Blockchains can't and won't solve the UK brexit problem. It won't solve the US politics problem. It won't solve the businesses too big to fail problem or the politics, power, and money corrupting people problem.
I agree that trust in institutions is a problem but blockchain won't solve it. It will just displace it. In return if you aren't careful you'll lose the benefits of third party arbitrators. The very thing that in the current system gives you any hope of righting the wrongs that the systems you don't trust have inflicted on you.
It's quite probable that rather than making things better cryptocoins will make them worse. It's also quite probably that they will devolve into the very thing they were trying to avoid becoming. As a case in point: Ethereum forked because of a bug in a smart contract. A central authority had to step in to right a wrong. (You can't trust people to write correct software). And that was early on in the cryptocurrency history. There will be more such occasions and each one will prove that not only can you not trust your bank to always get it right. You also can't trust the cryptocurrency developers or the smart contract developers.
Trust in, and disagreements over monetary policy may actually be at the root of many of the problems you outline. The euro crisis was likely a significant contributing factor to Brexit. The US bailouts of 2008 are still are source of political contention.
Yes Ethereum forked, but that actually gives users a choice, and still does. Some people who disagree with the choice to step in can still run and transact using Ethereum Classic. With both Bitcoin & Ethereum, market forces seem to be doing a decent job of maintaining consensus.
The difference here is that the source code for the EVM is open source and auditable. And I wouldn't use a smart contract that isn't the same, open source and auditable. This is my realm of expertise, this is how I think about systems and interactions, it's my turf so I have far higher levels of trust executing a smart contract then walking through the TSA scanners.
Yes, but our demographic is a very small part of the wider target audience so what makes sense for us does not at all make sense for them. Any solution that requires the market as a whole to level up to our level of expertise has the same problem for them that we have when walking through TSA scanners. The only difference is that now you are the TSA which again only shifted the problem. It didn't solve it.
Thats where web of trust comes in and empowers us, the engineers, compared to the past. Let's say my relative is having an issue with her mortgage, something that should be fairly straightforward to codeify in a smart contract. In the past, I'd have to shrug my shoulders and help her with a human communication problem. In the future I might be able to actually inspect the code of her mortgage. This allows me to assert my understanding about how it works. I can say, I know it's correct or I know it's incorrect. This is in contrast to modern day where it's much harder for me to understand, therefore I would likely shrug my shoulders and say, I don't know, you'll have to contact an expert.
It's similar to another example. I moved my mom over to use Linux as her operating system. I now know, for a fact, that her system is secure and updated. I trust the distribution to audit and package software safely, therefore my stress levels are much much lower and I barely get technical support questions from my mother, compared to before.
Smart contracts enable this same level of trust to develop for complex protocols between people & computers, like mortgages, insurance, DNS, software package building and distibution systems. It allows for advances levels of trust to develop in the system itself, and as an engineer I can now transmit that trust through my web of relationships which is how it reach and benefit non technical users. In a way, it allows for engineers to take more responsibility for the systems we live within, versus today where you have to pay me to give a shit and I try to take as little responsibility for the systems I support because I know they are fucked up and broken and I don't want to be the one on the hook when someone gets hurt by the system I and responsible for.
Proof of work blockchains arent solving anything here, theyre a step further in the “do not trust” direction. However i think consortium chains may have potential.
I think you have stated the right symptoms and identified a great angle.
Indeed the fact that "similarly employees are terrified of ending up in a career dead-end"
is related to the increase in the width of the Overton window.
Indeed it's "ironic" that it's happening at the same time there is an explosion in the amount of information available.
And indeed it's about institutions.
But once we make those extraordinary observations, we tend to use a vocabulary centered around the world trust,
and run the risk of veering off course. The multiple subtle uses of the word "trust" weaken the argument.
For example you could argue Uber, Airbnb also happened and they use a huge amount of trust.
A trick I like ot do is to replace the word trust with "adhesion", a more precise word.
It focuses the debate on a narrow phenomena and enable a different framework of thought.
It also suggests conclusions about what's happening and highlights interesting features.
Our conscious decisions are made inside a symbolic fabric. For the sake of the arguments, let's reduce human beings
to symbolic organisms living in an information ecosystem. That ecosystem is grounded in a physical reality,
which govern its functionning. The way it works when embodied in parchment scrolls is different
from the way it works when it's printed text.
What we usullay call information revolution is what happens when the physical artefacts underpining our information ecosystem change.
When it happens it also changes the laws of our symbolic reality. A mental universe where, using google instant,
one is able to refine a query, ten discover what she is actually looking for, learn that it actually exists,
find related topics, compare them, find highly relevant comments, again and again... dozens of times a day
is a totally different mental universe than the one we had merely 20 years ago.
If you were to close your eyes, suppress any thoughts about your physical surroundings,
consider how we collectively process information and compare it to previous era,
you would conclude that our minds have been propulsed into a sci-fi future
and are living some kind of star trek fantasy.
That is maybe controversial, but the consequences about who we have become are interesting.
Using again the symbolic organism metaphor, as the governing laws of our symbolic reality have changed, we also have evolved.
Far more than we acknowledge. Our inner selves are being projected so far in the future, we are becoming aliens to our previous selves.
Imagine if the strength of gravity was reduced to a thousandth of its current strength. The effect it would have on our bodies would be dramatic.
That is what is happening to us.
You don't have to agree with that, but if you do you will start to see the problem.
Our institutions which really are symbolic machinery or building, have been built implicitly
following the laws of our symbolic reality. But while we are changing under the action
of our new environment, our institutions are not.
The distance is growing, between people and the institutions that purport to guide them.
As if they are gliding through them. They are less and less made of the same matter.
What we are witnessing is an adhesion crisis.
Wearing those lenses, you will see more and more signs of what you mentionned in your comment.
Lack of trust is the form it takes when people are actively engaging in a particular situation like during elections.
Most of the time a growing minority is subconsciously deconnecting from institutions without even realizing it
and without an ounce of ill will. Right now, some tech workers, working in Big Co are reading this site at this very moment,
just to relax a little bit. Not realizing it's the 21st century equivalent of reading a anarcho-communist
rag at lunch time while working for Ford circa 1920. The difference is nowadays you have to do it to stay relevant.
As times goes, that hidden "negative" adhesion potential, is building up,
opening some cracks here and there. It is passively looking for anything, institution-like,
that will help channel it's energy.
And crypto looks like something that at least address the problem.
This is exactly right in my opinion. The dotcom era was all about the decentralization of information, whereas blockchains are all about the decentralization of trust. Contrary to the OP, I believe that blockchain technology really started in the first alt coin boom around 2012-2013. That's when the tinkerers came out. I think blockchain infrastructure is still very early days, and scalability is still among the biggest problems to solve currently, but it's definitely being worked on and it's solvable.
> The biggest problem in the world today is lack of trust and the failure of institutions. (Which, ironically, may have been been caused by the web and the huge amount of information it made available.) And blockchains address this.
The big rub in your belief is that social groups don't scale. In a group of size of 100 people or so, standard social techniques (such as peer pressure and ostracization) can keep order. But at 10,000 people, that doesn't work. Delegation does scale. Society and civilization essentially works by creating structures that can impose norms, rules, and punishment among others and offloading the cost of doing so to people who specialize in those tasks. Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't issues of "who watches the watchmen," but it does mean that that is the question you should be asking.
One example of the problems of decentralization is the modern information delivery mechanism. Because it's feasible to serve smaller groups, our social groups have broken up into smaller echo chambers where we're fed only the information we want to hear. The ease of spreading information is also ease of spreading misinformation, and objection to censorship means there's no way to control spread of misinformation.
"The ease of spreading information is also ease of spreading misinformation, and objection to censorship means there's no way to control spread of misinformation."
Censorship is non-consensual filtering of information (the mediator censors without consent of producer and consumer of information).
This does not mean we can't control the spread of disinformation at all: by investing in education, and educating people about the importance of verification in general or formal verification in specific where possible, society could invest in infrastructure that helps in weeding out false information without twisting the consumers hand willy-nilly.
As an example: without any need for censorship, if someone claims to give a proof for a theorem that supposedly follows from set.mm I can consent to censorship by voluntarily using MetaMath to verify it without even trying to understand the proof myself, and then discover that the proof is false, without some intermediary of information needing to censor anything for me.
This is kind of the underlying theme behind the "blockchain craze", educating people the surprising applicability of logic/mathematics to the real world, even if it is very hard to design and prove the security of such systems, and to interpret the assumptions of such designs with desirable properties as being the requirements of infrastructure we need to build in order to enjoy such a decentralized commons.
Disregarding the validity of your argument in itself, trust issues cannot be solved by black boxes. Humans laws have to be enacted by humans, because the real world is messy and rules and laws need "messy wiggle room".
I respectfully disagree partially.(I agree black boxes are insufficient, unless the democratic process is modeled/accepted as a black box)
I believe in the utility of separation of powers: a true democratic legislative branch, a provable executive branch, and a mechanically verifiable judgement branch.
I don't mind if you call the democratic facet of the legislative branch messy. Learning to make proper decisions for novel situations tends to be messy, because we learn from our mistakes, and mistakes are messy.
As long as the way the population would democratically prefer the case to be judged is captured/modeled accurately by the law, the formal mechanical law is suitable. If the way the mechanical law is applied does not capture the way we want things to be handled (what I presume you refer to with a messy case) the legislative branch should be activated to change the law, and we want the legislative branch to be democratic because it's what makes sure that the population consults their ethics and feelings (community taste can not be proven, except by poll).
So the mess is restricted to just the first instance of unforeseen situations. ("History repeats itself, the first time as a tragedy, and from then on as a farce")
> As long as the way the population would democratically prefer the case to be judged is captured/modeled accurately by the law, the formal mechanical law is suitable.
I would hate to live in your world. The law is the way it is because it governs humans, and because legislation cannot capture every aspect of all facets of the law.
Mechanical application of the law is a pretty dreadful idea.
the transition towards mechanical would of course prompt an enormous amount of decisions to be settled democratically (since we have been doing them ad hoc all the time), but the democratic decision is a decision by humans, and all the following similar cases would mechanically follow the same ruling, until either the population changes its mind (through the democratic process) or the population realizes it misformalized a law by an unforeseen case which again prompts a democratic consultation.
So it would still be decisions by humans, the resolution of the law would increase and capture more detail messy real world situations of our daily lives.
The only horror is that it would force us to either treat everyone as equals before the law, or force us to democratically change the law back and forth when we choose to be inconsistent, forcing us to realize we are discriminating on some (un)identified factor.
I'm sorry, but I don't believe we can get to a state where every edge case is encoded by law, nor that mechanical application of such would be a good thing. I would use my democratic mandate to vote against such a thing.
>but I don't believe we can get to a state where every edge case is encoded by law
Neither can the current system, so any analysis would have to be comparative. I do believe we can approach such a state much quicker and more accurately through formalization.
>nor that mechanical application of such would be a good thing.
Was the formalization transistion from unwritten laws to written laws a good thing in your view? What makes quotability from a written corpus of law not horrible, but further formalization horrible?
With mechanical application I only refer to the end result taken after the verifier (judging algorithm, i.e. MetaMath or other) as a result of either a passing proof of guilt provided by prosecutor, or passing of a proof of innocence provided by defense. There is no imperative algorithm that maps cases to sentences, thats not how the law can work due to combinatorial explosion. The law is like philosophy or mathematics.
The society could unconditionally reward people for detecting inconsistencies in the law before we run into them during a trial after a tragedy thus potentially preventing it (i.e. finding a proof that the law simultaneously guarantees a right for a certain deed, yet also forbids it)
btw I enjoy this discussion, so if you can come up with more criticisms or examples please do!
> What makes quotability from a written corpus of law not horrible, but further formalization horrible?
Inflexibility. We humans are squishy and imprecise. Which is why the law is unlike mathematics, and I think efforts to make it so and to remove humans from its application are fundamentally misguided.
> The society could unconditionally reward people for detecting inconsistencies in the law before we run into them during a trial after a tragedy thus potentially preventing it (i.e. finding a proof that the law simultaneously guarantees a right for a certain deed, yet also forbids it)
My thoughts here go more to mitigating circumstances rather than inconsistencies. These are varied to the point of the near infinite, and people can judge these better than algorithms ever could as people can infer, empathise and extrapolate.
I think the iron answer from a judge is less flexible than the possibility to start a democratic petition against a scandalous oversight in the formalized law...
I was trying not to bring up mitigating circumstances, since many people don't see a good reason for their existence (I do!), but mitigating circumstances is actually one of the reasons I want formalization! The way society treats the law is highly oversimplified with one-liners like "the law is the law" and "innocent until proven guilty" and "every convicted person is guaranteed a just trial because the prosecution needs to prove their case"
But if mitigating circumstances should be brought into consideration, then in theory you can't convict a person with a certain level of punishment until you have also proven that there were no mitigating circumstances, and I am not aware of any binding rule to try and locate or identify the mitigating circumstances.
I.e. allow me to call a perpetrator "less guilty" if there are mitigating circumstances; if the prosecution wins a case in the current world without mitigating circumstances ever being brought up by the defense (because they might not be aware), we currently accept the "proof" by the prosecution, even though the punishment may be unjustly harder.
I.e. the idea that the burden of proof in the current system lies totally with the prosecution is false, because the prosecution is not trying to diminish the sentence of the defense.
By formalizing we would start a discussion on how exactly to formalize mitigating circumstances.
I might choose to commit a crime against the (much older) perpetrators of my youth trauma, and while in practice I might get mitigating circumstances, I currently have no such guarantee...
The judge has some flexibility in how exactly to apply the law, which an algorithm does not.
> less flexible than the possibility to start a democratic petition against a scandalous oversight in the formalized law...
You can already do such, should you wish.
> By formalizing we would start a discussion on how exactly to formalize mitigating circumstances.
I don't believe we can capture all of these, nor should we try to have an exhaustive list. Such a list would likely need frequent modification as societal mores change. Better to have humans involved in the process than trying to apply to fix it afterwards.
I'm, personally, not convinced any of this is crying out for a blockchain either, even if we were to grant that automation would be a positive.
> People still get screwed when transacting in Bitcoin, they just get screwed by scammers & hackers rather than the government & big corporations
I‘d remove the „rather than“ out of the sentence: hackers can get bought by governments. Which leaves us with scammers, hackers, governments and businesses as possible screwers, no?
> The biggest problem in the world today is lack of trust and the failure of institutions.
Surely climate change, wealth inequality, or nuclear proliferation are larger issues...
If you want to say "institutions failed us and caused those problems" you might be correct, but you better back up that statement with a good replacement.
The web caught on because in the late 80s, the biggest problem in the world was that we were starved for information. We didn't know it yet, because we'd never lived in any other world, but once we could fire up Netscape and view homepages from people who lived across the world, or talk in real-time on AIM with people half a world away, or ask any question of Google and get answers, or find whole communities of people who were interested in that incredibly niche interest that we'd despaired of ever meeting someone else to share it with, or view the satellite & street view images of any address on earth, or order any product off Amazon and have it delivered tomorrow to our front door, it was apparent what we were missing out on. And that has spawned multiple trillion-$ companies.
The biggest problem in the world today is lack of trust and the failure of institutions. (Which, ironically, may have been been caused by the web and the huge amount of information it made available.) And blockchains address this. They don't solve it - actually, my biggest resistance to Bitcoin & blockchain hype earlier, and my biggest risk factor now, is that Bitcoin doesn't actually solve the problem it's purporting to solve. People still get screwed when transacting in Bitcoin, they just get screwed by scammers & hackers rather than the government & big corporations.
But the problem still exists, and people are aware of it now. Satoshi's greatest contribution was to create something that could semi-plausibly fix it and then release it into the world, which generates all sorts of attention from other entrepreneurs. Just like Tim Berners-Lee's original WWW browser was pretty clunky by modern standards, Bitcoin is pretty clunky by modern standards. But it's attracted a lot of minds into refining & replacing it, and as long as there's a problem, there's a market, and there's a good chance that eventually somebody will figure it out.
(Or not. Who knows, in the 60s everyone was sure there was a market for flying cars and robot vacuum cleaners. We did eventually get both flying cars and robot vacuum cleaners, but so far the market for them is much smaller than anticipated.)