On-chain Institutions: an Evolution of Civilization
Week in Saigon Saturday June 17 to Friday June 23, 20203
Blockchain is a New Form of Life
Blockchains are an independent life form, beyond human control. This can be an alarming observation, one that is discussed in depth in this Futurism publication. It can spell out end of human existence. My view is that it is true that in fact, we may be creating a new meta organism that lives beyond us and destroys us. This can be really disheartening and demotivating. Yet at the same time I don’t believe it has to be this way. We have the opportunity to be again repeating timeless patterns as beings of creativity, imagination and creation, continuing that which we have been doing since the start.
These can extend infinitely. We can in fact create a new world that we can’t even imagine yet. We can solve mortality. By combining VR and Ai we can have a new enlightened life style by putting the human body and brain in an infinitely computational environment that is also connected to the global computer of the blockchains. It can allow us to access boundless intelligence, of understanding and manipulation of boundless complexity. This is my personal holy grail of a code editor that combines the possibilities of VR and Ai assisted code reading and writing, and information searching.
This is possible right now. We have the technology for this, marrying Ai, VR and then the consensus layer, the collective contribution layer that lives beyond one individual life, this can lead to a new unimagined scale of human evolution and life. It is up to us as entrepreneurs, coders, designers to push humanity forward to use the new paradigms of technology for a world that keeps evolving. It also provides a new opportunity for us to evolve as a collective. The Human Colossus or ‘the one’ has existed before blockchains, it is the cumulative collective of humanity, the ant colony acting as it’s own life form. Now the job of coders, Web3 entrepreneurs and ‘indie-hackers’ is to be the channel for the universe to form a new evolution of our civilization.
What are examples of social institutions that can be evolved into the Web3 institutions? Social clubs, community organizations, libraries, religious organizations, businesses are some examples of institutions. These are formed because they are useful. We have this concept of a business and there are legal regulations around it. Now these things can be digitized with Ethereum.
We have evolved as a collective and not as individuals over the history of humans in the last ~200,000 years. In one of my favorite books “Roots of the Western Tradition: A Short History of the Ancient World” the series of transformations of humanity are laid out. What is striking, is the enormous change in human experience of what life is, from that of hunter and gatherer societies that existed for about ~180,000 of the total history of modern mankind species. Imagine what that was like and how it compares to todays everyday life. Only in the last ~40,000 years or so have Homo Sapiens settled into farming communities, formed villages, cities and kingdoms. Looking at our evolution from this scale, what is striking is the exponential rate of change. This is the technological explosion. Some landmarks on this timeline are the invention of language, writing, printing, steam engine, electricity, computers and now the last 30 years, the internet, blockchain, VR, Ai and others are comparable drastic steps only appearing in higher frequency.
Social institutions are a type of technology. Things like organized religions, governments, business organizations, these concepts had previously only existed in the minds of humans, and have been implemented in writing in form of laws, books, statements, rituals and traditions. Now the step of a digitally native and decentralized way of keeping state, is transferring this into the world of the digital sphere. The organizational nature is no longer a function that is implemented in the biological brains of humanity but it is running on code, on a network of distributed machines. This is major evolutionary step. This enables new social institutions that are no longer bounded by the very limited computational power of human brains but on the fast and much less error prone silicon brains of computers. It has been now over six years since Ethereum has launched, which enables smart contracts, or a global computer, that can handle any arbitrary code. This is opens to infinite number of applications, a Cambrian explosion of social institutions, that can accelerate the solution of problems of human coordination.
Consider what the first laws enabled, they enabled the flourishing of new economic systems, new science and generations of human coordination and evolution. Code becomes law. Code becomes cultures. Code becomes societies, cities and nations. Over the last year, the technology writer and investor Balaji has put a lot of time and thought into defining and elaborating on the concept of a ‘Network State'. This has long been explored through the concept of DAOs, or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. One major question is what is the step
My answer to this question is through the development of simple Decentralized Apps that are part social, part game a partly solving some real world problem. In the same way, humanity formed social organizations like monasteries and martial arts traditions. Anyone that has done any physical training with a trainer, or partner knows that they make real progress only when they train a system and are part of a broader community. This is true about sports and any human activity. We only progress as a collective and not as individuals. Individuals do make the most important contributions, but only after being part of a collective, then typically in the hero’s journey fashion, (which also maps very well onto patterns of machine learning process), they go into isolation, and then return and give back to the collective their individual discoveries and creations.
This leads to the idea that blockchains can be useful by giving us the experience of a community in a more efficient manner of a digital application. This is a step towards a digital community building. Over the last few weeks I have been creating just such an app.
We called it ‘Squad Goals.’ Here is how it works.
First you define a challenge. Let’s say I want to do 100 push ups for 30 days.
In the application, I go to the create page, enter a name, description, and a deadline. This follows the SMART goal setting pattern, of being Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound. Here is what I would enter:
Name:
100 Push-ups in 30 Day Challenge
Description:
“Do 100 push-ups every day for 30 days.”
Duration:
30
Stake
1 ETH
Maximum number of stakers
7
Tags
#fitness #pushups #30days
NFTImage
Then I would click “Launch” and this would create a new challenge type. Next I would share a link with friends and public in order to invite them to join the challenge.
Once they join in the app and submit their stake, the challenge starts. At the end of the challenge time period, everyone in the group must submit a vote, yes or no, for every other member, to vouch for them if they have completed it or not. Each person is required to check in with everyone in the group and find out if they have indeed completed it. This is a part that relies on human trust, and for this purpose of self-development, a persons trust is sufficiently reliable to serve as a basis for this gamified and fun experience. The goal is for everyone to have a framework and support in attaining whatever goal it is they want to attain. Everyone that completes it successfully get’s their stake back, plus their equal share of the stakes that were forfeited by those that did not complete it. A 10% for the protocol fee and 10% for the goes to the challenge creator. This incentives the creation of new and appealing challenges. The person that completes the challenge is rewarded with an NFT with the graphic or image that was created by the challenge creator. There is a safety valve feature, that if one or more persons does not complete the verification after 30 days of the conclusion of the challenge, the stakes are returned to the owners.
This forms a new primitive type of social engagement. It is a blend of gamification, self-development and social engagement. It is a fun and playful way of engaging with the blockchain technology. While this space has been full of scams and obsessions with getting rich fast, this approach is about engagement with community, self-development, playfulness and simplicity.
Digital Nomad Journal Update
This week I have been staying in Ho Chi Minh City. My routine has been generally: working from a cafe (or from my hotel room) on my Web3 developer freelance work, eating local food, meeting with friends here, and going to Muay Thai Kickboxing.
As per usual, I had the opportunity to fly a drone here and made a short film. Check it out here!
Song of the week
Aftergold - obli Remix Big Wild
View from Above KOAN Sound