When Did I Sign?

Today, let's venture back in time a bit to help us understand the times ahead. This Sunday, let's focus on the idea of alignment and society.

The ideas that keep society aligned today date back to 3000 B.C. in Mesopotamia. This is where we can trace the introduction of clay tablets to document the exchange of different goods - not much different from the notes we take on our iPhones to track which one of our friends owes us for that one time. As you can expect, tracking this information quickly became out of date, hard to manage, and ultimately at the mercy of whoever was in charge of keeping the records! It almost reminds me of the current banking system - cough, cough. Even the language the documents were written in was a specialized language that was held closely by the scribes. The more you look at history, the more you realize it's just one big comical circle. Is there a way for us to progress from the clay tablets? I thought this was a good place for us to spend our Sunday morning session together, getting into what keeps us aligned, and whether it's a contract and, if so, what kind.

The backbone of business today, and even keeping a civil society, revolves around the idea of a contract. The concept of a "social contract," even. This idea involves cooperating in an implicit agreement for mutual benefit. If only it were that easy. One issue that's gaining attention in our capitalistic society is the lack of alignment between all the stakeholders within publicly traded companies. Talk about an "implicit agreement for mutual benefit." The problem is that there is nothing that holds these agreements in place in real time that act like guard rails. For instance look at the banking sector & the most recent debacles. To keep it simple, bad trades at bad times without the proper oversight to hedge or cut the losses. It would be great to have a system where you could codify the laws to ensure that banks could not become over leveraged, or perhaps ensure that customer funds were not being misappropriated.

Essentially, we have traded in our clay tablets for paper or digital versions of them. It's sad to think of ourselves as being "developed" while performing the same actions as humans did 3000 years before Christ. Fortunately for us, we live in 2023, 14 years after the invention of blockchain.

A few weeks ago, we discussed the truth machine. Today, let's break it down a bit more so we can start priming up for the adventure we will take in the coming weeks. What the Mesopotamians were onto was the "ledger." The general ledger today is what modern-day accountants use to track complex business transactions. This is what the blockchain is, except a digital version that anyone can take part in the management and validation of the data it holds. It's public and "permissionless," which means you don't need anyone's permission, whether a person or a company. It's also inherently democratic. For a transaction to be made, the majority of the members need to agree - something even our country seems to waiver on sometimes.

Now, how could something like this public ledger help with the alignment problem from earlier? Well, there are some interesting things like perhaps user governance tokens. By giving users the ability to influence the platform's direction, governance tokens can help build trust between the platform and its community, leading to increased user loyalty and engagement. Think about the impact this could have on Facebook, oh, I'm sorry, "Meta's" brand. Allowing the users, the value providers of the platform, to have direct control of the platform and control their experience. These tokens can have intrinsic value, which can be traded or held as an investment. Distributing these tokens to the community allows the value created by the platform to be shared among its users, promoting a more equitable distribution of wealth. Could these new ways to capture and distribute value increase our country's output enough to escape this foreseen recessionary crisis?

You may be wondering why this groundbreaking technology hasn't been widely adopted since it was launched two years after the iPhone. In short, blockchain is complex and carries intricate implications for society. It's an unprecedented confluence of politics, technology, and finance. This includes the potential for holding political leaders accountable through public, verifiable, real-time accounting systems, eliminating bankers' arbitrage, and creating information systems that are immune to manipulation and censorship.

The distributed nature and automatic verification of ownership in the digital space represent the next evolution of the internet. While Web 1.0 enabled us to access information, Web 2.0 allowed us to contribute information, and Web 3.0 empowers us to maintain ownership of information and engage in a decentralized, trustless environment through blockchain and cryptographic technologies. Finally, moving away from clay tablets & into the future, where “smart” contracts can be executed by unbiased machines based on the validity of information agreed upon by the majority of participants, fostering a shared, mutual understanding in real time.

In conclusion, social alignment has been a challenge for centuries, but with the advent of blockchain technology, there is hope for a more equitable and democratic future.

Are You Feelin’ Moody?

INRI