In order to flesh out the Humanity 3.0 roadmap, I would like to blog about the following topics over the next few months.
Most likely my blogging will not follow the ordering of topics presented below, nevertheless, having a list of the topics and how they fit together is useful as we get started.
A. Foundational Topics
(i) What are institutions? The blockchain community needs to understand this concept of “institutions” much better, including how both “formal institutions” (e.g. rules) and “informal institutions” (e.g. norms, protocols) are sub-classes of the institutions that create and sustain social, economic, and political order. Institutional theory provides a very powerful and elegant toolkit for our purposes of re-thinking how human society, economy, and polity runs, and it will be foundational to all of my writing within the Humanity 3.0 blog and our discussions together.
(ii) Ethan Buckman’s vision for the Cosmos Network of Networks of Decentralized State Machines – in many respects, my vision for Humanity 3.0 institutions builds squarely on top of Ethan’s technical vision for a network of decentralized state machines; there are other ways we could introduce the technical blockchain layer, but, Ethan’s framing of the basic problem of living organisms communicating and transacting with one another requiring the keeping of ‘shared state’ and the solution to accomplishing this in a human societal context being a decentralized, byzantine fault tolerant, network of state machines is a particularly useful leaping off point.
(iii) Public/Private Key Pairs, Wallet Connect, and Web 3.0 – how Bitcoin was a trojan horse to introducing mainstream society to the act of using a public/private key pair to sign transactions, votes, and other community-verifiable events in a secure, immutable, and near-frictionless manner. How it is a huge leap forward that every web page on the Internet can now be frictionlessly connected to a blockchain wallet so that users of that website can sign transactions, votes, and community-verifiable events.
(iv) The Genesis of a Blockchain Community, The Role of the Founders, The Community Fund, The Community Roadmap, and the Hiring of Contractors to Build-out the Roadmap – the nuts and bolts of a community-driven project to deliver public goods.
(v) The Principle of Incrementalism – how and why blockchain ecosystems can be set-up to “incrementally evolve” into winning institutional arrangements for humanity over the long-run based on experimentation and empirical experience within a community. Similarities to how the U.S. system evolved over many, many cycles of legislation, case law, and adaptations by the Congress as mistakes were made and adjustments were needed.
B. State of the Union: Progress to Date in the Larger Blockchain Space
Over the past 10 years, the global community of blockchain and cryptocurrency technologists has successfully built:
(i) decentralized identities – we now have millions of people using public-private key pairs, and as a consequence of pressure from regulators, KYC of real-world identities against their on-chain identities.
(ii) decentralized money – we now have millions of people transacting in cryptocurrencies.
(iii) decentralized infrastructure – we now have 100s of networks with 100s of decentralized validators (e.g. miners, farmers) per network and a whole industry of decentralized validation services that is global and empowered.
While it is too early declare victory in the following areas, progress is also being made rapidly via hundreds of independent projects:
(i) finance, insurance & financial markets – financial system, lending, financial markets, insurance pools, oracles; discussion of how blockchains will do the institutions of banking, insurance, and financial markets better than was possible under the Humanity 2.0 institutional order – big topic, but in many ways also the most developed area within blockchain, so there are dozens of examples to choose from. The commercial-banking system did a lousy job in extending credit (due to problems of greed and laziness), and new protocols for lending could entirely replace the function of the commercial-banking system over the next decade.
(ii) new governance models – representation, liquid democracy, DAOs; discussion of Politeia, Cosmos Station, and Terra Station as clients for community-based voting on community-generated proposals; discussion of Polkadot’s progress and the concepts of liquid democracy, delegation, and proxy accounts.
(iii) taxation & community treasury – every transaction taxed (like VAT), tax can be increased in bad times, community funds, rainy day funds, 100% transparent & public (no secrecy like we have at the Fed today); discussion of the Decred, Terra, and Tezos community fund models.
C. Still to Come: Roadmap of Sorts
(i) how we do public records? births / deaths, marriages, land title, rulings of the justice system; discussion of public records maintained historically by centralized governments, discussion of the open syntax for public records being created on FileCoin, and why doing public records on blockchain will be better.
(ii) how we create democratically-elected councils of representatives to lead and oversee important public good projects – how do we hook-up liquid democracy, delegations of voting power to a trusted representative, penalties for failing to delegate or participate directly in community voting, sub-protocol for recognizing a change to the slate of representatives when the community at-large undelegates one custodian in favor of another, possibly also a process for granting the current slate of representatives multisig keys (and revoking those keys if a delegate loses support). Imho, multisig-based sign-off by trusted delegates within a community is generally needed in order to create something like a justice system or for oversight of contractor payment milestones. 100% DAO-based systems without human overseers in-the-loop are unlikely to succeed in delivering complex programs in arenas such as healthcare and defense.
(iii) how we do property rights? private property registries (e.g. buildings, cars, and swaps of cryptocurrency for physical assets), public property (e.g. WeWork type arrangements w/ tokenized ownership and community access to distributed buildings all over the world), community property (e.g. shared possessions like the Native Americans & Samoans); discussion of the experience at Chronicled and Agoric with on-chain asset registration and swaps of physical assets for cryptocurrency; discussion of why blockchain societies will not own one large, contiguous piece of land like America or England, but why they will end up aggregating many pieces of land all around the world in the true spirit of digital cooperatives led by digital nomads who are working towards a new voluntary global order, ultimately finding and creating safe zones with contractors providing defense to protect against persecution by the police and militaries of nation-states.
(iv) how we can eventually do local government, schools, hospitals, police, and public works? this can build on the community treasury, community proposals, and contractors model that we already have working relatively well in many of the ecosystems, so the leap may seem less far than at first you might imagine. Discussion of cooperatives.
(v) how we can do credentialing better on blockchain? licenses to drive an automobile, practice medicine, certify financial statements, and design structurally-engineered buildings and bridges, so that members of the community can be safe, and protocols to revoke credentials when trust is breeched (perhaps connected to justice system overrides). Apart from a few university’s issuing diplomas on-chain, there’s little to no progress in this area to date. Huge white space for builders.
(v) how we do an on-chain system of justice? another huge whitespace for blockchain entrepreneurs, there has been little experimentation with creating systems of justice juxtaposed with multi-sig based reversals of on-chain transactions, property rights, credentials, and so forth. Polkadot could be the place where these experiments first happen as liquid democracy, multi-sig, and proxy votes are all out of the box on Parity Substrate. To discuss: lower courts: perhaps a system of tribunals, say, 2 of 3 or 3 of 5 key multi-sig to override on-chain transactions, Appeals Courts and Supreme Court: democratically elected, say, 5 of 7 or 7 of 9 key multi-sig to override on-chain transactions; could also be a system that publishes judgements of guilt or innocence and pulls up short of charging decisions, no incarcerations, the idea if people have knowledge about another person’s history of dangerous, unlawful, or violent actions then they can react to defend themselves when around that person, or the person can be banished from the ecosystem, but no one needs to be thrown into a prison. Mobile phones can now make instantaneous access to information about millions of people possible.
D. Putting it All Together with Humanity 3.0
(i) How we can run society on blockchain better than was possible with nation states. Reducing the transaction costs of democratic elections and administering public good and service projects. Making it all voluntary. Why this matters in parts of the world where dysfunctional governments, lawlessness, and the institutions of Humanity 1.0 are currently the norm, i.e. how we can rapidly progress human development, prosperity, and progress on top of this new technology layer worldwide by leapfrogging the need for Humanity 2.0 institutions altogether.
(ii) dApps for the Commons: A Huge White Space Opportunity – The enormous potential of a vast array of new community-based, network-governance supported societal common good projects. I envision each member participating voluntarily in 10 or 20 communities that they care about on their mobile device, paying $1 or $10 per month with a streaming subscription fee model out of their pay, and hundreds of millions of people per community in the more successful communities! We can access these new public services via dApps on our mobile phones. All voluntary! I can’t wait to browse through this “public good dApp store” 20 years from now!
(iii) The Great Transition from Humanity 2.0 to Humanity 3.0 – How the transition from the current Nation-State humanity 2.0 model to the new Libertarian-Blockchain Humanity 3.0 Model will unfold over coming decades. Starts as a totally parallel system…. won’t be a scary transition, as every single community is both voluntary and opt-out. Flags will prevail, we will all wear the t-shirts of the networks and communities we care most about!
Humanity 3.0 