When I was asked to come back and speak at ethcc again I initially said I would be speaking about formal verification, since this is the topic I've spent most of last year thinking about.
But I've also been talking about it a lot already, I can almost do in on autopilot by now.
So I wanted to do something different for ethcc. Especially since this is a little bit of a different conference. It's not less technical than other conferences, but it is definitely more political.
What in the end inspired me to change the topic of my talk was a presentation at CCC, the chaos communication congress in Leipzig on Ethics in mathematics by Maurice Chiodo. In his talk he outlined the extreme influence that the work of mathematicians have in the real world, and how unwilling mathematicians are to accept that there is any ethical aspect to their work.
Most of them get really excited working to solve problems of geometry, analysis or statistics, and aren't too worried whether their results are being used to help in fracking, ballistics, to determine your jail sentence, analyse your credit rating, or even determine who you hook and potentially mate with.
And that's concerning. Almost any job has an ethical implication, and the greater the impact of the work you are doing, the more careful you need to be to make sure that that impact is a positive impact upon the world.
Now, I think that the blockchain industry are more willing to accept that there is an ethical dimension to what we do. In fact, unless you are just here for the merkle trees, or just here for the lambos, it was probably the social implications of blockchain technology that attracted you in the first place. Blockchain has always been a political movement.
We are dealing with instruments that has the potential of having tremendous impact over people's lives, weapons of debt construction, so we should be really careful about the design of instruments, and the language we use to describe them.
3-4 mins
But any discussion about ethics is moot without an accompanying discussion on value. So what are the values of the blockchain community?
Of course, there might be as many different ideas about this as there are people, but we can still try to identify some values that a large part of the community seem to subscribe to:
- Decentralization -- "Power exercised by people in these systems is diffuse rather than concentrated" -- Power to do what? Power to participate on equal footing as others in the system Power to change the system Power to , changing the rules of the system, or -- A distrust in traditional institutions such as banks, funds and the regulatory entities that govern them. -- Resilience -- Efficacy
- Price "the language of money, markets, prices and profit is dominated by a grammar that equates money with the state, markets with a profit-centred mode of calculation and profit as a surplus defined by reference to extraction of individual benefit. Cryptoeconomics has been strong in challenging the first of these, but less effective in the latter ones. But they need to be challenged too."
Blockchains give us a very powerful tool for creating instruments of value
One of the features often claimed as a driver of power diffusion is the ability to fork. That a big reason why power holders of a system should be benevolent is because if they are not, then users can just fork the protocol and start a new instance.
The problem with this proposition is that it fails to recognize the difference between a platform and a protocol.
Protocols are rules of interaction, whereas platforms are "places" of interaction. A protocol does not need a starting point or a global state.
Practically all large scale DAOs right now are plutocratic. The level of decentralization that a plutocratic system can achieve is entirely a factor of the distribution of wealth in the system. This distribution is very hard to measure in blockchain systems, and is likely to only become harder to estimate as privacy increases.
If we aim for building systems governed by different mechanisms than plutocracy, we must aim to
Plutocratically governed, the general public has no insight into the distribution of MKR.
Dai represents a new value instrument. It does not represent the same values as the dollar, even if its reference point is the dollar.
In multicollateral dai, any value instrument that is accepted as collateral is acknowleged as a legitimate instrument of value, and the value represented by this asset will now be a value of dai. It will also reinforce the value of the underlying asset.
How would you feel about tokenized barrels of oil being accepted as a collateral type? How would you feel about tokenized patents or marketing rights to pharmaceutical drugs being accepted as a collateral type?
Martin Shrkelis Turing Pharmaceuticals aquired the marketing rights to the AIDS medication Daraprim for $55M
Both of these already have a dollar price in the market. The value that dollars represent is coupled to the
Brett Scott; On the ethics of blockchain https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bXILxV61GQ Deconstructing ‘Decentralization’: Exploring the Core Claim of Crypto Systems Angela Walch https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=088024100123021124117081020074025065121004001038027088066090122107020104065116071098119033023106033000111096096004125006093094106034037051088088089011009069011082127041026076024117098124086010127022094087106071107030104094008026082098095024097028030017&EXT=pdf https://medium.com/econaut/economics-back-into-cryptoeconomics-20471f5ceeea
Parents being late to pick up their kids from daycare had to pay https://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/chapters/freakonomics.html
The key innovation of blockchains is the ability to establish a common global state in an adversarial setting, to reach "consensus" in a peer-to-peer setting.
The process establishes a shared view of reality, an objectivity among the participants of the protocol.
This objectivity is not the protocol itself, but rather an emergent feature of the protocol from a set of initial conditions.
The protocol (the rules of interaction), together with a specific set of interactions forms the platform.
The assumption of blockchains is that the rules of the protocol, (mainly linearity and fungibility), enables value to be encoded in the platform.
What I want to do in this talk is to deconstruct this notion of value and compare it with other possible forms of value.
The anthropological theory of value, put forth mainly by David Graeber argues that the notion of value in the singular, as used by economists as a measure of the degree to which objects are desire and values in the plural, used in a sociological sense to describe what is ultimately good or desireable are essentially different viewpoints of the same fundamental notion.
At first glance, this may sound like a pretty radical proposition. Especially in a globalized economy like ours, it may seem hard to see a similarity between the values of say, "friendship, love or honor", and the price of a refrigerator. At the very least, the two different notions of value may seem incomparable.
But if we deconstruct these notions, and the roles values in the plural and value in the singular plays in our lives, we start to see a couple of similarities;
-- First of all, both notions of value are ways of describing "conceptions of desire"; a measure that plays some sort of role in influencing the choices people make between different course of actions. In microeconomics, or cryptoeconomics as people in this space like to call it, one tries to predict the behaviour of actors by modelling them as rational agents maximizing some implicitly assumed notion of value. In anthropology, one tries to describe the behaviour of people by mapping out the values reflected in their culture. In this sense, the only difference between value and values is the direction of the analysis. This becomes particularly obvious if one asks a researcher in either field to try to switch the direction: If you ask a microeconomist to explain the phenomenon of gift giving, they might reply that the gift giver is only giving in order to establish a useful alliance where they might get something in return. If you ask them for an explanation of anonymous gift giving, they might claim that they are trying to maximize their feeling of self worth, or good feeling. Pretty soon you will encounter some of the "softer" pluralistic values that anthropolgists speak of. Conversely, if you ask an anthropologist to try to predict the behaviour of a person based on some predefined set of values, you quickly start getting into the business of trying to measure or at least compare different values against each other, much like one does in microeconomics and game theory.
-- Another bridge between the two notions of value comes from a phenomenon with which the blockchain community should be very familiar, the phenomenon of tokenization. Tokenization is the process of taking a value in the abstract, and forming an instrument which somehow represents this value. Tokenization is a process far more widespread than the realm of blockchains; there are countless examples: -- The value of education being tokenized as degrees or certificates -- The value of science being tokenized in grants or publications -- The value of a work of art being tokenized in reviews or awards -- The value of a persons creative attention being tokenized in some form of intellectual property
In this setting, money is just a particular instrument which tokenizes many different things that people may desire: -- The creative output of other people or machines (labor, goods and services) Here we can also characterize a distinguishing feature between fiat currency and crypto currency. Namely in their ability to represent -- Various contractual rights upheld by a government.
One might argue that a crucial distinction between the instrument of money and the other value instruments like an award or a certificate is in their fungibility. One of the common characterisations of money is that it should be a means of exchange, and therefore freely transferable. But this is a rather new idea. For a large portion of human history, and in many situations today, the manifestation of debt is not transferable. If I help you move in to your apartment, you owe me a favor, and I won't necessarily accept that when I need help next time, you'll send your friend Frank which owes you a favor.
Fungibility is a powerful phenomenon. It complicates the representative power of a token, by allowing many people with different ideas of what the token actually represents use the it for their different needs. In a very real sense, it objectifies the token. It becomes harder to think about the token representing another form of value, it has become a manifestation of a value of its own kind.
Comparing different notions of value is difficult. "A price is merely an index since the base unit of measure is arbitrary with respect to the thing being measured". A comparison of one token for another does not mean that they represent the same form of value, it only means that someone is willing to exchange a particular form of value for another, and has
It's also interesting to note what happens when you start comparing different forms of value.
Fetishization (The spectacle)