By Virginia Valenzuela, Arts Editor & Kyle Olney, Director of Product
Over the centuries, humanity has attempted a number of different models for large-scale governance. From monarchies to republics, democracies to dictatorships, from communism to socialism to utilitarianism, and so on. And while each may be predicated on some philosophy of who should be in charge and more importantly, how large groups should coordinate, the problem of governance being efficient and effective, and how to remain so over time, urges us to continue the search for that more perfect union.
In 2008, the economies of the world felt the crash of American exceptionalism at its worst. Banks were found to be bad actors, whose main purpose was not to help the population manage their money, but to offer them predatory loans to buy assets they could not afford. When the housing bubble burst, it was the American taxpayer who paid the bill for economic resurrection, and it’s the taxpayer who continues to bear its yoke.
It was no coincidence then, that in 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto mined the first block on the Bitcoin blockchain. Embedded within that block was the contemporaneous headline: “The Times Jan/03/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” This statement, a rallying cry etched in the annals of history for all time, embodies the political motivation behind blockchains as a technological innovation for coordination of the common good.
If we zoom out from the excitement of insiders and the confusion of outsiders that surrounds cryptocurrency, NFTs, DAOs, and other groundbreaking technologies a la blockchain, we can see that these experiments are merely the latest answer to the age-old question: how do we govern ourselves? And relatedly, how do we protect ourselves from bad decisions being made on our behalf or in our name?
Preamble
In a lot of ways, we can think of Bitcoin as the first DAO. A proto-DAO of sorts, Bitcoin was formed through a social consensus about the parameters of how to keep a public ledger, and a calcification of the values around why an unalterable, permissionless and distributed ledger could become the optimal means of exchanging value and certifying history. Miners would be rewarded for honest efforts toward maintaining the network and for contributing computing power, and anyone could opt in or out as they pleased. Users could trivially access every transaction ever made, tracking the provenance of any given unit of value stored on the network, thus providing the ultimate form of financial transparency combined with irrefutable security. The political philosophy behind Bitcoin makes changing the network incredibly difficult; but theoretically this is possible given the right social consensus around any proposed changes.
Then came Ethereum, which grew as a branch off of the Bitcoin trunk, allowing users even greater opportunity to apply and…
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