The promise of Web3... from the beginning... was nothing less than a revolution. However, now we are still stuck with all kinds of chains that are focused on capital asset transfer. Don't get me wrong I am an avid proponent of Bitcoin. In the past... some... may even have believed not the least important one.
Also, I might attend the Cardano summit that's happening soon. Any step in the direction of decentralisation is a good step in my opinion...but...we can do so much better still with this new set of ideas that Satoshi Nakamoto popularized... much much better still and I believe it is our duty.
Blockchain technology opens up new possibilities in governance that we must pursue, because the centralisation of power has progressed so far, that it has undermined the democratic process itself. Monetary capitalistic democracy is failing, it has been failing for a while.
Blackrock, Central Banks, the World Economic Forum, the International Monetary Fund... the list goes on... these are all non-elected institutions which have a bigger influence on all of our daily lives than our elected representatives. Who gave these people the idea and influence that they can rule us? Money did.
There have always been rich people who used their money to gain influence and control over media outlets to further their interests. Social media has been a radical catalyst in this development. The moral degeneration associated with the beginning of the digital age is another reason, why we must look for alternative forms of governance, for a new organisational system for our societies.
Capitalism's favourable performance-oriented thinking... as compared to the communist concept of egalitarianism which 'wokeism' recently revived throughout the Western world... is something that we must maintain when designing our alternative. It's just money that we must get rid of, in short, a barter trade system must be our goal.
How to get there all the way? I will be honest, I haven't thoroughly thought this through yet, but I have found a piece of the puzzle... a consensus mechanism, which allows for democratising data. There has been some development in the field, but generally, the nodes in cryptographic networks, a.k.a. blockchains achieve consensus on transactions to update a simple financial ledger.
With smart contracts, everything becomes a bit more difficult, but the general structure of these transactions remains trivial... Alice sends X bitcoin to Bob. We are going to disrupt this. Instead of a simple financial ledger, we keep an entire decentralised relational database and in turn our transactions change from simple journal entries to more complex SQL statements.
A key principle of crypto networks is the concept of the digital signature. After creating a transaction it gets digitally signed, so that the nodes in the network can verify that the transaction was created by the sender. This way, with the simple structure of a journal entry, any signed transaction always benefits the network... since it's always only Alice who can sign her transactions and these are always fund transfers away from her wallet to another.
With transactions against a database, this is different. While "Delete from X where Y" may be a valid transaction, it may not necessarily be in the best interest of the network. Manual scrutiny is necessary. Over the course of 24 hours, the pending transactions in our network can be supported or challenged by all other network participants. Only if a claim (a database transaction suggestion) gets more support than opposition, will it be executed in the database. If it doesn't get enough support, the staked token required to suggest the claim, will go to the opposition. Successful claims get a reward in the form of a tokenized SQL statement. These are the tokens that can be used to stake or challenge claims.
In short, if you created Taiwan in our shared table of countries and after 24 hours, fewer people are opposing this create statement, than there are supporters of it, you "own" Taiwan in our shared database. If later on somebody claims the deletion of Taiwan successfully after 24 hours, he will "own" the deletion of Taiwan, etc.
Got a headache yet? I know this is really hard to wrap your head around without an example. In the screenshot above, you see the "MVP" of this consensus mechanism, a little app I coded to discuss the GOATs of football etc. Maybe that helps understand where this is heading. The codebase just got too dirty so now I am building it again... puro. I am still looking for help.
Cheers,
Mat Kwa
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