Labor productivity has never been greater but the rewards from this are not being evenly distributed. In fact, artificial intelligence, robotics, and smart devices are wreaking havoc on labor markets and generating growing calls for basic income to help avert even worse income inequality in the coming years. Aside from rampant inequalities, we seem to be stuck in making real progress on climate change and losses of biodiversity. In short, many of us have begun to question whether market-based capitalism as we know it is capable of improving conditions for planet and people.

Throughout the past several years I have been conducting research on a range of sustainable entrepreneurial initiatives around the globe, interviewing hundreds of inspiring entrepreneurs along the way. What I have come to realize is that there is a new wave of entrepreneurial organizing around the world, oriented toward making things better for the 99 percent. Yet much of this organizing does not fit the mold of traditional, capitalist approaches to startups, venture finance, growth and exit.

In my latest book, I refer to this phenomenon as post-capitalist entrepreneurship. For me it is something more than just entrepreneurship that also seeks to balance social and/or ecological impacts. Post-capitalist entrepreneurship (PCE) instead is about changing the underlying logic of entrepreneurial organizing, governance models, legal structures, approach to intellectual property, perception of consumption and production and of course the ultimate objectives and metrics of success.

In my view there is somewhat of a continuum of PCE from those closest to our current understanding of market-based entrepreneurship to more extreme versions of PCE:

For-benefit (B Corps)

On the surface, B Corps may seem like mere representations of responsible market-based entrepreneurship. After all, the majority of B Corps are for-profit enterprises, frequently with board of directors, closed, intellectual property models, private ownership and often receive traditional investment from angels and venture capitalists. Some B Corps are even publicly traded on traditional stock exchanges (e.g. Etsy, Natura). What makes B Corps the starting point for PCE is that they are legally bound to embrace social and ecological concerns. If “there is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits” as the famed economist, Milton Friedman wrote in Capitalism and Freedom, then companies who legally bound themselves to something beyond profits, as B Corps do, are something different than what we think market-based enterprises are about.

Platform Cooperatives

The media has offered plenty of coverage of the platform capitalist business models like Uber, Airbnb and Task Rabbit. Yet, what has been underexplored so far is the emergence of alternative models of sharing economy platforms which embrace ideas like the commons and cooperative governance. The platform cooperative movement is picking up steam with support from the Platform Cooperative Consortium, as well as a growing number of innovators embracing the Occupy Movement´s values, but leveraging technology to turn their activism into collective entrepreneurial action.

Peer Production and Consumption

While most of the sharing economy, including platform cooperatives, are primarily oriented towards recirculated goods and skills in society more efficiently, there is something potentially even more impactful happening mostly in cities around the globe. The maker movement is picking up steam around the globe, supported by the 1100 Fab Labs, platforms like Etsy which connect makers with distributed customers seeking unique, instead of mass-produced products made in China, and numerous other democratized technologies making innovation more affordable for the 99 percent.

Loic Le Goueff, a 27-year-old Swiss national agrarian, and his partner launched a startup called Aquapioneers. Through access to Barcelona’s Green Fab Lab, the pair had managed to design and build a closed loop aquaponics device which can be used by homeowners and renters to produce their own vegetables at their homes with minimum investment and low operating costs. What makes Aquapioneers so interesting is that they have committed to the maker community and to open source hardware. In fact, they are making their design freely available for downloading and printing at the more than 1,100 Fab Labs around the world.

The Fab City initiative encourages member cities to commit to producing at least 50 percent of everything consumed in the city by 2054. More than a dozen cities around the world including Amsterdam, Barcelona, Boston, Detroit and Santiago, Chile, have already made the ambitious commitment. To achieve these goals cities such as Barcelona have been supporting a grassroots maker movement of producers and consumers for everything from energy and housing to furniture and food. Sometimes cash changes hands while in others, alternative currencies, even local, social, cryptocurrencies are being used to encourage value exchange.

Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAOs)

Still mostly a dream, the idea behind DAOs is that you could have platforms connecting users for exchange without an intermediary monetizing the transactions. Think Uber without Uber in the middle, Airbnb without Airbnb. DAOs would be blockchain-enabled platforms facilitating exchange through smart contracts and distributed ledgers but no ownership of the platform. Essentially DAOs are like open source software supported by developers around the globe designed to take out the platform capitalist intermediaries and their venture capitalists. One of the most advanced experiments in the DAO space is OpenBazaar which essentially aims to be like eBay without eBay.

Conclusion

I am not so naïve as to suggest that capitalism is dead or perhaps that it could die anytime soon. Instead, what I am saying, is that capitalism, and the short-termism that frequently emerges, does not appear to be capable of addressing the world´s most pressing problems. But rather than just protest in the street like the Occupy Movement did, we are starting to witness a new, collective movement of entrepreneurs and citizens aiming to take matters into their own hands by creating new organizational models (or remaking old ones like the platform cooperativism movement) to challenge the status quo and to create a new kind of economy, one that it is frequently more local but at the same time interconnected globally. Can the post-capitalist entrepreneurship movement operate in parallel with, and successfully compete against venture capital-backed and publicly-traded traditional enterprises? Will the PCE movement help us create a more circular, sustainable and just economy in time to avert even worse crises of inequality and climate change? I do not have clear answers to these questions, but I prefer to be optimistic about their chances. How about you?

Originally published in Triple Pundit.

Photo by kvanhorn

The post Post-Capitalist Entrepreneurship: B Corps and Beyond appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The following by J.Z. Garrod is reposted from TripleC, where the full PDF is available.

Photo by Ars Electronica

The post The Real World of the Decentralized Autonomous Society appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“On 20 July 2016, something happened that was arguably the most philosophically interesting event to take place in your lifetime or mine.”

The above quote is undoudbtedly hyperbole if you’re not a geek, but nevertheless, last year’s conflict around Ethereum and The DAO, which punctured the anarcho-capitalist utopia of a trustless society, was a milestone for the understanding of technological systems and their embeddedness in human value systems. Rather than aiming for trustlessness and the atomization of individuals in automated market systems, we should focus our efforts on building systems based on trust between humans, on community building, and on the centrality of the commons.

This article gives details around last year’s DAO crisis around a central theme: Blockchains don’t offer us a trustless system, but rather a reassignment of trust!

Excerpted from E J Spode:

“Such are the perils of supposedly trust-free technology. It might make for good marketing copy, but the fact of the matter is that blockchain technology is larded through with trust. First, you need to trust the protocol of the cryptocurrency and/or DAO. This isn’t as simple as saying ‘I trust the maths’, for some actual human (or humans) wrote the code and hopefully debugged it, and we are at least trusting them to get it right, no? Well, in the case of The DAO, no, maybe they didn’t get it right.

Second, you have to trust the ‘stakeholders’ (including miners) not to pull the rug out from under you with a hard fork. One of the objections to the hard fork was that it would create a precedent that the code would be changeable. But this objection exposes an unmentioned universal truth: the immutability of the blockchain is entirely a matter of trusting other humans not to fork it. Ethereum Classic Classic would be no more immutable than Etherum Classic, which was no more immutable than Ethereum. At best, the stakeholders – humans all – were showing that they were more trustworthy qua humans about not forking around with the blockchain. But at the same time, they obviously could change their minds about forking at any time. In other words, if Ethereum Classic is more trustworthy, it’s only because the humans behind it are.

Third, if you are buying into Ethereum or The DAO or any other DAO, you are being asked to trust the people who review the algorithm and tell you what it does and whether it’s secure. But those people – computer scientists, say – are hardly incorruptible. Just as you can bribe an accountant to say that the books are clean, so too can you bribe a computer scientist. Moreover, you’re putting your trust in whatever filters you applied to select that computer scientist. (University or professional qualifications? A network of friends? The testimonials of satisfied customers – which is to say, the same method by which people selected Bernie Madoff as their financial advisor.)

Finally, even if you had it on divine authority that the code of a DAO was bug-free and immutable, there are necessary gateways of trust at the boundaries of the system. For example, suppose you wrote a smart contract to place bets on sporting events. You still have to trust the news feed that tells you who won the match to determine the winner of the bet. Or suppose you wrote a smart contract under which you were to be delivered a truck full of orange juice concentrate. The smart contract can’t control whether or not the product is polluted by lemons or some other substance. You have to trust the humans in the logistics chain, and the humans at the manufacturing end, to ensure your juice arrives unadulterated.

Can’t these gateways to the system be trustless as well? Can’t smart contracts some day have code to call for robotic orange-pickers and robotic juice concentrate-makers who would summon their robotically driven trucks to deliver the orange juice concentrate straight to our door? Yes – in theory. But imagine the task of reviewing the code to ensure that every step in the process hadn’t been corrupted by a bug that uses security failures to highjack trucks, or that gives false approvals to adulterated orange juice. Perhaps we could write second-order programs to automate the testing of the first-order programs – but why do we trust those? Do we ultimately need automated automated-program-tester testers? Where does it end?

By now, the answer should be obvious: it ends with other humans. Blockchains don’t offer us a trustless system, but rather a reassignment of trust. Instead of trusting our laws and institutions, we are being asked to trust stakeholders and miners, and programmers, and those who know enough coding to be able to verify the code. We aren’t actually trusting the blockchain technology; we are trusting the people that support the blockchain. The blockchain community is certainly new and different, and it talks a good game of algorithms and hashing power, which at least sounds better than tired slogans such as Prudential is rock solid and You are in good hands with Allstate. But miners aren’t necessarily any more reliable than the corporations they replace.

The sorry case of The DAO raises another question: Why are people so eager to put their faith in blockchain technology and its human supporters, instead of in other social and economic organisations? The upheavals of 2016, from Brexit to Trump, suggest that there is widespread fatigue with traditional institutions. Governments can be bought. Banks are designed to service the wealthy, and to hell with the little guy. ‘The system is rigged’ is a common refrain.

But instead of targeting the moral failures of the system and trying to reform it, the very concept of ‘trust’ has become suspect. Blockchain enthusiasts tend to cast trust as little more than a bug in our network of human interactions. To be sure, one of the weird features of trusting relationships is that, in order to trust someone, there has to be some chance that they will fail you. Trust involves risk – but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Which brings us back to Buterin and the hard fork of The DAO. What made this event significant was not just what it demonstrated about the foibles of technology or the hubris of 20-something computer scientists. What it really exposed was the extent to which trust defines what it is to be human. Trust is about more than making sure I get my orange juice on time. Trust is what makes all relationships meaningful. Yes, we get burned by people we rely on, and this makes us disinclined to trust others. But when our faith is rewarded, it helps us forge closer relationships with others, be they our business partners or BFFs. Risk is a critical component to this bonding process. In a risk-free world, we wouldn’t find anything resembling intimacy, friendship, solidarity or alliance, because nothing would be at stake.

Perhaps we ought to reconsider the desire to expunge trust, and instead focus on what should be done to strengthen it. One way to support trust is to hold institutions accountable when they betray it. When the US Department of Justice, for example, elected not to prosecute any of the bankers responsible for the 2008 financial collapse, the net effect was to undermine confidence in the system. They debased the principle of trust by showing that violating the public’s faith could be cost-free.

Much of our system of trust is invisible to us – but it would be helpful if we could be more aware and appreciative all the same

Second, trusting relationships should be celebrated, not scorned. When we believe in someone and they betray us, our friends might call us a sucker, an easy mark, a loser. But shouldn’t we celebrate these efforts to trust others – just as entrepreneurs talk up the value of failure on the road to innovation? Isn’t the correct response along the lines of: ‘I see why you trusted them, but isn’t it is terrible that they let you down?’

Third, we should appreciate the trusting relations we engage in, and are rewarded by, every day. We’re constantly relying on others to help us with something or look after our financial affairs, and much of the time we simply take it for granted. In part, that’s because much of our system of trust is invisible to us – but it would be helpful if we could be more aware and appreciative all the same.

Finally, we shouldn’t deceive ourselves with the idea that a technological fix can replace the human dimension of trust. Automation of trust is illusory. Rather than disparaging and cloaking human trust, we should face the brutal truth: we can’t escape the need to rely on other people, as fallible and imperfect as they might be. We need to nurture and nourish trust – not throw it away, like so much debased and worthless currency.”

The post On the perils of trustless systems appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Abstract

Although it is still in early stages, many commentators have been quick to note the revolutionary potential of next-generation or Bitcoin 2.0 technology. While some have expressed fear that the widespread application of these technologies may engender the rise of a Terminator-style Skynet, others believe that it represents the coming of a decentralized autonomous society (DAS) in which humans are freed from centralized forms of power through the proliferation of distributed autonomous organizations or DAOs. Influenced by neoliberal theory that stresses privatization, open markets, and deregulation, Bitcoin 2.0 technologies are implicitly working on the assumption that ‘freedom’ means freedom from the state. This neglects, however, that within capitalist societies, the state can also provide freedom from the vagaries of the market by protecting certain things from commodification. Through an analysis of (1) class and the role of the state; (2) the concentration and centralization of capital; and (3) the role of automation, I argue that the vision of freedom that underpins Bitcoin 2.0 tech is one that neglects the power that capital holds over us in both organizing the structure of our lives, and informing our idea of what it means to be human. In neglecting these other forms of power, I claim that the DAS might be a far more dystopian development than its supporters comprehend, making possible societies that are commodities all the way down.

The full article is available here.

The post Essay of the Day: The Real World of the Decentralized Autonomous Society appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Every network is a state, and thus, it needs a government

What’s the right lesson for the decentralization community to learn from the collapse of the DAO?

Perhaps the simplest lesson is that even decentralized networks need governments, and have governments. Every network is a state. Every state has a government.

Decentralization theater considered harmful

In Dijkstra’s terms: decentralization theater considered harmful.

Decentralization theater means any system that produces not decentralization, but the appearance of decentralization. Security theater is the enemy of real security; decentralization theater is the enemy of real decentralization.

A network without decentralization theater is one that admits:

* any network is a digital state with a central government.

* any new state is born at war with full emergency powers.

* limiting and/or eliminating governance is a slow, hard task.

TLDR: true decentralization isn’t just a technical problem. It’s also a political problem, and not an easy one. Believing you’ve solved it, before actually solving it, is not a way to solve it.

Decentralization and legitimacy

Steve Randy Waldman is not alone in pointing out that a blockchain is a parliament. It’s just the technical reality that a majority of miners in a proof-of-work blockchain, or stakeholders under proof of stake, have the mathematical power to govern the network absolutely.

But this power does not give them the legitimate authority to do whatever they want. Mathematically, the Ethereum miners can easily roll back the DAO. Do they have the right to roll back the DAO? As we write, this question is one much debated.

We have an easy answer: no. The most basic principle of law is that pacta sunt servanda, agreements must be respected. A good clue is that before the DAO hack, everyone swore great oaths to “the steadfast iron will of immutable code.” Methinks the lady did protest too much. But these oaths make rolling back the DAO blatantly illegitimate.

From a governance perspective, the line of lawlessness isn’t the line between soft and hard forks. It’s any fork which makes an exception for a specific address. Ethereum has already done this by freezing the DAO contract. At this point, it might as well be hanged for an ox, and go through with the full rollback.

Illegitimacy and belligerency

Within the ethos of Ethereum (we are obviously not qualified to comment on “real” law), a rollback is a lawless act. This does not make it a wrongful act. It simply cannot be judged as an act of law. Rather, it is an act of war.

And judged as an act of war, a DAO rollback is exactly right. Ethereum is not dealing with a “participant.” It is dealing with a pirate, a thief, hostis humani generis.

As a state at war with an external enemy, the Ethereum network shouldn’t just zero the DAO hacker’s booty. It must do all it can to destroy her. If possible, it must dox and report her. The right place for this fool is the supermax, not the Riviera.

But does Ethereum really want to be at war? And if Ethereum is at war — and this certainly isn’t the only pirate in the sea — how does it become decentralized? If Ethereum is at war, where there is no law, how can it achieve its goal of creating a world where code is law?

But we really shouldn’t panic. It is actually possible to go from wartime government to peacetime government, from absolute martial law to absolute rule of law. It is just nontrivial. It’s a political engineering problem that can’t be ignored. If it has to be solved, it should be solved properly.

What really doesn’t work is to declare martial law, execute all traitors, terrorists and enemies of the state, then declare that elections will proceed as scheduled next week. If the goal is the decentralized rule of code as law, a rollback takes an enormous step backward. Reversing this setback isn’t trivial.

Should Ethereum actually go to war? Or should it just let the hacker win? Clearly, from a pure blockchain perspective, the only correct thing to do is let the DAO burn — as a painful warning to all future contract authors and participants.

At present, it seems that Ethereum’s leadership has chosen war. Certainly, neither choice is obviously imprudent. Ethereum is a winner and probably has a bright future either way. But who chooses war needs a plan to win that war, and return to peace.

Sovereignty is conserved

For a government to even have the power to consider wartime measures, a government has to exist in the first place.

Again, we can’t remind ourselves too often that a blockchain just puts absolute authority in the hands of the miners. We just think of this power in terms of the law it’s supposed to enforce. But the two are different — at least in wartime.

Why is it so hard to eliminate unaccountable power? Who watches the watchmen? The German legal scholar Carl Schmitt defined the problem well when he wrote: “the sovereign is who decides the exception.”

In the American regime, the Supreme Court is sovereign by Schmitt’s definition. We have a complex system of laws, which are not formal code but in some ways aspire to be; above it, we have a judiciary system that can decide arbitrary exceptions to those laws. Pure rule of law, Schmitt tells us, is always and everywhere an illusion. We can and should strive to approach this limit, but it’s an infinity that we can’t actually reach.

Schmitt’s exception principle can be rephrased as “sovereignty is conserved.” There is always someone who answers to nobody. We cannot eliminate government; the best we can do is tame it.

One way to think of the problem of reducing exceptional force to zero is to compare it to a simple unstable equilibrium, like a pencil standing on its point. The pencil on its point needs almost no force to stay upright. But the farther it deviates from this orderly, self-sustaining equilibrium, the more energy must be applied to return it to vertical.

Vitalik seems to have grasped more or less Schmitt’s point: “Intent is fundamentally complex… we believe that we value things like ‘fairness’, but it’s hard to define what fairness even means.”

If we could define fairness, we would have a rule to which there were no exceptions. We would need no judges, or governments, or even soldiers. We would need no sovereignty. But since we can’t define fairness — yet need to enforce some clear vision of fairness — sovereignty remains conserved.

Bitcoin, a blockchain at peace

Bitcoin has done an excellent job of freezing the war power of its own “parliament.” Ironically, mining power in Bitcoin is quite centralized — a small number of Chinese mining-pool managers, who have every opportunity to collude, could roll back anything. But they never have and they probably never will.

Even if a single pool controlled 51% of Bitcoin mining power, they’d have no incentive to break the rules — quite the converse. We equate physical decentralization with limited governance, perhaps because we think of the physical difficulty of coordination as the main protection against arbitrary power.

Bitcoin shows that this isn’t true. As far as we can tell, Bitcoin would keep working fine if there was only one miner. This uni-miner would have still have no incentive to corrupt the network — though another party, such as a real government, might have an incentive to coerce the miner.

The important success of Bitcoin is the collective acceptance — mathematically false, but politically true — that rollbacks in Bitcoin are inconceivable. Bitcoin has governance problems, but they’re confined to relatively unimportant questions, like the blocksize debate. “Decentralization” may not be quite the word, but somehow Bitcoin has achieved limited government. The pencil is standing on its point. For now.

Ethereum’s dilemma

A rollback creates a scary precedent. It’s a sort of military coup. Just as the miners have the power to rule any blockchain, the military has the power to rule any country. Do they want it? The first coup makes the next coup much easier. Same with the first rollback.

In retrospect, the great mistake here was that Ethereum didn’t know it needed a government, and did its best to pretend it didn’t have one. After a rollback, Ethereum doesn’t just have a government. It has a military dictatorship.

Ethereum and Bitcoin are qualitatively different. Bitcoin has a simple UI metaphor: cash. Everyone knows how cash works. A smart contract has its own UI metaphor: law. But as we see, mechanically administered law, law without judges, is a very different thing from ordinary human law.

What the DAO shows is that Ethereum just wasn’t ready to be decentralized. It was not ready to allow a $150 million contract with no supervision or appeals process. The problem was not Ethereum’s code per se — although Solidity doesn’t seem terribly well designed for preventing these pitfalls — but the human understanding of its capabilities and limits.

A rollback acknowledges this. It acknowledges that Ethereum wasn’t ready for complete self-government, and someone needed to have stopped the DAO from trading. It’s not quite clear what the principle behind the rollback was.

Perhaps the best kind of DAO rollback would be a rollback which understood this error fully, and acknowledged that — for the moment — Ethereum needs a sovereign government, with the power to restrict and/or steward contracts.

Contracts are not payments. They are infinitely more complex. They will keep blowing up. Ethereum is full of buggy contracts, scammy contracts, ponzis and casinos, etc. A governed Ethereum, in the present state of the technology, might well choose to vet all contracts centrally before they started trading.

Would this be a permanent feature? Certainly not — it would be a way for the community to collectively define a good contract. Once we know what a responsible, well-tested, non-scammy Ethereum contract looks like, it’s much easier to return to the principle of caveat emptor and let good contracts outcompete bad ones.

But after the DAO hack, how does anyone trust any contract? Arguably, Ethereum is ready to be decentralized only when users are able to make this decision rationally, and get it right. This work simply hasn’t been done.

Perhaps the worst-case scenario is one in which Ethereum approves the hard fork, on the “just this once” principle. To save the country, we need a military coup. But don’t panic! “After executing all traitors and enemies of the people, the generals will immediately restore democracy and the rule of law.”

The “just this once” fork takes us back to decentralization theater, where Ethereum pretends not to have a government. But now, this pretense is even more threadbare. The next hack, which will certainly happen, will produce yet another coup — or at least a food fight over whether to have a coup. This is the path to a “digital banana republic,” where the tattered illusion of law barely conceals the real law of nature.

The bottom line is that if a rollback happens once, we can expect it to happen again. This time, the rollback can be treated as an act of war, and no process is necessary. Next time, there needs to be a process — or the dream of code as law will drift further away.

Having a central government isn’t inconsistent with the ultimate objective of eliminating central government. Certainly, before Ethereum was released, its developers were its government. Every government is born in a state of chaos and war.

The mistake is just in thinking something as complex as Ethereum can jump directly to decentralization in a single step. The pencil is not standing on its point, or anywhere close. Before anyone can think about letting go, someone needs to actually lift it. To reach law, first enforce peace.

Constitutional structure

One of the governance problems of blockchains, related to the fundamental error of decentralization theater, is the failure to build deliberative institutions on top of the “parliament of miners.” Voting by proof of work is great, especially if the majority is well above 51%, and can demonstrate its strength without an actual hashing race. It’s a good way to finalize decisions. But not a good way to make them.

But blockchain governance would be considerably improved if the miners actually had a formal way to delegate their power to a structured institution that represented them. Both Bitcoin and Ethereum have foundations and/or core teams, but authority in these institutions isn’t tied in any way to actual mining power. Informal politics fills this void with personality cults and eloquent blogposts, all hoping to create collective agreement among the actual voting miners.

History shows this is not a great way to run a railroad. Misalignment between a fundamental power, like the miners, and a group purporting to represent them, like the foundations, is inherently dangerous.

What’s the alternative? An actual constitution. Perhaps the first smart contract that Ethereum needs is not the DAO, not even well-engineered, high-quality smart contracts like Augur and Maker, but just its own equivalent of 1789. If Ethereum needs a government, it must govern itself. It certainly has all the technical tools it needs!

The post Why Networks Are States That Need Democratic Government appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The Ethereum Foundation stated quickly on its website that they identifed and effectively froze the hacker’s account. Also, Stephan Tual (the founder of Slock.It, the group that created the DAO) said:

“All stolen funds will be retrieved from the attacker.”

Now if you change the “will” to “can” in that sentence you get an interesting and crucial new reality:

“All stolen funds can be retrieved from the attacker.”

No other financial system ever has been able to make that claim.

The point is that peer-to-peer validation systems that store history well can provide a mechanism for reversion. In other words, a damaged system can immediately revert to a state from before the damage occurred! (wiki much?)

In the case of currencies, this is a huge win for the user-base of any currency. In the case of other distributed systems, the same is true.

Moreover, this is an example of a more general property of panarchy and the peer-to-peer future as a whole, that stems from understanding of complex systems. Some complex systems are not only resilient to certain kinds of attacks, but but actually improve as a result of disruptions! Popular scholar and author Nassim Taleb coined the term “antifragile” (his book, “Antifragile”) to refer to this phenomenon:

“The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the anti-fragile gets better”.

While there are still ongoing, and healthy, debates about the response and the solution, they will invariably leaded to a wide variety of technological implementations, some of which will be adopted as improvements to the alternative economy as a system. It can be argued that this kind of evolution also happens in the currently dominant financial system of banks, etc., but that current system is run by elites with very private agendas. By contrast, the alternative peer-to-peer panarchical economy is, a system we can celebrate because it includes a global community of interested and motivated participants and makers.

In other words, there is no need for a huge financial bailout which incurs enourmous economic costs and does little to alleviate the actual damage done or to improve the future situation. Ethereum (and any other systems we develop) can be changed by us simply by getting more involved and saying “We think this needs to be done differently.”

You certainly won’t get far trying that at your bank.

Further Reading:

• http://www.wsj.com/articles/investment-fund-based-on-digital-currency-to-wind-down-after-alleged-hack-1466175033
• http://www.coindesk.com/dao-attack-good-thing-ethereum/

The post Why the Ethereum/DAO Hack Proves They Are Better Than Banks appeared first on P2P Foundation.