In this post, we analyze Wikipedia — a site that has achieved tremendous success and scale through crowd-sourcing human input to create one of the Internet’s greatest public goods. Wikipedia’s success is particularly impressive considering that the site is owned and operated by a non-profit organization, and that almost all of its content is contributed by unpaid volunteers.

The non-commercial, volunteer-driven nature of Wikipedia may cause developers from the “decentralized web” to question the site’s relevance. However, these differences may be merely cosmetic: IPFS, for example, has no inherent commercial model, and most of the open source projects that underlie the decentralized web are built, at least in part, by volunteers.

We believe that a site that has managed to coordinate so many people to produce such remarkable content is well worth a look as we search for solutions to similar problems in the emerging decentralized web.

To better understand Wikipedia’s success, we first survey some key features of Wikipedia’s battle-tested (to the tune of 120,000 active volunteer editors) coordination mechanisms. Next, we present some valuable high-level lessons that blockchain projects interested in human input might learn from Wikipedia’s approach. Finally, we explore vulnerabilities inherent to Wikipedia’s suite of mechanisms, as well as the defenses it has developed to such attacks.

Wikipedia: key elements

While we cannot hope to cover all of Wikipedia’s functionality in this short post, we start by outlining a number of Wikipedia’s foundational coordination mechanisms as background for our analysis.

User and article Talk Pages

While anyone can edit an article anonymously on Wikipedia, most regular editors choose to register with the organization and gain additional privileges. As such, most editors, and all articles, have a public metadata page known as a talk page, for public conversations about the relevant user or article. Talk pages are root-level collaborative infrastructure: they allow conversations and disputes to happen frequently and publicly.

Since talk pages capture a history of each editor’s interaction — both in terms of encyclopedia content and conversational exchanges with other editors — they also provide the basis for Wikipedia’s reputation system.

Clear and accessible rules

If we think of the collection of mechanisms Wikipedia uses to coordinate its editors as a kind of “social protocol”, the heart of that protocol would surely be its List of Guidelines and List of Policies, developed and enforced by the community itself. According to the Wikipedia page on Policies and Guidelines:

“Wikipedia policies and guidelines are developed by the community… Policies are standards that all users should normally follow, and guidelines are generally meant to be best practices for following those standards in specific contexts. Policies and guidelines should always be applied using reason and common sense.”

For many coming from a blockchain background, such policies and guidelines will likely seem far too informal to be of much use, especially without monetary or legal enforcement. And yet, the practical reality is that these mechanisms have been remarkably effective at coordinating Wikipedia’s tens of thousands of volunteer editors over almost two decades, without having to resort to legal threats or economic incentives for enforcement.

Enforcement: Peer consensus and volunteer authority

Upon hearing that anyone can edit a Wikipedia page, no money is staked, no contracts are signed, and neither paid police nor smart contracts are available to enforce the guidelines, an obvious question is: why are the rules actually followed?

Wikipedia’s primary enforcement strategy is peer-based consensus. Editors know that when peer consensus fails, final authority rests with certain, privileged, volunteer authorities with long-standing reputations at stake.

Peer consensus

As an example, let’s consider three of the site’s most fundamental content policies, often referred to together. “Neutral Point of View” (NPOV), “No Original Research” (NOR), and “Verifiability” (V) evolved to guide editors towards Wikipedia’s mission of an unbiased encyclopedia.

If I modify the Wikipedia page for Mahatma Gandhi, changing his birthdate to the year 1472, or offering an ungrounded opinion about his life or work, there is no economic loss or legal challenge. Instead, because there is a large community of editors who do respect the policies (even though I do not), my edit will almost certainly be swiftly reverted until I can credibly argue that my changes meet Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines (“Neutral Point of View” and “Verifiability”, in this case).

Such discussions typically take place on talk pages, either the editor’s or the article’s, until consensus amongst editors is achieved. If I insist on maintaining my edits without convincing my disputants, I risk violating other policies, such as 3RR (explained below), and attracting the attention of an administrator.

Volunteer authority: Administrators and Bureaucrats

When peer consensus fails, and explicit authority is needed to resolve a dispute, action is taken by an experienced volunteer editor with a long and positive track record: an Administrator.

Administrators have a high degree of control over content, include blocking and unblocking users, editing protected pages, and deleting and undeleting pages. Because there are relatively few of them (~500 active administrators for English Wikipedia), being an administrator is quite an honor. Once nominated, adminship is determined through discussion on the user’s nomination page, not voting, with a volunteer bureaucrat gauging the positivity of comments at the end of the discussion. In practice, those candidates having more than 75% positive comments tend to pass.

Bureaucrats are the highest level of volunteer authority in Wikipedia, and are also typically administrators as well. While administrators have the final say for content decisions, bureaucrats hold the ultimate responsibility for adding and removing all kinds of user privileges, including adminship. Like administrators, bureaucrats are determined through community discussion and consensus. However, they are even rarer: there are currently only 18 for the entire English Wikipedia.

Since there is no hard limit to the number of administrators and bureaucrats, promotion is truly meritocratic.

Evolving governance

Another notable aspect of Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines is that they can change over time. And in principle, changing a Wikipedia policy or guideline page is no different than changing any other page on the site.

The fluidity of the policies and guidelines plays an important role in maintaining editors’ confidence in enforcing the rules. After all, people are much more likely to believe in rules that they helped create.

If we continue to think of the policies and guidelines for Wikipedia as a kind of protocol, we would say that the protocol can be amended over time and that the governance for its evolution takes place in-protocol — that is, as a part of the protocol itself.

Lessons for the decentralized web

Now that we have a little bit of background on Wikipedia’s core mechanisms, we will delve into the ways that Wikipedia’s approach to coordination differs from similar solutions in public blockchain protocols. There are three areas where we believe the decentralized web may have lessons to learn from Wikipedia’s success: cooperative games, reputation, and an iterative approach to “success”.

We also hope that these lessons may apply to our problem of generating trusted seed sets for Osrank.

Blockchain should consider cooperative games

Examining Wikipedia with our blockchain hats on, one thing that jumps out right away is that pretty much all of Wikipedia’s coordination games are cooperative rather than adversarial. For contrast, consider Proof of Work as it is used by the Bitcoin network. Because running mining hardware costs money in the form of electricity and because only one node can get the reward in each block, the game is inherently zero-sum: when I win, I earn a block reward; every other miner loses money. It is the adversarial nature of such games that leaves us unsurprised when concerns like selfish mining start to crop up.

As an even better example, consider Token Curated Registries (TCRs). We won’t spend time describing the mechanics of TCRs here, because we plan to cover the topic in more detail in a later post. But for now, the important thing to know is that TCRs allow people to place bets, with real money, on whether or not a given item will be included in a list. The idea is that, like an efficient market, the result of the betting will converge to produce the correct answer.

One problem with mechanisms like TCRs is that many people have a strong preference against playing any game in which they have a significant chance of losing — even if they can expect their gains to make up for their losses over time. In behavioral psychology, this result is known as loss aversion and has been confirmed in many real-world experiments.

In short, Proof of Work and TCRs are both adversarial mechanisms for resolving conflicts and coming to consensus. To see how Wikipedia resolves similar conflicts using cooperative solutions, let’s dive deeper into what dispute resolution looks like on the site.

Dispute resolution

So how does a dubious change to Mahatma Gandhi’s page actually get reverted? In other words, what is the process by which that work gets done?

When a dispute first arises, Wikipedia instructs the editors to avoid their instinct to revert or overwrite each other’s edits, and to take the conflict to the article’s talk page instead. Some quotes from Wikipedia’s page on Dispute Resolution point to the importance of the Talk pages:

“Talking to other parties is not a mere formality, but an integral part of writing the encyclopedia”

“Sustained discussion between the parties, even if not immediately successful, demonstrates your good faith and shows you are trying to reach a consensus.”

Editors who insist on “edit warring”, or simply reverting another editor’s changes without discussion, risk violating Wikipedia’s 3RR policy, which prohibits editors from reverting 3 changes on a given page in 24 hours. Editors who violate 3RR risk a temporary suspension of their accounts.

If initial efforts by the editors to communicate on the Talk Page fail, Wikipedia offers many additional solutions for cooperative coordination, including:

• Editor Assistance provides one-on-one advice on how to conduct a civil, content-focused discussion from an experienced editor.
• Moderated Discussion offers the facilitation help of an experienced moderator, and is only available after lengthy discussion on the article’s Talk page.
• 3rd Opinion, matches the disputants with a third, neutral opinion, and is only available for disputes involving only people.
• Community Input allows the disputants to get input from a (potentially) large number of content experts.

Binding arbitration from the Arbitration Committee is considered the option of last resort, and is the only option in which the editors are not required to come to a consensus on their own. According to Wikipedia’s index of arbitration cases, this mechanism has been invoked only 513 times since 2004 — a strong vote of confidence for its first-pass dispute resolution mechanisms.

A notable theme of all of these dispute resolution mechanisms is how uniformly cooperative they are. In particular, it is worth observing that in no case can any editor lose something of significant economic value, as they might, for instance, if a TCR was used to resolve the dispute.

What the editor does lose, if their edit does not make it into the encyclopedia, is whatever time and work she put into the edit. This risk likely incentivises editors to make small, frequent contributions rather than large ones and to discuss major changes with other editors before starting work on them.

“Losing” may not even be the right word. As long as the author of the unincluded edit believes in Wikipedia’s process as a whole, she may still view her dispute as another form of contribution to the article. In fact, reputation-wise, evidence of a well-conducted dispute only adds credibility to the user accounts of the disputants.

Reputation without real-world identity can work

Another lesson from Wikipedia relates to what volunteer editors have at stake and how the site’s policies use that stake to ensure their good behavior on the system.

Many blockchain systems require that potential participants stake something of real-world value, typically either a bond or an off-chain record of good “reputation”. For example, in some protocols, proof-of-stake validators risk losing large amount of tokens if they don’t follow the network’s consensus rules. In other networks, governors or trustees might be KYC’d with the threat of legal challenge, or public disapproval, if they misbehave.

Wikipedia appears to have found a way to incentivize participants’ attachment to their pseudonyms without requiring evidence of real-world identity. We believe this is because reputation in Wikipedia’s community is based on a long-running history of small contributions that is difficult and time-consuming to fake, outsource, or automate.

Once an editor has traded anonymity for pseudonymity and created a user account, the first type of reputation that is typically considered is their “edit count”. Edit count is the total number of page changes that the editor has made during his or her history of contributing to Wikipedia. In a sense, edit count is a human version of proof-of-work, because it provides a difficult-to-fake reference for the amount of work the editor has contributed to the site.

If edit count is the simplest quantitative measure of a user’s total reputation on the site, its qualitative analog is the user talk pages. Talk pages provide a complete record of the user’s individual edits, as well as a record of administrative actions that have been taken against the user, and notes and comments by other users. The Wikipedia community also offers many kinds of subjective awards which contribute to editor reputation.

Reputable editors enjoy privileges on Wikipedia that cannot be earned in any other way — in particular, a community-wide “benefit of the doubt”. Wikipedia: The Missing Manual’s page on vandalism and spam provides a good high-level overview, instructing editors who encounter a potentially problematic edit to first visit the author’s talk page. Talk pages with lots of edits over time indicate the author should be assumed to be acting in good faith, and notified before their questionable edit is reverted: “In the rare case that you think there’s a problem with an edit from this kind of editor, chances are you’ve misunderstood something.”

On the other hand, the same source’s recommendations for questionable edits by anonymous editors, or editors with empty talk pages, are quite different: “If you see a questionable edit from this kind of user account, you can be virtually certain it was vandalism.”

Blockchains which adopt similar reputation mechanisms might expect to see two major changes: slower evolution of governance and sticky users. And while no public blockchains that we’re aware of have made significant use of pseudonymous reputation, it’s worth noting that such mechanisms have played a significant role in the increasing adoption of the Dark Web.

Assigning power based on a long history of user edits means that the composition of the governing class necessarily changes slowly and predictably, and is therefore less subject to the “hostile takeovers” that are a fundamental risk for many token-voting-based schemes.

Sticky users are a consequence of the slow accretion of power: experienced users tend to stick to their original pseudonym precisely because it would be time-consuming to recreate a similar level of privilege (both implicit and explicit) under a new identity.

All in all, Wikipedia’s reputation system may represent an excellent compromise between designs offering total anonymity on one hand and identity models built on personally identifying information on the other. In particular, such a system has the benefit of allowing users to accrue reputation over time and resisting Sybil attacks by punishing users if and when they misbehave. At the same time, it also allows users to preserve the privacy of their real-world identities if they wish.

Iteration over finality

Wikipedia’s encyclopedic mission, by its very nature, can never be fully completed. As such, the site’s mechanisms do not attempt to resolve conflicts quickly or ensure the next version of a given page arrives at the ultimate truth, but rather, just nudge the encyclopedia one step closer to its goal. This “iterative attitude” is particularly well-suited to assembling human input. Humans often take a long time to make decisions, change their minds frequently, and are susceptible to persuasion by their peers.

What can Radicle, and other p2p & blockchain projects, learn from Wikipedia in this regard? Up to this point, many protocol designers in blockchain have had a preference for mechanisms that achieve “finality” — that is, resolve to a final state, with no further changes allowed — as quickly as possible. There are often very good reasons for this, particularly in the area of consensus mechanisms and yet, taking inspiration from Wikipedia, we might just as easily consider designs that favor slow incremental changes over fast decisive ones.

For instance, imagine a protocol in which (as with Wikipedia) it is relatively easy for any user to change the system state (e.g. propose a new trusted seed), but such a change might be equally easily reverted by another user, or a group of users with superior reputation.

Or consider a protocol in which any state change is rolled out over a long period of time. In Osrank, for instance, this might mean that trusted seeds would start out as only 10% trusted, then 20% trusted one month later, and so on. While such a design would be quite different from how Wikipedia works today, it would hew to the same spirit of slow, considered change over instant finality.

Attacks and defenses

While the previous section covered a number of ways in which Wikipedia’s mechanisms have found success up to this point, the true test of a decentralized system is how vulnerable it is to attacks and manipulation. In this section, we introduce Wikipedia’s perspective on security. We then examine some of Wikipedia’s vulnerabilities, the attacks that play upon them and the defenses the Wikipedia community has evolved.

How Wikipedia Works: Chapter 12 discusses the fact that nearly all of the security utilized by Wikipedia is “soft security”:

“One of the paradoxes of Wikipedia is that this system seems like it could never work. In a completely open system run by volunteers, why aren’t more limits required? One answer is that Wikipedia uses the principle of soft security in the broadest way. Security is guided by the community, rather than by restricting community actions ahead of time. Everyone active on the site is responsible for security and quality. You, your watchlist, and your alertness to strange actions and odd defects in articles are part of the security system.”

What does “soft security” mean? It means that security is largely reactionary, rather than preventative or broadly restrictive on user actions in advance. With a few exceptions, any anonymous editor can change any page on the site at any time. The dangers of such a policy are obvious, but the advantages are perhaps less so: Wikipedia’s security offers a level of adaptability and flexibility that is not possible with traditional security policies and tools.

Below, we discuss three kinds of attacks that Wikipedia has faced through the years: Bad Edits (vandalism and spam), Sybil Attacks, and Editing for Pay. For each attack we note the strategies and solutions Wikipedia has responded with and offer a rough evaluation of their efficacy.

Bad edits: Vandalism and spam

The fact that anyone with an internet connection can edit almost any page on Wikipedia is one of the site’s greatest strengths, but perhaps may also be its greatest vulnerability. Edits not in service of Wikipedia’s mission fall into two general categories: malicious edits (vandalism) and promotional edits (spam).

While Wikipedia reader/editors are ultimately responsible for the clarity and accuracy of the encylopedia’s content, a number of tools have been developed to combat vandalism and spam. Wikipedia: The Missing Manual gives a high-level overview:

• Bots. Much vandalism follows simple patterns that computer programs can recognize. Wikipedia allows bots to revert vandalism: in the cases where they make a mistake, the mistake is easy to revert.
• Recent changes patrol. The RCP is a semi-organized group of editors who monitor changes to all the articles in Wikipedia, as the changes happen, to spot and revert vandalism immediately. Most RC patrollers use tools to handle the routine steps in vandal fighting.
• Watchlists. Although the primary focus of monitoring is often content (and thus potential content disputes, as described in Chapter 10: Resolving content disputes), watchlists are an excellent way for concerned editors to spot vandalism.

Given the incredible popularity, and perceived respectability, of Wikipedia, it’s safe to say that the community’s defenses against basic vandalism and spam are holding up quite well overall.

Sybil attacks

Sybil attacks, endemic to the blockchain ecosystem, are known as “Sockpuppets” in Wikipedia, and are used to designate multiple handles controlled by the same person. They are usually employed when one person wants to seem like multiple editors, or wants to continue editing after being blocked.

While Sockpuppets are harder to detect in an automated fashion than vandalism and spam, there is a process for opening Sockpuppet investigations and a noticeboard for ongoing investigations. Well-thought-out sockpuppetry attacks are both time-consuming to mount and defend against. While dedicated investigators (known as clerks) are well-suited to the task, it is impossible to know how much successful Sockpuppetry has yet to be discovered.

Hired guns — Editing for pay

Hired guns — editors who make changes to in exchange for pay — are becoming an increasingly serious concern for Wikipedia, at least according to a 2018 Medium post, “Wikipedia’s Top-Secret ‘Hired Guns’ Will Make You Matter (For a Price)”, in which Author Stephen Harrison writes,

“A market of pay-to-play services has emerged, where customers with the right background can drop serious money to hire editors to create pages about them; a serious ethical breach that could get worse with the rise of—wait for it—cryptocurrency payments.”

In the post, Harrison draws on a number of interviews he conducted with entrepreneurs running businesses in this controversial space. According to Harrison, businesses like What About Wiki, operate in secret, utilizing large numbers of sockpuppet accounts and do not disclose the fact that that their edits are being done in exchange for pay.

In the past, Wikipedia has prohibited all such activities and in fact, businesses like What About Wiki violate Wikipedia’s Terms of Use — a legally binding agreement. However that seems to be changing. According to Harrison,

“A 2012 investigation discovered that the public relations firm Wiki-PR was editing the encyclopedia using multiple deceptive sock-puppet accounts for clients like Priceline and Viacom. In the wake of the Wiki-PR incident, the Wikimedia Foundation changed its terms of use in 2014 to require anyone compensated for their contributions to openly disclose their affiliation.”

The upshot is that since 2014, paid editing is now allowed on the site so long as the relationship is disclosed.

And yet, major questions remain. For one thing, at least according to Harrison’s analysis, companies acting in compliance with Wikipedia’s disclosure policy represent just a small fraction of the paid editors working (illegitimately) on the site. For another, he argues that complying with Wikipedia’s policies leads to paid editors making less money, because there’s a lower chance their edits will be accepted and therefore less chance the clients will be willing to foot the bill.

This leads to a final question, which is whether paid edits can ever really be aligned with the deep values that Wikipedia holds. For instance, one of Wikipedia’s main behavior guidelines is a prohibition against editors who have a conflict of interest in working on a given page. It’s hard to imagine a clearler conflict of interest than a paid financial relationship between the editor and the subject of a page.

DAOs

Wikipedia’s success is inspirational in terms of what can be accomplished through decentralized coordination of a large group of people. While we believe that the decentralized web still has many lessons to learn from the success of Wikipedia — and we’ve tried to touch a few in this post — a great deal of work and thinking has already been done around how a large organization like Wikipedia could eventually be coordinated on-chain.

Such organizations are known as Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), and that will be the topic of a future post.

Photo by designwebjae (Pixabay)

The post What the decentralized web can learn from Wikipedia appeared first on P2P Foundation.

All the powers of the old-world have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: liberal States and dictators, banks and FANG, regulators and speculators.

Where is the State that hasn’t attempted to muzzle freedom of communication and information, or to expand surveillance of its own citizens? Which major online service hasn’t monetized their users’ data without their knowledge or closed user accounts without possible recourse? Which banker hasn’t publicly opposed the right of everyone to have personal and absolute ownership of one’s assets through cryptocurrencies?

Two things result from this fact:

1- Peer-to-peer is already acknowledged by all world powers to itself be a power.

2- It is high time that peer-to-peer supporters should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies; that they counter oppressive forces with their diverse and energetic initiatives. To this end, peer-to-peer contributors will assemble in Paris from the 8th to the 12th of January 2020 at the Paris P2P Festival, the first event dedicated to all forms of free interplay between peers: technical, political, cultural, social, and economic.

If we indulge in allusion to a much more famous Manifesto, it is because we believe that p2p technology projects (Bitcoin, blockchains and Web3, distributed Web and Solid, self-sovereign identities, decentralized protocols…) need to be put in perspective.

In 2019, people’s protests and social demonstrations have flooded the streets of every continent: Sudan, Chile, Hong Kong, Catalonia, Algeria, Iran, India, and of course, in France, our Gilets Jaunes. In many cases, governments reacted not only through police or military crackdown but also with censorship of electronic communication: the internet shutdown in Iran, the censorship of social networks in Hong Kong, the prohibition of decentralized identity systems in Spain… Unfortunately, it is now well-established that internet censorship effectively protects the police states that use it.

Therefore, it is no surprise that we’re seeing an increase in infringements of freedom of the press and physical attacks against those who spread information. Antoine Champagne, journalist and co-founder of reflets.info, will come to the festival to talk about the current state of the protection of journalists and whistleblowers.

Along with the cypherpunk tradition, we believe that cryptography and decentralization are essential means to protect individual and collective civil liberties. We hope that talks on the history of the cypherpunk movement and on the history of decentralization will spark conversations about this point of view among the festival participants.

Peer-to-peer technology is a concrete way to arm the resistance against oppressive powers by providing the resilient and confidential communication channels needed to coordinate social movements in hostile environments. Multiple initiatives in this domain will be presented, from the research work of the LIRIS-DRIM team (CNRS) on streaming and Web request anonymization, to Berty‘s decentralized messaging protocol, to talks and workshops on libtorrent and ZeroNet, Ethereum’s network protocol, cjdns, ZKP and identity, and homomorphic encryption.

For the general public less comfortable with the nuts and bolts of p2p cryptography, the documentary Nothing to Hide will give evidence of how mass surveillance impacts everyone and why we have come to accept it so easily. The festival will also host a show on mentalism and social engineering and a serious game which aims to help everyone learn about effective cybersecurity practices.

Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are another branch that stems from the cypherpunk movement. Over the last few years, the importance of having a form of money that is independent from political powers and financial institutions became obvious. At first it was ignored, then it prompted only laughs and sarcasm, and finally, open hostility. Now states and mega-corporations try to compete with their own digital and centralized currencies.

Hence the necessity of articulating and educating the public about what makes decentralized currencies so special! We will tackle this challenge in many ways: a talk on Bitcoin by the founders of Cercle du Coin, a screening of the documentary Protocole with its director in attendance, workshops introducing how to use wallets and cryptocurrencies, presentations and workshops on Libre Money (Monnaie Libre), Dash, Ark…

Since the inception of Ethereum, the scope of the blockchain, this decentralized ledger which stores cryptocurrency transactions has exceeded its monetary applications. Blockchain-based Dapps, DeFi and DAOs refer to new ways to perform peer-to-peer interactions and new approaches for managing common resources in more open and less inegalitarian ways. The audience will be introduced to several programmable blockchains such as Ethereum, Holochain, Tezos, or Aeternity.

DAOs, or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, are a way to introduce self-governed and transparent rules in place of the arbitrary exercise of centralized power in organizations. We will review the most interesting DAO initiatives such as Aragon, DAOstack and MetaCartel, with a panel, talks and two workshops: co-designing a DAO using DAOcanvas and participating in a decentralized jurisdiction with Kleros. Lessons learned with iExec and Paymium will shed light on decentralized marketplaces and exchanges, another form of decentralized and programmable entities.

But blockchains are not the only way to decentralize the internet. The Solid standard, created by Tim Berners-Lee, aims to re-decentralize the Web, which today lies under the control of a small number of global mega-firms such as Google and Facebook. In France, this standard is actively supported and extended by several teams gathered in the Digital Commons Consortium, present at the festival. They will give talks and workshops covering the Virtual Assembly and Startin’Blox.

Blockchains and distributed Web are closely associated with open source and free software, considered a type of digital commons. More generally, the question of the commons, is defined as a shared resource that is co-governed by its user community according to the community’s rules and norms and is an essential aspect of peer-to-peer networks.

The P2P Foundation, which will give one of the opening talks of the festival, claims the autonomy of the commons with respect to both the private and public sectors. An event within the festival, the Public Domain Day, organized by Wikimedia France and Creative Commons France, will invite open conversations about multiple aspects of intellectual property in the age of the commons: open science and open education, free licences and development aid, and the implications of IA and blockchain on art production. We will also screen a documentary telling the tragic story of Aaron Swartz, the freedom activist behind Creative Commons, and Hacking for the Commons, a brand new documentary about the clash between supporters of intellectual property and those who stand for open and free knowledge. Several members of the Coop des Communs will also participate, such as the Digital Commons Consortium and Open Food Network. Finally, a talk by The Commons Stack will show how blockchain, DAOs and commons can be tightly coupled.

The last major theme of the festival will be shared governance and peer collaboration, as these are critical to all the other topics mentioned above, from blockchain upgrades to management of the commons to the ability of people to act as free citizens and economic agents. We will open the festival with the Citizens’ Convention for the Climate, the first experiment of direct democracy embedded in the institutions of the French republic, as a response to the demand for real democracy expressed the Gilets Jaunes, in the context of climate emergency. The association between climate and collective intelligence will also be discussed during a talk and workshops on the Climate Collage. Tools, practices, and ideas for distributed governance and collective sense-making will be discussed and experienced with Jean-François Noubel, Open Source Politics, the Open Opale collective, and a Warm Data Lab by Matthew Schutte.

In short, peers and commoners everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.

In all these movements, they bring to the front, as a leading question in each, the intellectual and physical property question, no matter its degree of development at the time.

Finally, they labour everywhere for a unanimous agreement on initiatives supportive of civil liberties and the construction of the commons.

Peers and commoners disdain the concealment their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the overthrow of the prevalent logic of concentration of power, wealth, and information.

Free Peers of All Countries, Unite!

Lead image: Close view of Hong Kong Lennon Wall by Ceeseven under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Special thanks to Kirstin Maulding.

The post The P2P Festival in Paris: Unite the Peers appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Abstract

Blockchain technologies have generated excitement, yet their potential to enable new forms of governance remains largely unexplored. Two confronting standpoints dominate the emergent debate around blockchain-based governance: discourses characterised by the presence of techno-determinist and market-driven values, which tend to ignore the complexity of social organisation; and critical accounts of such discourses which, whilst contributing to identifying limitations, consider the role of traditional centralised institutions as inherently necessary to enable democratic forms of governance. Therefore the question arises, can we build perspectives of blockchain-based governance that go beyond markets and states? In this article we draw on the Nobel laureate economist Elinor Ostrom’s principles for self-governance of communities to explore the transformative potential of blockchain. We approach blockchain through the identification and conceptualisation of affordances that this technology may provide to communities. For each affordance, we carry out a detailed analysis situating each in the context of Ostrom’s principles, considering both the potentials of algorithmic governance and the importance of incorporating communities’ social practices. The relationships found between these affordances and Ostrom’s principles allow us to provide a perspective focussed on blockchain-based commons governance. By carrying out this analysis, we aim to expand the debate from one dominated by a culture of competition to one that promotes a culture of cooperation.

Introduction

In November 2008 a paper published anonymously presented Bitcoin: the first cryptocurrency based purely on a peer-to-peer system (Nakamoto, 2008). For the first time, no third parties were necessary to solve problems such as double-spending. The solution was achieved through the introduction of a data structure known as a blockchain. In simple terms, a blockchain can be understood as a distributed and append-only ledger. Data, such as the history of transactions generated by using cryptocurrencies, can be stored in a blockchain without the need to trust a third party, such as a bank server. From a technical perspective, blockchain enables the implementation of novel properties at an infrastructural level in a fully decentralised manner.

The properties most cited by blockchain enthusiasts at this infrastructural level include immutability, transparency, persistency, resilience and openness (Underwood 2016; Wright & De Filippi 2015), among others. Certainly, some technical infrastructures could previously provide these properties, e.g. the immutability and openness provided by content repositories like Github or Arxiv.org, or the persistence and resilience provided by large web services such as Amazon or Facebook. However, the implementation of these solutions relied on a trusted third party. There have been other decentralised technical infrastructures with varying degrees of success which also reflect some of these properties, e.g. the Web has been traditionally shown as an example of openness, although with uneven persistence (Koehler 1999), or BitTorrent peer-to-peer sharing networks are considered open, resilient and partially transparent (Cohen 2003). However, none of the existing decentralised technologies have enabled all these properties (and others) at once in a robust manner, while maintaining a high degree of decentralisation. It is precisely the possibility of developing technological artefacts which rely on a fully distributed infrastructure that is generating enthusiasm, or “hype” according to some authors (Reber & Feuerstein, 2014), with regards to the potential applications of blockchain.

In this article we focus on some of these potential applications of blockchain. More precisely, we reflect on the relationship between blockchain properties and the generation of potentialities which could facilitate governance processes. Particularly, we focus on the governance of Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP) communities. The term, originally coined by Benkler (2002), refers to an emergent model of socio-economic production in which groups of individuals cooperate with each other to produce shared resources without a traditional hierarchical organisation (Benkler, 2006). There are multiple well-known examples of this phenomenon, such as Wikipedia, a project to collaboratively write a free encyclopedia; OpenStreetMap, a project to create free/libre maps of the World collaboratively; or Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects such as the operating system GNU/Linux or the browser Firefox. Research carried out drawing on crowdsourcing techniques (Fuster Morell et al., 2016a) found examples of the broad diversity of areas in which the collaborative work on commons is present. This includes open science, urban commons, peer funding and open design, to name but a few. Three main characteristics of this mode of production are salient in the literature on CBPP (Arvidsson et al., 2017). Firstly, CBPP is marked by decentralisation, since authority resides in individual agents rather than a central organiser. Secondly, it is commons-based because CBPP communities make frequent use of common resources, i.e. shared resources which are openly accessible and whose ownership is collectivised. These resources can be immaterial, such as source code in free software, or material, such as 3D printers shared in small-scale workshops known as Fab Labs. Thirdly, there is a prevalence of non-monetary motivations. These motivations are, however, commonly intertwined with extrinsic motivations. As a result, a wide spectrum of motivations and multiple forms of value operate in CBPP communities (Cheshire & Antin 2008), beyond monetary value, e.g. use value, reputational and ecosystemic value (Fuster Morell et al., 2016b).

The three aforementioned characteristics of peer production are in fact aligned with blockchain features. First, both CBPP and blockchain strongly rely on decentralised processes, thus, the possibility of using blockchain infrastructure to support CBPP processes arises. Secondly, the shared commons in CBPP corresponds to the shared ledger present in blockchain infrastructure, where data and rules are transparent, open, collectively owned, and in practice managed as a commons. This leads to the question if such blockchain commons could host or support commons resources, or “commonify” other features of CBPP communities, such as their rules of governance. Thirdly, CBPP relies on multi-dimensional forms of value and motivations, and blockchain enables the emergence of multiple types of non-monetary interactions (sharing, voting, reputation). This brings about the question of the new potentials for channelling CBPP community governance.

Overall, we strongly believe that the combination of CBPP and blockchain provides an exciting field for exploration, in which the use of blockchain technologies is used to support the coordination efforts of these communities. This leads us to the research question: what affordances are generated by blockchain technologies which could facilitate the governance of CBPP communities?

Read the full paper here.

Photo by mikerastiello

The post Essay of the day: When Ostrom Meets Blockchain: Exploring the Potentials of Blockchain for Commons Governance 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.

We trust in the ways things used to be, so we keep on trampling over blooming flowers while chasing dying leaves to get us there. Innovations to provide for everyone, arrives exponentially everyday, yet they are less and less accessible to a frustrated population of embarrassed future millionaires betting their lunch money on the next lottery ticket out! Maybe that’s why we seem to revert back to 19th century political promises, protecting their 12th century economic premises.

The truth, however, is more difficult to ignore.

Sure, we can choose to ignore the technical truths of distributed and regenerative abundant energy generation systems, DAOs or decentralized autonomous organizations, co-operative sharing networks, and disruptive breakthroughs in every aspect of our lives. Although, as long as we are in denial, the outcomes that we want, our real intentions like feeling loved, feeling secure and feeling satisfied, will hardly come from the old economic instruments we’ve agreed to get us there. Fiat money, for example is only as good as its ability deliver on its promise to convert our intentions into reality, and if our political and economic systems cannot make good on those promises, maybe we are asking the wrong questions.

When broken promises are the norm, and not the exception, we might want to ask new questions to reframe the next planetary prosperous reality we could be living in now!

First, observing the obvious:

Earth Day: People with homes make up signs to complain about how our elected leaders are destroying the world, while homeless people are told to move out of the way for the parade. Then there is lots of plastic trash we have to clean up.

Conscious Festivals: Everybody buys expensive tickets to gather in harsh environments to feel one with nature and the cosmos. We all talk about our enlightenment, then go back to work afterwards as some form of slave labor. The organizers walk away with millions.

Innovation Hubs and Investors: Super creative, hard working people bust their asses designing solutions to make our lives easier. They are persuaded to work in a noisy and crowded “co-working” environment, getting ready for their 5 minutes in front of “successful” people who might offer them some bio-survival tickets. That is only if those people think that someone’s life’s work, supported by all of our taxes which paid for their education and support, can make their collection of IOUs grow larger without doing any real work.

Sharing Economy: Some smart people designed some clever software to make the supply and demand networks of services super efficient. A salesperson sees that as a way to get goods and services for way cheaper, and takes out a huge loan to aggregate those services and promote it. Everyone who works for the network complains about doing more and getting less, or paying more and getting less, and the salesperson still owes money to the lenders, so they have to sell us the story of why they are still going to change the world.

Retail and Real Estate: Buying and collecting stuff has been fundamental to our existence. Except now, we made so much nice stuff, that no one cares where you got it from and how much you paid for it. Where we live depends on where we have to work, and when that’s everywhere, its a hard sell to keep pumping prices that no one could ever pay back in their lifetimes. So now we have retail and residential ghost towns, waiting for people to buy into the dream of being tethered down so investors don’t lose their shirt. On the commercial side, the high yield captive renter businesses like hospitals still keep building, although we are wising up to their game, and looking for health and wellness elsewhere. Business can’t work without customers to pay for their services, and now business as usual is losing customers while waiting for a time machine to take them back to the 80s when no one knew better.

Banking, Insurance and the Stock Market: We trust people who think like us, and we work with those we trust. When we feel people can’t be trusted, we trust our common agreements. Mind you, the agreements are only the instruments and not the intentions behind them. They are the best we could do with what we could understand. So now we seem to understand a system of promises expressed in arbitrary numbers that might deliver on those promises if we can still trust the people that manage them to deliver.

Unfortunately, “those people” don’t seem to care much about anyone other than themselves, and keep breaking their promises. It’s not their fault of course, the stuff they thought they could sell us about how the future will be, we already know now, because the people who make and buy the stuff we are selling are known in the present. Oh well, there goes that idea!

Please understand that this is not some open source idealist rant.
It is a simple realization of the technical reality that we all feel, and all I’m doing is just putting some words to it. Most of us are not beyond self-interest and self-preservation. We do not act according to our ideologies, we act according to our survival instincts. We do what we do, to make sure we will have our insecurities made secure, our distrust of uncertainty made certain and trusted, and be seen and appreciated for who are, relative to what we feel our value should be in the world. At the core, we just want to love and be loved in return.

In other words, we want Returns on Our Intentions.

That is, and has always been the real ROI (Return On Intention). It’s just that the instruments we’ve agreed to get us there no longer make sense in a world where markets die and networks rule. We now have the digital tools to make agreements between each other accountable, trust each other relative to context and deliver on those promises without a proxy. Plus, we can now be rewarded for adding value to the network, rather than the network sucking the value from us to pay off some imaginary ideal for undeliverable IOUs.

This is the age of instant ability to manifest our intentions. We really don’t have to work so hard to get there. It’s right in front of we when we pause and see what is, versus what we want to believe it is. We are living in the 21st century. Let’s get out of our 12th century economic mindset.

So how do we do that?

1. Networks are natural:Nature needs fewer inputs per outputs and reuses waste as feedstock, as do networks. As we feed networks with data that satisfies its needs for matching input, output and waste, we enable it to feed us in new ways. It’s like farming, only better. For every unit of energy used to work the farm, the farm rewards us with more units of energy as food. Networks do exactly that, yet, we now use network efficiencies to make stuff cheaper and sell it for higher margins, not realizing that we are bankrupting its original purpose. We’re foraging like hunters now, when we’ve already invented farming. We don’t have to. Some networksalready get this, and are starting use the sharing economy for good, as in, recirculating the value created back to its participants.

2. Feedback is fundamental: Understanding our local actions relative to global impact directly relates to the quality of our lives. When you look up the history of automotive safety before and after the invention of traffic signs, traffic rules and dashboards, the stats are astounding! 1917, Detroit had 65,000 cars on the road, resulting in 7,171 accidents, 168 of them fatal. That’s approximately 10% per year. Compare that to today, with autonomous cars on the way, and the percentage of accidents relative to the 1.2 billion cars on the road is less than 0.004%. The parallels to automotive safety stats are all around us. The more we understand the impact of our action relative to others, our behavior shifts, and we use less energy to do more work.

3. Values are Contextual: What is the value of a toilet when nature calls? Priceless. The value of anything is the amount of life we are willing to exchange for it, so where we spend it, is of prime importance. We know that intuitively, although our tendency is to trust the value metrics of our predecessors that did not, and could not understand the world we see now. Today, networks are showing us a new framework and new contexts for where value is created and relative to our goals. Just as water has a different value in the desert than in the tropics, our contributions have contextual value that cannot be captured within the existing economic paradigm we’ve chosen to satisfy our intentions. Money can’t buy me love is more than a hit song, it can’t even buy me the satisfaction of status once reserved for people who could buy $90,000 watches and $800 shirts, because no one really cares anymore.

Optimizing the Observed : When we see our world relative to Return On Intention, the things that once looked like problems we had to live with suddenly become irrelevant cultural relics.

Consider our previous list after this realization:

Earth Day: Protests to shame politicians and policymakers are less about the planet, and more about the economic paradigm that pillages the earth for profit. When input, output and waste are matched based on network efficiencies, real value is rewarded for the benefit it can guarantee in the present, not a future value best guess that robs us of our survival.

Conscious Festivals: Each of us want to be relevant in the world. Our intention is to be acknowledged, deemed significant, and feel wanted and needed. When our economic paradigm cannot deliver on that promise, we go looking wherever we can find it. Gathering and ritual is integral to society. A network economic model that rewards both patrons and producers relative to contribution changes what celebration is all about.

Innovation Hubs and Investors: The Intention of investors, whether its slow money R&D, or fast money venture markets, is ultimately to motivate the creation of innovation that we can all benefit from. The intention of innovators is delivering on that promise and be appreciated for doing so. The disconnect today is about reconciling two separate agendas, when beneath the instruments, the intention is the same. When we chose to operate in a paradigm that supports intentions over instruments, we quickly realize that investors, innovators, and the rest of us benefiting from their creation are all part of the same ecosystem. That allows for lenders and borrowers to both benefit from network equity, to be transparent, and to include their customers in sharing that surplus, instead of extracting future value from them.

Sharing Economy: Share the wealth. It’s really that simple.

Retail and Real Estate: What is the intention behind a purchase? How does our technical reality satisfy that intention? As we understand and measure consumption in satisfying intention terms, how we buy what we buy shifts. The same is true for the best use of land, including the deciding not to misuse it, because it makes much more sense in resource regeneration terms. Focusing on our intention of creating a higher quality of life now, rather than the fuzzy promise of it, shifts how we solve for the solutions that will actually guarantee future access, rather than just sell us the dream of it.

Banking, Insurance and the Stock Market: Trust is about context relative to intention. The instruments we had trusted to deliver on the intention of producing material baseline for survival, have already performed their task in the 20th century. Our future values are not determined by further capacity for production and consumption, rather, it is to answer the intention of how much more satisfaction we can expect. Markets were apropos for that purpose, then. Now, we have peer to peer networks that can directly guarantee that with pre-sales, sourcing, off-takes, and allocations in advance of production. In effect, we now have the ability to become our own stock tickers, relative to the social value our networks believe we can produce. So maybe it’s time to realize that market economic paradigm has already shifted to real-time network value creation.

RUN : Regenerative Unified Networks delivering ROI,

Return On Intention

No one can predict the future, though the signs for a future full of prosperous possibilities are all around us, when we are willing to reframe reality for the rest of us. Search and social networks signaled the start to the sharing economy, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, and the evolution of blockchains, holochains, smart contracts, DAOs, OVNs, AR, VR, AI and whole host of emergent acronym ready ideas are showing us something previously unseen.

We are no longer in a market driven reality.

Our exchanges now are on ubiquitous, asynchronous, autonomous networks, a whole system of networked interdependencies. Sure, most of them now look like walled garden platforms like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Uber, AirBnB, etc. though their longevity will be determined by whether or not they share data and transform their models to serve their ecosystems instead of extracting from them. This recent article on Google’s cash cow drying up with Amazon searches may be an early indicator of the fate of profit driven networked platforms, still accounting for value using an industrial era market paradigm of transactions instead of transformation.

Regardless of where you stand on the evolution of our socioeconomic reality, our technologies today can deliver something, never before possible at this global scale. They can instantly close the gap between intention and outcome, matching resources for inputs, outputs and waste dynamically with demand. Delivering real ROI, our Returns On Intention.

Of course we don’t know if those who fear losing control of their current power position will see what’s here now as a threat, or the transition to greater prosperity for all that it represents. However, one thing is certain, and that is, our current systems were born out of seeking out Returns On Intentions, and the next systems will be no different. Because ultimately, intention is intelligent. It points to our deepest desires. In other words, it points to love, the driving force of our living existence here on Earth.

As the mystic poet Rumi wrote:

“Love is the whole thing. We are only pieces.”

I hope for the sake of our survival as a species, we realize the profundity of that, and focus on getting the returns we really want. The real ROI, instead of the instruments from a bygone era we believe will get us there.

Sure, we believe in trust more than the truth, however, in this time of great transition, trusting our intentions will surely lead us to the truth that is.

The post ROI: Return On Intention appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Primavera de Filippi at Medialab-Prado

In this special event, organised by Guerrilla Translation and the P2P Foundation, Digital Rights researcher Primavera de Filippi explores the possibilities and pitfalls of blockchain-derived platforms developed through Ethereum.

The event was held at Madrid’s MediaLab-Prado and features an extensive and engaging round-table discussion after the main presentation.

The post Podcast of the Day: Primavera de Filippi on Ethereum appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Governance by Networks. Credit: Thierry Erhmann

The “social” in a lot of online social networking turns out to be pretty weak. Sure, we can share pictures and opinions with thousands of people, even organize protests and recommend one another for jobs. But protests organized on Facebook event pages tend not to turn into lasting organizations that can wield power after the fact. The employer one finds through LinkedIn can’t exist solely on the network; there’s likely brick-and-mortar somewhere, and certainly some paper documents. Social media only goes so far. So it’s probably not surprising that bands of geeks — and their investor friends — are eager to upload more aspects of life to the Internet: from money to contracts to organizations to entire countries.

Some of the odd boundaries between online and offline community are on display when you walk into Hacker Dojo, a member-run hackerspace not far from the Googleplex in Mountain View, California. A dull office-park storefront opens into an expanding series of rooms with clusters of people, mostly white and Asian young men, staring into their individual screens, but together. At the door, you’re met not by a receptionist, but a computer asking for your email address. When you give it, you’re told the rules. Among their distinctions: Everywhere and everything is “100 Percent Communal,” but it is “Not a Public Facility.” Naps are okay, but sleeping is not.

Hacker Dojo was host to an event in late June where one could find some features of a new order being worked out. Steve Randy Waldman, a freelance economist and blogger, spoke to a room of about 20 people interested in Bitcoin and other crypto-currency projects. He talked, actually, about the close-knit fraternal organizations that, a century ago, provided insurance and medical benefits to millions of Americans. Many of these mutual-support networks have fallen away in an age of mobility and frayed communities, but maybe crypto-currency can bring them back.

The big idea that makes crypto-currency tick in the first place is the blockchain. Bitcoin’s blockchain, for instance, is a list of transactions that shows which users hold how much of the currency. No one entity controls the list. Rather than being kept on a single, central server, the blockchain is stored and checked across the whole network of users. Sophisticated mathematics — the “crypto” part — keeps it secure. Thus, a lot of the trust that typical currencies rely on — that the issuing government won’t go bust, that cash can’t easily be counterfeited — is no longer needed. In the algorithm we trust.

Photo credit: zcopley / Foter / CC BY-SA 2.0.

Money, it turns out, is just one of many things one can do with a blockchain. Not long after Bitcoin appeared in 2009, people started recognizing this. Blockchains can be used to send messages or transfer ownership records or store data. Any kind of contract could also reside on a blockchain, written in computer code rather than ordinary legal jargon. These “smart” contracts could establish marriages, organizations, even national constitutions — anything you can code. The contracts would enforce themselves in a pre-determined way, including by automatically removing funds from a party’s account. The stakes are that much higher than what we’re used to on Facebook. And, since blockchains spread their data across a network, they also offer the promise of radical transparency. All contracts, transactions, whatever — they could be out in the open for examination.

A short-lived crypto-currency startup called Invictus started talking about “decentralized autonomous companies” last year. Another project, Ethereum, which is building a much-anticipated platform for blockchain contracts, adopted the more open-ended language of “decentralized autonomous organizations,” or DAOs. “We changed it to DAO because the play on words of ‘tao,’” says Ethereum’s Anthony D’Onofrio; the project’s 20-year-old founder, Vitalik Buterin, offers more technical reasons, as well.

The urge to decentralize and autonomize has informed social movements since the 1970s. The language of “decentralized autonomous organization” appeared among the swarms of activists in the late-1990s counter-globalization movement. But the trust-replacing mechanisms of a blockchain offer less an ideology than a method, one which may make it far easier for us to hand our relationships over to code.

The wild, unregulated West

A big part of the appeal of DAOs is the undiscovered, unregulated possibilities they present — possibilities that offline legal and social conditions don’t allow. At least until government regulators catch up, DAOs are a blank slate. At Hacker Dojo, Waldman described the impulse this way: “There’s something we’d like to do, and we’d like to create some space for ourselves to do it.”

In principle, a DAO could be anything from a radical collective, governed by the consensus of its members, to a virtual drone that trades assets and pays payrolls with no human inputs at all. There’s lots of room in between. A $100,000 bounty was posted on May 17 for developing a software platform to replace the Bitcoin Foundation, a leading promoter of the currency. A few weeks later, a group called Project Ðouglas presented the Eris platform, named after the Greek goddess of chaos and designed for running a DAO with democratic, meritocratic structures in mind. (Project Ðouglas prefers to use the term distributed autonomous organizations. The “Д isanother story.)

Eris exemplifies not just the potential of DAOs, but also how incredibly conjectural they remain. It is built on the basis of Ethereum, a platform that hasn’t even been released yet, fleshing out a vision of a decentralized future that is less than a year old.

Expressionist explanation of DAOs from Heart_Cycle on Twitter

Perception, however, is enough to mean real money. Go to a Bitcoin conference, and you’re likely to meet, among the legions of libertarian hackers, a serious contingent of go-getters who have recently quit jobs in finance. They’re packaging their startups as modules that big banks can buy when blockchains come closer to the mainstream. With DAOs, not just a currency like bitcoin but a whole new financial system can be built on blockchains, further from the reach of conventional regulatory mechanisms. The often-touted promise is that a system like this, without the “friction” of regulation and big-bank bureaucracy, and with a lot more transparency, will speed up innovation and bring an infusion of needed financial services to the under-served populations.

This kind of distributed, easy-access finance could mean a revival of economic democracy, a new form of cooperative ownership. But not everything called “democratizing” is created equal. New, unregulated realms are often most empowering those who already had lots of power in the old system. Precedents like the subprime mortgages hawked on poor communities before the 2008 financial crisis should remind us that expanding access to finance can be a means of exploitation.

How government regulators will respond to the prospect of DAOs, or how the pioneers will regulate themselves, is anybody’s guess. “I’ve always wanted to change the world,” one member of the Ethereum team told me, after meeting with legal advisors in New York. “But I don’t want to do it from a prison cell.”

‘Strategic actors’

Bitcoin, which first appeared in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis as a tool of decentralized liberation, is becoming awfully centralized. The richest 100 Bitcoin users hold 20 percent of the wealth, making it far more concentrated than the normal economy. The process of “mining” is now so much in the hands of a few as to pose a threat to the whole system. While decentralized networks sound like weapons against gross inequality, they can also become the means of something grosser. It all depends on how the networks are structured and put to use.

In his talk, Waldman said he hopes to see DAOs that are “designed as strategic actors.” By collecting dues and holding members responsible to contracts, a DAO could be a means of organizing new kinds of labor unions or fostering disciplined consumer activism, which have failed to appear on social media so far. What if, rather than just indicating on Facebook that you plan to participate in a protest, you joined a group of people contractually bound to do so? And then, after the fact, what if the group could debate and decide together what to do next?

Amid all the speculative promise, one can forget that there remain other ways to organize ourselves than blockchains. Waldman cited such pre-digital examples as in-person meetings, distinctive clothing, even religious belief — “a powerful engineering tool, and we should take it seriously.” He talked about fraternal orders like Freemasons and Elks mostly in the past tense, as sources of inspiration for the DAOs to come. But three-quarters of the way through his talk, one of the engineers present — middle-aged, with a thick beard and large glasses — raised his hand and declared himself a real-life Freemason.

“We’re still around!” he insisted. He cited stories of real-life good deeds done through his lodge. Offline.

The post Are You Ready to Trust a Decentralized Autonomous Organization? appeared first on P2P Foundation.