The Revolution will (not) be decentralised: Blockchains - Commons TransitionCommons Tra... - 0 views
commonstransition.org/t-be-decentralised-blockchains
ethereum blockchain commons commonstransition bollier
shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 11 Jun 15
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Decentralised topologies and non-discriminatory protocols have been all but replaced by a recentralisation of infrastructure, as powerful corporations now gatekeep our networks. Everything might be accessible, but this access is mediated by a centralised entity. Whoever controls the data centre exercises political and economic control over communications. It’s difficult to see how we can counteract these recentralising tendencies in order to build a common core infrastructure.
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powerful mining pools now control much of the infrastructure and rent-seeking individuals control a lion’s share of Bitcoin’s value.
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the underlying architecture has potentials not only for the future of money, but also for the future of networked cooperation.
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Just as Bitcoin makes certain financial intermediaries unnecessary, new innovations on the blockchain remove the need for gatekeepers from other processes
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The broader implication is that the blockchain could support the activities and resources necessary to the commons
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A lot of what follows is pretty speculative, but worth discussing in the context of peer-production.
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The blockchain is the distributed ledger that keeps track of all transactions made using the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. Arguably this is Bitcoin’s key innovation
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the blockchain could support new forms of peer-production, and fully decentralised infrastructures for applications as varied as finance, mesh networks, cloud databases and share economies.
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There are a number of start-ups and groups currently innovating in this space such as Ethereum, Ripple and Mastercoin.
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Bitcoin involves two parameters: a trustless database (more on this later) and a transactions system capable of sending value from place to place
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Ethereum builds a generalised framework that extends the capabilities of the blockchain to allow developers to write new consensus applications.
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claim is that blockchain-based technologies such as Ethereum can support and scale distributed forms of cooperation on a global scale.
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it doesn’t matter whether I believe in my fellow peers just so long as I believe in the technical efficiency of the blockchain protocol.
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Where questions about how to reach consensus, negotiate trust and especially scale interactions beyond the local are pervasive in the commons, the blockchain looks set to be a game changer.
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the blockchain could support not only cryptocurrencies but also other financial instruments like equity, securities and derivatives; smart contracts and smart property; new voting systems; identity and reputation systems; distributed databases; and even the management of assets and resources like energy and water.
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Ethereum incentivises participation, encouraging actors to contribute without introducing centralisation
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In order to use an Ethereum application, users make micropayments to the developers in ether, Ethereum’s coin, or ‘cryptofuel’ as they term it.
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Monetary transactions aside, this encourages people to contribute to the commons and puts systems in place to try and protect its resources from commercial expropriation.
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Instead, we can imagine infrastructure as something immaterial and dispersed, or managed through flexible and transient forms of ownership.
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The payoff seems to be that new blockchain-based technologies have the potential to support new forms of commons-based peer production, supplying necessary tools for cooperation and decision making, supporting complementary currencies and even provisioning infrastructures.
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proof-of-work is not a new form of trust, but the abdication of trust altogether as social confidence in favour of an algorithmic regulation
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proceeds from a perspective that already presumes a neoliberal subject and an economic mode of governance in the face of social and/or political problems. ‘How do we manage and incentivise individual competitive economic agents?’ In doing so, it not only codes for that subject, we might argue that it also reproduces that subject
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Property doesn’t disappear, but instead it is enforced and exercised in different ways. If rights were previously exercised through norms, laws, markets and architectures, today they are algorithmically inscribed in the object.
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There is real potential in the blockchain if we appreciate it not as some ultimate techno-fix but as a platform that, when combined with social and political institutions, has real possibilities for the future of organisation.