Great chain of confidence: how blockchain and trust change the world

    One of the things that distinguishes developed countries from not so much is trust between people. In small towns and villages, trust can hold on to the fact that everyone knows each other. But in quickly urbanized societies like Russian, where people were relatively quickly pulled out of one environment, without having managed to integrate themselves into another - as usual, in such cases they cite the example that neighbors on the landing often do not know each other - this is no longer works. Here another factor is already acquiring significance - the strength of institutions. The feeling of greater safety and comfort in some cozy Central European country rests on the presumption of high-quality work of institutions, state and public, from police to charity, and not at all on the belief that people there are more honest and decent in themselves. People everywhere are more or less the same - only the level of trust between them differs. And strong institutions in the industrial era returned to people the trust level of a small community.

    But in the post-industrial society the quality of their work is less and less satisfying. Something is wrong with the institutions themselves, or just a person of the 21st century places increased demands that the old systems cannot satisfy - a debatable question. The fact is that they have become too opaque, too cumbersome and, most importantly, too slow for the modern pace of life. Technologies are replacing them - now they have to provide the modern man with the level of trust that is necessary for comfortable living.

    How technology, including the blockchain, changes the relationship between people, satisfying the fundamental need for mutual trust in new ways - Rachel Botsman speaks at TED this June:



    Rachel Botsman, a visiting professor at Oxford University, talks about how technology allows trust to change our way of life, work and consumption. Her idea of ​​“co-consumption”, presented in the book What's Mine Is Yours in collaboration with Roo Rogers, was included in TIME magazine in “10 ideas that will change the world” and got into the list of “Breakthrough ideas of 2015” by Thinkers50.

    The institutions that are modern to us, on which even the most developed societies of this world hold, have become fairly outdated. In one of the past posts, we talked about how modern banking system is more likely to be a brake on development than on its circulatory system - and how this issue of cryptocurrencies emitted independently of the state can change that.

    But the list can be expanded: the electoral system, with all its stuffing and sometimes absurdities, as, for example, in the United States, where for the second time in 16 years, the person who receives the smaller number of votes becomes the president. The whole concept of representative democracy, undoubtedly a breakthrough for those times, when the very opportunity to send its village neighbor to the capital to influence important government decisions was like a miracle, now it looks a little outdated - in all these multi-storey structures of elections, chambers, parties, deputies and assistants too corruption, populism and simply incompetence easily reproduce.

    The so-called checks and balances have become systems of delays and weights. Once called upon not to allow the concentration of too much power in the hands of too few people, now they interfere with the source of power as such - that is, people - to dispose of it. As a result, the principle of democracy "we trust our politicians to represent our interests" has become "we no longer trust our politicians, because the system has become too complex and slow to satisfy our requests."

    The fact that technological progress will move people towards direct democracy has been talked about for a long time. But from the point of view of today, the picture of the future already looks a little different: instead of direct democracy, progress moves us towards a distributed democracy. Those. to the system of self-government of a society, in which it not only reduces the number of intermediate stages between its request and response to it in the form of a law, but simply ceases to need the state in many issues. We already live in the world as a whole from states informationally independent. Next in line are financial independence, currencies emitted by private individuals or public organizations on the basis of the public consensus. Bitcoin is the first and main example of this currency - it is the majority consensus that determines its appearance and future. What's next? Perhaps independence infrastructure: The development of self-driving cars, private astronautics, and even experiments with hyperloops lead to the fact that one of the most important functions of the state since the days of ancient Rome — the construction of roads — can also be transferred to the management of public consensus. And so on and so forth. One can even imagine what will become the last bastion for a distributed democracy: weapons and security. Perhaps states will hold on to a monopoly on violence to the end. And perhaps, having lost a monopoly on money, they will easily give up the right to start wars and execute people, because there simply will be no point in it - there will simply be nothing to protect if you are no longer a printing press. that one of the most important functions of the state since the days of ancient Rome — the construction of roads — could also be transferred to the management of public consensus. And so on and so forth. One can even imagine what will become the last bastion for a distributed democracy: weapons and security. Perhaps states will hold on to a monopoly on violence to the end. And perhaps, having lost a monopoly on money, they will easily give up the right to start wars and execute people, because there simply will be no point in it - there will simply be nothing to protect if you are no longer a printing press. that one of the most important functions of the state since the days of ancient Rome — the construction of roads — could also be transferred to the management of public consensus. And so on and so forth. One can even imagine what will become the last bastion for a distributed democracy: weapons and security. Perhaps states will hold on to a monopoly on violence to the end. And perhaps, having lost a monopoly on money, they will easily give up the right to start wars and execute people, because there simply will be no point in it - there will simply be nothing to protect if you are no longer a printing press.

    And here is the blockchain?


    This is the most important and interesting topic, in my opinion, which Rachel touched on in passing: losing confidence in modern institutions, people need a new foundation on which new confidence will be formed. It is clear that we are talking about a network structure. But from what material will the threads of this network be woven? Blockchain is the answer.

    Now network trust structures are in their infancy, flourishing inside the unique hubs that are platforms: Uber, Airbnb, Bla-bla-car, social networks. We trust these hubs to a sufficient degree, but their number will steadily grow and their transparency issues will grow, too. Blockchain as a principle, which excludes the possibility of deceit, deletion of information in hindsight, fraud - even elementary “erasing of personality”, which dreaded by dystopias and fighters of the end of the 20th century - is elementary - and should be this very material on which the whole fabric of the future society will hold.

    Now we trust platforms not only because they are business and should, in theory, think rationally and take care of their customers. But also because at the dawn of any technology, any breakthrough - and we are now at this particular stage of the story - there were always romantics, not pragmatists. And the technological world now lives on the principles of ethics, formulated by the founding fathers of Silicon Valley and multi-billionaire startups, for whom breakthrough technology is more important than money simply because they have more money than they need. These are the principles of user friendliness, the benefits of honest politics, the struggle for freedom of information and so on, which are now upheld by all the technological giants of the planet: from Tim Cook to Pavel Durov.

    But pragmatists come for romantics, administrators for administrators, and nobody can give guarantees of a cloudless future of technology startups bathing in money - there is always a dotcom 2.0 crisis or something else like that. In the end, the ideologists of startups sometimes just die - and then we read sad posts on Facebook that without I. the company “I” is not the same.

    Therefore, trust, without which the prosperous life of any society is simply impossible, in any epoch, must nevertheless be held on something more fundamental than belief in good intentions and the ethical code of the founding fathers. The founding fathers of the United States left behind a Constitution, which has lasted for almost three centuries. The founding fathers of a new future must also leave something behind. And perhaps this is what professional deformation in me now says, but I sincerely believe that the Constitution of the new world, the iron principle, on which people’s trust in a friend and all the resulting opportunities from the ability to build a business, meet and love, to the opportunity at any moment to go anywhere and live anywhere - there will be a blockchain. At least for the moment, it is best suited for this.

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