Turing-Complete Governance
Metadata
Highlights
- Let’s take decentralization as a constraint here; in certain contexts, we want to avoid having centralized power and few points of failure. Computation is that which makes it possible to do what we want while respecting the constraint of decentralization.
- Arbitrary programmability comes from the fact that blockchains like Ethereum are Turing-Complete computers, which can run algorithms to perform any well-defined computational tasks.
- Smart contracts on Turing-Complete chains contain the promise of composable, arbitrarily programmable governance – what I call Turing-Complete governance.
- Composability comes from the fact that Ethereum is also a world computer with interoperable programs
- Today, collective action problems abound. Misaligned incentives between the individual and the group prevent us from making progress on anything from pollution, to pandemics, to building alliances and working towards the same mission.
- While there are all sorts of reasons for creating a DAO—e.g. they can be purely social (e.g. gating access to an exclusive community based on a token), or necessitated based on a low-trust adversarial environment—to view DAOs as defined decision-making communities opens up their conceptual potential as powerful instruments for enabling better governance.
- There’s also the question of those who are uninterested in governance power, and purely want to make money through the community, which can end up corrupting and over-financializing the spirit of the community, or even result in a hostile takeover.
- Token-based structures meet DeFi needs by allowing scalable ownership in low-trust contexts in which financial motives play a key role, and community over-financialization is low on the list of concerns. And even in those canonical DeFi spaces, there are still many organizational kinks to iron out, e.g. a lack of truly participatory decision-making.
- Now, innovations in community governance tooling and “organization legos” have made sorting and prioritizing proposals much more streamlined, and thus much less centralized. Modular, composable mechanisms for submitting and reviewing proposals have proliferated, such that the most important ones get the most attention. This large council DAO has, through experimentation, come to rely on a proposal prioritization algorithm, which enables members to have personalized proposal feeds that still allow data control and privacy.
- Jane Jacobs speaks of the importance of lively sidewalks to a city, where many people of all backgrounds mingle, keep a casual eye out for each other, and can meet naturally in public. Much of this, she insists, must be informal, to keep private life from being transgressed on by institutional structures. Interoperability and programmability means that we have an opportunity to stitch together human structures that look very different to past ones—informal, lively, casual yet strong.
- Public infrastructure on the Internet should be like public infrastructure in the physical world: in the ideal case, freely accessible and used by many. We shouldn’t settle for an online landscape of gated silos, difficult-to-use UIs, and huge barriers to participation.
Turing-Complete Governance
Metadata
Highlights
- Let’s take decentralization as a constraint here; in certain contexts, we want to avoid having centralized power and few points of failure. Computation is that which makes it possible to do what we want while respecting the constraint of decentralization.
- Arbitrary programmability comes from the fact that blockchains like Ethereum are Turing-Complete computers, which can run algorithms to perform any well-defined computational tasks.
- Smart contracts on Turing-Complete chains contain the promise of composable, arbitrarily programmable governance – what I call Turing-Complete governance.
- Composability comes from the fact that Ethereum is also a world computer with interoperable programs
- Today, collective action problems abound. Misaligned incentives between the individual and the group prevent us from making progress on anything from pollution, to pandemics, to building alliances and working towards the same mission.
- While there are all sorts of reasons for creating a DAO—e.g. they can be purely social (e.g. gating access to an exclusive community based on a token), or necessitated based on a low-trust adversarial environment—to view DAOs as defined decision-making communities opens up their conceptual potential as powerful instruments for enabling better governance.
- There’s also the question of those who are uninterested in governance power, and purely want to make money through the community, which can end up corrupting and over-financializing the spirit of the community, or even result in a hostile takeover.
- Token-based structures meet DeFi needs by allowing scalable ownership in low-trust contexts in which financial motives play a key role, and community over-financialization is low on the list of concerns. And even in those canonical DeFi spaces, there are still many organizational kinks to iron out, e.g. a lack of truly participatory decision-making.
- Now, innovations in community governance tooling and “organization legos” have made sorting and prioritizing proposals much more streamlined, and thus much less centralized. Modular, composable mechanisms for submitting and reviewing proposals have proliferated, such that the most important ones get the most attention. This large council DAO has, through experimentation, come to rely on a proposal prioritization algorithm, which enables members to have personalized proposal feeds that still allow data control and privacy.
- Jane Jacobs speaks of the importance of lively sidewalks to a city, where many people of all backgrounds mingle, keep a casual eye out for each other, and can meet naturally in public. Much of this, she insists, must be informal, to keep private life from being transgressed on by institutional structures. Interoperability and programmability means that we have an opportunity to stitch together human structures that look very different to past ones—informal, lively, casual yet strong.
- Public infrastructure on the Internet should be like public infrastructure in the physical world: in the ideal case, freely accessible and used by many. We shouldn’t settle for an online landscape of gated silos, difficult-to-use UIs, and huge barriers to participation.
Turing-Complete Governance
Metadata
Highlights
- Let’s take decentralization as a constraint here; in certain contexts, we want to avoid having centralized power and few points of failure. Computation is that which makes it possible to do what we want while respecting the constraint of decentralization.
- Arbitrary programmability comes from the fact that blockchains like Ethereum are Turing-Complete computers, which can run algorithms to perform any well-defined computational tasks.
- Smart contracts on Turing-Complete chains contain the promise of composable, arbitrarily programmable governance – what I call Turing-Complete governance.
- Composability comes from the fact that Ethereum is also a world computer with interoperable programs
- Today, collective action problems abound. Misaligned incentives between the individual and the group prevent us from making progress on anything from pollution, to pandemics, to building alliances and working towards the same mission.
- While there are all sorts of reasons for creating a DAO—e.g. they can be purely social (e.g. gating access to an exclusive community based on a token), or necessitated based on a low-trust adversarial environment—to view DAOs as defined decision-making communities opens up their conceptual potential as powerful instruments for enabling better governance.
- There’s also the question of those who are uninterested in governance power, and purely want to make money through the community, which can end up corrupting and over-financializing the spirit of the community, or even result in a hostile takeover.
- Token-based structures meet DeFi needs by allowing scalable ownership in low-trust contexts in which financial motives play a key role, and community over-financialization is low on the list of concerns. And even in those canonical DeFi spaces, there are still many organizational kinks to iron out, e.g. a lack of truly participatory decision-making.
- Now, innovations in community governance tooling and “organization legos” have made sorting and prioritizing proposals much more streamlined, and thus much less centralized. Modular, composable mechanisms for submitting and reviewing proposals have proliferated, such that the most important ones get the most attention. This large council DAO has, through experimentation, come to rely on a proposal prioritization algorithm, which enables members to have personalized proposal feeds that still allow data control and privacy.
- Jane Jacobs speaks of the importance of lively sidewalks to a city, where many people of all backgrounds mingle, keep a casual eye out for each other, and can meet naturally in public. Much of this, she insists, must be informal, to keep private life from being transgressed on by institutional structures. Interoperability and programmability means that we have an opportunity to stitch together human structures that look very different to past ones—informal, lively, casual yet strong.
- Public infrastructure on the Internet should be like public infrastructure in the physical world: in the ideal case, freely accessible and used by many. We shouldn’t settle for an online landscape of gated silos, difficult-to-use UIs, and huge barriers to participation.