july

Though well-written and inspirational, I believe this post fundamentally misunderstands Ethereum and blockchains. 

Ethereum's distinctive property is objective, strict global consensus, and absolutely nothing else. It's great for usecases that require strict global consensus, but it's impossible for everything else, because Ethereum cannot parse any subjectivity or rough consensus at all. 

As such, while money, contracts, governance, identity, law are presented as examples, Ethereum can only parse very, very limited forms of the above, where it's objective. In some cases, like governance or law, it's almost entirely subjective with negligible scope for Ethereum to help. 

99.99% of economics, institutions and the like are deeply human and subjective, which Ethereum or blockchains in general cannot interpret at all. Indeed, we've seen many a times how forcing subjectivity into objective code has led to many disastrous outcomes in crypto.

(Contd...)

everyone wants everything onchain because we desperately yearn for a simple world with clear rules and objective truths

our reality is more complex and chaotic than ever

the growth of crypto is a global cry for help

that's my main conclusion from @polynya's body of work

building /cabin, village-elder-ing /farcon | grin.io

Interesting take! Yeah, the modern world is extremely complex, and keeps getting more complex. The complexity does bring many rewards, so I don't think dumbing things down is a solution. The best outcome is to master said complexity, but yeah, some things may be too complicated in the short term

devs deal with complexity by building layers of abstraction: simple and hard at the bottom, with layered complexity/subjectivity on top as needed. our social structures should do the same.

there's a seminal legal paper on why property law keeps vacillating between clear, objective, predictable rules (crystals) and flexible, subjective, discretionary interpretations (mud): http://i.grin.io/crystals-and-mud.pdf

whats special now is that you can have both: crystalline protocols for the objective, with rich subjectivity built on top. like a credit card on crypto rails -- you can use the card if you want chargeback protection or use the blockchain directly if you want an irreversible tx. most humans want the credit card, but direct protocol access is vital for e.g. disruptive startups, novel legal structures, Canadian truckers.

this was not possible before. US law can only have one setting on the hard<->subjective spectrum.