Crypto and the Permissionless Revolution
I’m a Free Will kind of guy.
You might as well be born with “Free Will Included” stamped right on your bottom as far as I’m concerned.
Nature imposes only physical limits. Everything else boils down to a decision to act within those material constraints.
Whether you judge that aspect of the human condition a feature or a bug depends on your perspective. But regardless of your point of view, each of us possesses the fundamental capacity to choose for ourselves. Only you determine the next step. And only you decide the degree to which you impose your Will on others.
In a nutshell, where you draw the line on the whole issue of your Will relative to others forms the essence of moral action.
Some see no line.
To them, the ends justify the means. And when persuasion fails, those means include constricting your actions in an unceasing train of prohibitions and permissions.
Thankfully, throughout history, we have benefitted from a particular breed of Free Will revolutionaries. Visionaries hell-bent on creating conditions that respect everyone’s right to choose. Intellects with ideas to subvert authoritarian designs by drawing the lines of an open society around everyone.
And when it comes to putting those subversive ideas to the test, they all know this:
You don’t ask permission to start a revolution…
The Will to Act According to Your Principles
In July 1776, when a dissatisfied band of colonists signed the Declaration of Independence, they had already assumed the right of self-governance. The fight for a free and open society was happening anyway.
The Declaration simply made plain their motivation to act.
And they most definitely were not begging the favor of the king.
When Eric Hughes shot off an email containing A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto in March of ’93, programmers the world over were already writing open-source cryptography code. They knew that “privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age.”
They wanted privacy. But no one was going to give it to them.
“Cypherpunks write code,” and his Manifesto let the world know they wrote code to make encryption – and the “anonymous transaction systems that it makes possible” – available to anyone who wanted it.
And that no one could do anything about it.
Satoshi Nakamoto had already written the Bitcoin code when he(?) dropped the Bitcoin whitepaper on a cryptography mailing list in October 2008.
The white paper described his attempt at an anonymous transaction system. He knew money didn’t have to come from the government. Money just needs a system of trust. And he thought proof-of-work cryptographic hashes could provide that trust.
And, like the architects of authoritarian subversion that went before him, he was not asking permission.
Well, Satoshi’s idea works.
Encrypted, anonymous transaction systems now live out in the decentralized network wild.
A wilderness where the only permission any individual needs to engage productively with another is their consent.
No Censorship, No Permission
Bitcoin not only provides a novel system of trust for money; it also opened the door to entirely new ways of coordinating human activity.
Today, that activity often happens through corporations granted permission to operate by governments.
Whether through partnership agreements, limited liability companies, S-corps, C-corps, or whatever, these agreements legally bind the owners of corporate entities to courts of law. These agreements place the activities of these entities under legal jurisdictions. And those entities need the permission of those jurisdictions to exist.
These legal arrangements also provide a system of governance within corporations. They dictate who has the power to make decisions and how conflicts get resolved.
But, as Eric Hughes pointed out, “Code is Law.” And the cryptographic powered networks underlying Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies make entities operating under the code of law possible.
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, or DAOs, are a type of smart contract – a feature made possible by blockchain technology.
In fact, you can think of Bitcoin as a DAO with a simple, but powerful governance structure. The built-in block rewards incentivize miners to confirm and secure transactions. In exchange, miners receive the authority to accept changes to the underlying code.
What miners can’t do is limit who receives or spends Bitcoin. They don’t possess the power to censor transactions. Which means you don’t need miner’s permission to engage in productive, economic activity over the Bitcoin network.
But smart contracts make possible DAOs that enable far more complex governance structures. DAOs that coordinate human activity much the same way that traditional corporate structures do today.
And here are two solutions putting the subversive idea of creating and running companies on decentralized, permissionless blockchains to the test.
A Refuge for a Free and Open Society
One is the Aragon Network. Another is DAOStack.
These are both platforms that allow you to create DAOs. They both have methods of governance to coordinate corporate-like activities. And they both have native tokens that could soar in value as demand for DAOs on these platforms rise.
Those tokens are the ANT token for Aragon, and the GEN token for DAOStack.
Now, the how, what, and why of these platforms – and DAOs in general – will take time to unpack. And unpacking these ideas along with steps you need to take to profit from the migration to a permissionless world is exactly what I’ll do for you through The Prosperity Project.
The CryptoVerse may ultimately provide the perfect conditions for economic growth and prosperity. An exit from the spiraling cost of order that sidesteps barriers to productive activity erected by governments to further centralize power.
It’s a path through manufactured chaos. And it may very well provide the conditions necessary to allow a free and open society to thrive through the coming Age of Disruption.
But to thrive along with it, you must first take steps to get there.
P.S. Want to chat blockchains, smart contracts, tokens, and everything crypto?
Join me and The Prosperity Project community over in Telegram.
