
Can we tokenize behavior? - kawera
http://arnoldwaldstein.com/2017/12/can-tokenize-behavior/
======
niftich
There is some good substance buried here, but it's phrased in a voice thick
with hype and slathered with emergent jargon/slang pidgin of folks mentally
and emotionally invested in the loftier suppositions of the cryptocurrency
movement. It's indistinguishable from a parody, but it's probably sincere.

By my reading -- and this is hard to glean -- the central thesis seems to be
that cryptocurrencies shouldn't be used to one-to-one reimplement currently
present systems of digital social interaction; instead, think about what can
be accomplished from the ground-up when your individual, small-time holders
are vested.

It's both cutely observant, and painfully oblivious to nearly all of human
history, where individuals pooled together resources to build, invest, serve
as a patron to the arts, etc -- a range of activities from basic survival to
abstract societal good.

------
skywhopper
I can’t really find any substance here to latch onto. But the idea of
distributed crypto remaking society is nothing new. I first ran into it in the
early nineties via Bruce Schneier’s “Applied Cryptography”. All these
algorithms could provably make voting, anonymous cash, messaging, and more
totally secure and unbreakable! We were on the cusp of a technolibertarian
utopia! The internet was going to make it happen and this new “world wide web”
would make it accessible to the masses.

Turns out, as Schneier himself long ago realized, it’s more complicated than
that, and the combination of malicious actors and human nature render every
technological solution ultimately fallible.

The blockchain is not going to solve the basic issues of human fallibility and
gaps in trust. Further attempts to quantify human experience, this time into
cryptographic tokens, will not change the goals or capabilities of
governments, criminals, corporations, or individuals.

We won’t code our way out of our problems. We need to stop fooling ourselves
and start looking for real solutions.

~~~
smokeyj
> The blockchain is not going to solve the basic issues of human fallibility
> and gaps in trust

Yet here we are. With a globally traded decentralized token. What more
evidence do you need that “the game has changed”?

~~~
setr
Time; the coin sees little use in any fundamental market. If it were to crash
and vanish tomorrow, relatively little would be affected.

It's difficult to claim "Something has changed the game", if it can't even
accomplish being noticable in its absence.

It exists, and it can sometimes be used, and some people think it will be
used. Thats about all you can say about it.

~~~
smokeyj
I'm speaking broadly to decentralized "blockchains". If any or all were to
crash _a new one will replace it_. In that sense the cat is out of the bag and
"the game has changed". It doesn't matter if any websites from the 90's still
operates, the internet was a game changing invention regardless of when mass
adoption took place.

~~~
setr
Well no, bitcoins current value is clearly primarily based on speculation, and
distinctly divorced from its value in usage. If it vanished tomorrow, and was
replaced, the new coin will likely _not_ reach the same height as bitcoin; its
speculative valuation would vanish, and it would reach merely bitcoins true
value (based on its utility). And its true value is likely quite low; at least
nowhere near where its at today.

That is, bitcoin doesn't yet justify its own existence. A new one will replace
it, but hardly _out of necessity_ , rather simply because it is trivial to do
so. If its existence was suddenly erased, few systems would be affected
(mostly layer 1 actors, those directly associated with bitcoin: miners, coin
devs, a few startups, etc) and most corrected quite quickly. there's not yet a
true _dependency_ on cryptocoins or blockchaind; the game is the almost
exactly the same as it was with or without the bitcoin paper.

Its not _yet_ changed.

~~~
smokeyj
> If it vanished tomorrow, and was replaced

But it won’t vanish. I’m still waiting. If you can make bitcoin vanish I’d
give you some credibility. Until then you’re amongst a sea of journalists
declaring the death of crypto. I’m waiting for it and I mean that sincerely.
Yet here we are.

~~~
setr
What in the hell are you going on about? Im just talking about whether or not
you should call it "game changing". Vanishing bitcoin is just a hypothetical.

~~~
smokeyj
[http://blog.ycombinator.com/building-for-the-
blockchain/](http://blog.ycombinator.com/building-for-the-blockchain/)

The phrase "paradigm shift" seems to be thrown around quite a bit ;)

------
mt3ck
I think we need to be careful about integrating blockchain into the fabric of
societies, especially the social and emotional aspects.

'Think not of how to replumb or rewire the world, but how to create the
environment where interactions can be different, social, within a new economic
order.'

This gets me thinking of the episode Fifteen Million Merits (S1, Ep2) of Black
Mirror.

~~~
Nuzzerino
Given the clusterfuck that was Facebook, I fear that there is less incentive
to be careful than one would hope.

------
tw1010
Bret Weinstein, the evolutionary biologist, recently discussed similar ideas
in this interview:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzAgSp_O03I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzAgSp_O03I)

Here is a shorter piece of the interview that focuses a bit more on the
specific idea:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4j-jRDTlJg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4j-jRDTlJg)

If anyone has links to more discussion about this subject, I would love to
hear about it.

------
JamesLeonis
We would do well to remember that BitTorrent came from Mojo Nation, which
attempted to tokenize distribution long before Filecoin and the like.

Ultimately, "too cheap to meter" was the problem they encountered, so they
stripped out the tit-for-tat portion and Bittorrent was released.

[https://elaineou.com/2017/10/14/the-transaction-costs-of-
tok...](https://elaineou.com/2017/10/14/the-transaction-costs-of-tokenizing-
everything/)

------
Sir_Cmpwn
I was hoping this was tokenize as in compiler theory, and was about
interpreting body language with ML or so. Disappointed :(

------
CodeMage
I stopped at 4th paragraph because I couldn't understand the author's ideas.
Can anyone explain the following bit to me?

> _Like the inevitability of collective micro-ownership of commodities like
> real estate, art, storage, even energy. These feel natural to the innate
> structure of the blockchain itself_ [...]

~~~
trophycase
This relates to the tokenization of all forms of ownership so it becomes easy
to sell fractional ownership of otherwise difficult things.

~~~
Robotbeat
We already have this, though: cooperative businesses. The most common being
credit unions. Some grocery stores operate on this principle.

It's a good model and has been scaled up to large multinational corporation
size in the Mondragon Corporation, but we don't need blockchain or
cryptocurrency to do it.

I've been incredibly well-served by both credit unions and cooperative grocery
stores.

Corporations exist to serve the interests of their shareholders. If you are a
customer or employee of a corporation that you are not a shareholder of, then
that corporation is not necessarily trying to do business in my interest but
quite possibly could be operating at the _expense_ of my interests in order to
serve the interest of the shareholders. We _hope_ that these interests are
aligned, but often we see that they aren't. Cooperative businesses naturally
align these interests by making the workers or consumers (or both)
shareholders. And they remain voluntary.

It addresses many of the drawbacks of unionization, of traditional capitalist
corporations, and socialism. It really should be copied more widely. Given my
positive experiences with the cooperative business model, I would gladly seek
out such businesses if they were more widely available.

~~~
seibelj
“Why do we need Facebook? Friendster already did social networks. Why do we
need google? Alta Vista already did search.”

Crypto allows you to tokenize assets on a much more efficient, streamlined
approach than structuring an entire business model in a formal co-op. The two
are similar only in vague terms.

~~~
Robotbeat
That'd be missing much of the benefit, though. If you don't restructure the
business as a co-op, then the consumer or worker is not likely to see the same
benefits. The structure of the co-op gives its small-time shareholders a
similar level of acknowledgement/voice that big-time shareholders would have
in a conventional business (and similar to what a union does for workers,
except without the large amount of friction and unnecessary antipathy between
management and the workers). Simply tokenizing ownership would not have this
benefit.

~~~
nrhk
Well that would depend on the token and its implementation details wouldn't
it. If you own x% of the pool you get a voice at the table with x being
adjustable. Or alternatively all the small token holders can choose a rep or
series of reps to vote on decisions on their behalf.

~~~
Robotbeat
Agreed! But now you're talking about changing the structure of the business
somewhat. That is no longer "mere" tokenization. Something along these lines
could work.

~~~
Nuzzerino
SingularityNET.io uses this approach somewhat:

> " _Democratic Governance._ Although token holders will not have equity or
> voting rights in the Foundation itself, they will be allowed to vote on
> specific decisions affecting the Platform. The decisions subject to holder
> vote will be limited at first, but will eventually expand to a point where
> the token holders and the Foundation share nearly equal control of all
> aspects of the Platform’s functionality. Even in the Platform’s early
> stages, following the token sale, token holders will be able to rate the AI
> Services they use, affecting the success of those services and providing
> feedback that is necessary for the service to improve. This role further
> contributes to the continued improvement of the Platform and its offerings,
> without any involvement of the Foundation."

~~~
Robotbeat
In a coop, the members have full voting rights in all aspects. This is the
better model.

------
macawfish
All this because we still haven't learned how to share?

~~~
zardo
We know how to share. We also know naively scaling up sharing to 7-billion
participants doesn't work.

