Continuations

There was an interesting post on the YCombinator blog by Ramon Recuero about the evolution of blockchain protocols through forking and copying. The post does not mention the alternative possibility of binding voting as a mechanism for the evolution of blockchains. There are several projects, including the troubled Tezos, where the blockchain protocol will be able to evolve via on-chain voting. Voting is an important mechanism to be explored as an alternative to forking. In his famous treatise...

We have been having an interesting discussion in our village on the feasability of Internet voting for local issues. In general, I am wary of electronic voting systems because they have the potential for manipulation at large scale. I certainly think that the closed source model that has been pursued to date is completely broken. Any effort on the federal and state levels should be open source for sure and will probably be futile until we have a broader crypto infrastructure (if ever). In the...

Earlier this week I started writing about wealth and financial capital as part of examining how the various components of the industrial system are beginning to break down. I will have more to say about the financial capital portion of wealth in upcoming posts but wanted to first provide more data and more context. As was pointed out in the comments Thomas Piketty provides a lot of data that he and others collected and form the basis for his book “Capital in the 21st Century” (which I just st...

Tomorrow is a big election as potentially control of both houses is on the line. But why vote? There is something known as the “paradox of voting,” which questions why a rational voter would bother voting at all. The reasoning is that any particular voter is incredibly unlikely to influence the outcome of the election. So the marginal benefit from voting would seem to be much lower than the cost of taking time off from work, driving to the polling place, etc. There are quite a few things wron...