Cryptocurrency Economic Network Will Make the Free Flow of Trust Possible

"Homo sapiens rules the world because it is the only animal that can believe in things that exist purely in its own imagination, such as God, country, money and human rights." - Yuval Noah Harari

Humans are social animals. For most of human history (about 12000 years ago), humans evolved in tribes of no more than 150 people. Language plays a role in the rapid reproduction of human beings. Through language, we can create stories. Religion, nation-state and money are all examples of societies that have enabled us to create larger societies that have eventually conquered smaller, tribal like communities whose people have not fully evolved over time. In addition, women are picky partners (as opposed to most other primates), and a small number of men gain the attraction of most women under unrestricted choices (Pareto distribution). Otherwise, the distribution of female sex market value is normal distribution. This phenomenon has been studied in the study of ancestral genes and is also reflected in the online dating market. So in essence, this is the way nature filters out quality, and it is this way that we can accelerate our control over the environment.

When living in a tribe, autonomy may be a way to build a strong reputation network among people who know each other. In this way, people can manage themselves without any central entity. When humans gather into larger and larger groups by telling stories, we can cooperate with people we don't necessarily know. Christians fighting side by side in the Crusade don't need to know each other. They just need to believe the same story, the story of the Bible.

Scalable central coordination

The problem with autonomous communities is that they have no scale. The challenge for the larger group is to design the right social structure to establish order and maximize social welfare. Although market-based economy can effectively allocate resources, market incentives are often inconsistent with social values. An obvious example is the profit privatization and loss socialization mechanism during the financial crisis. Financial policymakers hardly bear the consequences of their actions as society as a whole.

"Give me motivation and I'll give you results." - Charlie Munger,

Scalable tribal collaboration

Until recently (2009), without any central entity that coordinates interaction and ensures that people's behavior meets the expectations of system designers, it was impossible to coordinate people who do not know each other around the world.

Bitcoin is the first example. It consists of a series of incentives (incentive structure), which are written in a 9-Page white paper and embedded in code accessible to everyone. This is a peer-to-peer approach that transfers funds from one person to another without requiring anyone to trust any core entity in order to exchange value in a reliable way. In this way, a cryptocurrency economic network was born.

The Internet makes information flow freely, and bitcoin makes money flow freely. The wider cryptocurrency economic network makes the free flow of trust possible.

There are many ways to look at the cryptocurrency economic network. I found that the best way to compress this concept is to define it as a trusted incentive mechanism (more about this).

"Software is just the code of human thinking, so it has almost unlimited design space." - "Chris Dixon

Trustworthy

Computers in the network provide tribal trust among people so that whenever they do something, they know they will get the expected compensation. This is similar to the tribal reputation network, but people don't need to know and trust each other. They transfer trust to the network mechanism. Cryptography achieves this as a set of technologies for secure communication. Human activities tracked on the network can be transfers, provision of services, loans or investments in physical assets, or any other activity, including some kind of transaction representing the exchange of value.

excitation

Computers enable individuals to trust the network because it is economically rewarding to provide computing resources to protect transactions performed on the network.

machine

It is embedded in software by network creators and automatically executed on different computers around the world. In essence, they allow people to

Decentralized collaboration in action

With all this in mind, what are some practical examples of scalable collaboration between people that could not have been achieved before? In this article, I will focus on collaboration for sharing information. The reason behind this choice is that it often lacks the motivation to cooperate. By providing these two examples, we can understand where this will lead us in the future.

Maritime Agreement

It is an old saying that data is new oil. Google, Facebook, Uber and other technology giants often open part of their technology stack (such as tensorflow, prophet and pyro), but their data is definitely not like this. The reason behind this is that the data accumulated by these companies has a lot of potential value. The more data they have, the better user experience their products can (potentially) provide. Due to the influence of (data) network, they have a huge user group, and this user group tends to grow larger, so as to establish a data monopoly. It depends on the specific use case, but the essence is the same: companies have no incentive to share data. Is there any way to change this situation?

Ocean protocol constructs a cryptocurrency economic network in the form of open data economy. Participants are encouraged to share their accumulated data with others. They are financially compensated based on estimates generated from shared data. This may break the existing information island. The lack of data also reduces the ability of small companies to compete with large companies for data science talents. In data science, data is often more important than algorithms. An example of a shared data economy is an alliance of car manufacturers, which are assembling their data to train an autopilot vehicle model. Another example is the cooperation between ocean protocol and Roche Diagnostics to "improve the care of patients with heart disease through safe and reliable data sharing". In this way, data owners can set prices for their data and see how and by whom they use it. Data scientists can run algorithms on these data and store them encrypted at the same time. Ocean protocol creates a matrix connecting problem solvers (data scientists, artificial intelligence researchers) and problem owners (non-governmental organizations, enterprises, governments). Through this matrix, artificial intelligence sharing can be created. In this way, scalable tribal like collaboration can be achieved through a reliable network driven by the economic motivation of collaboration.

Numerai

The investment industry is a typical example. In this industry, there is little motivation for cooperation among different participants in the market. Success (ROI) depends on some kind of information asymmetry (non consensus right) between investors and markets. This can be achieved through fundamental or technical analysis of financial markets (and other methods). Sharing a profitable investment strategy means losing the information advantage in the market. This is a zero sum game (one side needs to lose in order to make a profit). Again, is there any way to change this situation?

Numerai has built a cryptocurrency economic network in the form of artificial intelligence hedge fund, which has changed the incentive structure of financial information sharing. They use auction and betting mechanisms to encourage data scientists to use the data provided to make predictions. Their contribution to the overall performance of the hedge fund meta model is compensated. Data scientists are provided with abstract data, which means they don't know what these data represent. This eliminates human bias and over fitting (the prediction of available data is good, but there is no further promotion for invisible or new data). It also prohibits people from obtaining data without returning contributions. Cryptocurrency makes it economically unreasonable to submit over matched models. This is not telling people what to do. This is to motivate them to produce the desired network behavior.

They transformed the potential incentive structure of the financial market from competition to "invisible cooperation to build a meta model". They make use of the integration principle (combining many different models), which makes "the error rate of machine learning is lower, the return of a single transaction is higher, the volatility of the portfolio is lower, and the risk of the portfolio is higher".

conclusion

Cryptocurrency economic network can fundamentally change the way we organize society without any core entity to establish trust and incentive mechanism for the interaction between individuals. At the same time, like any technology, the more powerful it is, the more cautious we need to implement it. However, the only way to learn how to use it is through constant tinkering.

It is easy to compare the current social organization to an ideal substitute. It is tempting to apply new technologies to every business use case we have today. Do you need a decentralized Uber? Or decentralized Facebook? Many conditions need to be met to achieve this, because building decentralized applications is much more complex than building centralized applications. There are obvious trade-offs to consider when building these applications at each layer (for example, the value of decentralization and scalability). In addition, we will build applications that we can't even imagine today, similar to Web 2.0 technology. Although we can decentralize each centralized software product, this does not mean that we should do so.