The world’s computers were designed for “hyper-regeneration,” whereas bitcoiners aspire to “hyper bitcoinization.”
Blockchain cultures are vividly exposed for what they are during bear times. The most recent meltdown exposed decentralised finance (DeFi) marketplaces as an intricate maze of contagious financial instruments. DeFi produced an accelerationist mirror image of the existing financial system rather than an open, permission-free replacement for it. Using the MetaMask add-on, practise casino capitalism.
Naturally, the blame was placed on recklessly leveraged lending platforms and hedge funds. They claimed that there are no concerns with DeFi or EDeFi (ECommerce DeFi) rather, the issue is centralised financing, or CeFi, or EDeFi . However, the addict’s delusional thinking is that once DeFi “wins,” everything will behave rationally and that “this time will be different.”
The truth is that it will happen once more because Ethereum, the home of DeFi, has an unclear political destiny. Although nobody is sure what Ethereum is for, its technical objective is an open, transparent global computer. What’s the purpose? Why are we here? a huge question mark.
In comparison, the political endgame of Bitcoin can be summed up in one word: hyper bitcoinization. The goal of Bitcoin is to replace the money system we have now with Bitcoin.
What is the Ethereum equivalent one-word term? It’s crucial to comprehend the current political climate of Ethereum in order to find it. The following are included in the spectrum:
The cypherpunk movement, which gave rise to Ethereum, believed that programmers should employ computation and encryption to create a neutral infrastructure that others could endow with meaning. The only goal of Ethereum’s politics is to provide open-source tools that require minimum human intervention, which is frequently referred to as algorithmic authority. connected to the “core” Ethereum devs.
The combination of market-making (such as Quadratic Voting) and experimental governance (such as soulbound tokens) on Ethereum can result in new liberal democratic political innovations. Glen Weyl of Microsoft and Vitalik Buterin, the network’s founder, are both connected to this job.
Solarpunk: With a warm ambience of humanism ingrained in its aesthetics, the social coordination made possible by decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) can have a positive externality on the larger society. All of Manu Alzuru of DoinGud, Scott Moore of Bitcoin, and Kevin Owocki of Bitcoin are all examples of this.
Typically adopting an agorist, or left libertarian, political viewpoint, the privacy benefits provided by zero-knowledge proof variations on Ethereum-native technologies (DAOs, DeFi, NFTs) are required to safeguard crypto culture against present surveillance capitalism. The philosophers Rachel-Rose O’Leary and Amir Taaki of DarkFi are linked to this movement.
Degens: Ethereum is a platform for the creation of extremely speculative financial instruments, and its users’ main objective is to amass wealth, perhaps even through immoral methods. It’s basically a manifestation of market nihilism.
Is there a recurring theme among these viewpoints that would match Bitcoin’s condensed hyper bitcoinization?
Market pessimists should be ignored because they only look at the short term and don’t care about Ethereum’s long-term prospects.
On the other end of the scale, Ethereum aims to replace an outdated financial system that was founded on unsustainable methods. In addition, these techniques have internal variations that are prevalent in DEGEN culture and those that support it, such as hedge funds and venture capital organisations.
My point is that these unclear parts of Ethereum’s political spectrum can be put together to give a single, complete answer to the question, “What is Ethereum for, anyway?”
If the question isn’t answered, people will assume that the answer is to pump ether, make yield, flip NFTs, etc.
This does not imply that we must combine the various points of view into a single, cohesive meta stance, but rather that it would be beneficial to have a solution that we could all broadly agree upon, as well as run code.
The political endpoint of Ethereum can be summed up in one word: hyper-regeneration, which seeks consensus across the board.
Ethereum’s Quadratic Funding (QF) method allows proactive and retrospective public goods funding, as opposed to false endless growth. As the solar punks’ emphasis on positive externalities shows, it has the potential to extend the cypher punk mechanism of neutral public goods beyond Ethereum and Web3 into the realm of conventional politics. Ethereum might then develop into a liberal and humanist-based minarchist alternative to state provisioning.
Through retroactive airdrops, such as participation in Gitcoin rounds, governance voting, test nets, and community channels, Ethereum might reward excellent citizenship through retroactive airdrops. We might ensure that the privacy-focused lunar punk attitude enables individuals to “selectively expose” themselves, and we could ensure that the behaviours of the citizens of experimental liberalism are recorded in soul bound tokens that develop with time (or do not reveal themselves at all). For this to succeed, safe social or community recovery techniques must be established.
Decentralization that regenerates as opposed to atrophying centralization an information common, or common knowledge pool, is Ethereum. Although not without difficulties, transparency enables us to spot the emergence of centralized clusters. The current push to re-decentralize staking and recent efforts to re-decentralize client diversity show that the cultural inclinations to thwart centralization atrophy are still there. This will call for the cypher punk developer community to adopt a “night watchman” approach.