Abundance Is Not All About Money

If you were to picture abundance, how would it be? In the biblical sense, where in the garden of Eden Adam and Eve had anything they wanted in abundance, except the forbidden fruit?

A world where anyone can afford to buy the basic necessities? That's inclusive, but minimalist, and it doesn't say anything about having access to products to buy, even if you can afford them. We were once in this situation here in Romania. Having money to buy but little to buy in stores. I can testify that's not abundance at all.

A world where anyone has access to buy anything, but not everyone has enough to buy with? Hmm, that sounds like capitalism. And it's not abundant across the spectrum either.

A world where anyone has access to buy anything, and anyone has enough money to buy at least the basic necessities. That's better. Maybe that's a combination capitalism + crypto (+ UBI?).

But here are other facets that have nothing to do with money.

Abundance of Information

We have already had a major leap forward during the last two decades with the creation and rise of the internet and then the smart phones. It's not seldom this comparison is made that anyone with a modern smart phone has access to more information than the president of the United States pre-internet age.

But with the abundance of information shared in a centralized manner through a few mediums, the temptation to use it to create or destroy trends, censor and manipulate was so high and we are currently seeing it used in plain sight and without fear of repercussions.

We won't truly be able to feel the benefits of the abundance of information until such practices cannot be imposed at system level, when governance in decentralized systems is given control.

I listened this morning to a recent video of taskmaster about the importance of financial education.

At some point in the video he said something like: "this is why I spend so much time on Leofinance" [because there are things he doesn't know that he learns this way]. I commented this:

It's incredible how much one can learn on LeoFinance (and not only, but your post is about financial education) at no cost but time, and even more, get paid to do it. For various training modules, corporations tie young employees for years to pay them back. This is another facet of the world of abundance.

This is actually the comment which expanded into this post.

Abundance of Software Development

Corporations develop closed source software. Even if they don't want to, they usually don't put enough trust in license protection to open their code up to the world.

At the same time, open source coding grew immensely in the last decade. It is almost a norm in the crypto-verse.

If we talk about the defi space, there are thousands of clones of the successful platforms out there. I actually saw Uniswap is trying to protect itself from cloning the new version by using a different type of licensing. I'm curious how that will work.

If we think of these cases, why would the platforms that first introduce novelty to the market make it open source, if they'll immediately be cloned?

The reason stands in synergy. At one time one platform develop something and it will be incorporated by others, next another will find something else and will improve all and so on. They all grow faster this way.

Plus, there are better chances of bug tracking and fixing in open source software. And there are more contributors, some likely doing it without expecting anything in return.

Abundance at Decision Level

Decentralized systems have a sort of abundance at their decision level, unlike centralized systems. They are generally slower to reach decision (consensus) than centralized systems, but they are safer. And any rotten apple which doesn't follow consensus is eliminated from decision, and can be voted out at any time by stakeholders in POS systems, without waiting for the next term of elections.

If we take Hive for example, compared to political elections and terms. Governance on Hive is assured by the top 20 witnesses (block producers), to which at every round 1 backup witness is added at random.

Every owner of powered up Hive has the right to vote for the governance of the chain. Every account has the possibility to choose up to 30 witnesses to vote for. Maybe a bit too many, but much better than one candidate, as you vote in political elections. Plus you can change your vote at any time, what you can't do in politics once you see they trash it.

Of course, in politics it's almost customary that they'll promise many things and forget all of them once they're elected.

On Hive that's unlikely. It can be tried and I believe it has been, but someone in the end catches you and that means bye-bye your witness position (or your proposal funding, if you were approved).

Conclusion

These are only three different aspects of abundance, other than money. But there are others. We just have to keep an open mind and, probably, leave some old models behind.

Posted Using LeoFinance ^Beta