The legitimate Vitalik

@revisesociology handed me an article by Vitalik, the founder of Ethereum that was published yesterday about legitimacy. I am not going to rehash the article, but it is well worth the read and you will find that one of the core components of it, centers on Hive and the legitimacy of the community, using the fork from Steem as an example.

Perhaps people are finally realizing that the community is the most important part of it all. The challenge is that due to the dynamics of people, it is also the hardest to bring into alignment for a common goal, which is one of the challenges of decentralized systems that still require governance in order to develop, as many people will not agree due to the wide range of personalities, motivations and incentives.

However, as I have said many, many times before, we are in unprecedented territory in our capabilities to align connect, organize and align ourselves globally as individuals, without the need for authority intervention. What we are seeing in crypto and the internet in general, is the legitimization of community as an economic force, whether it be on the blockchains and the generation of value through community established and supported cryptocurrencies, or in the traditional markets as seen recently with the wallstreetbets movement, organized to disrupt the hedge funds and institutional dominance over markets and financial vehicles.

This is the early emergence of the "paradigm shift" that is often spoken about in regards to changing the world. We on Hive are not only witnessing it, we are participating in guiding it and while Vitalik slowly starts to get aboard, Hive keeps driving a community approach. While a lot of people do not put much credence in the "Proof-of-Brain" model or concept in regard to content, essentially, the entire Hive ecosystem is driven by it, as it is the community itself that decides what is considered legitimate on Hive.

What this means is that over time, we have coordinated ourselves to create normalizations of various kinds, meaning, we have developed a culture. This culture will ebb and flow dynamically in order to meet introduced challenges and changing ideals, but the Hive community has built a range of "social" rules that direct participants in various ways. This is all opt-in and no one is forced to act according to the rules, but with all activity, there are reactions to actions, meaning there are consequences for behavior.

From the Vitalik article:

Each person reasons that because everyone else follows these mechanisms, if they do something different they will only create conflict and suffer, or at least be left in a lonely forked ecosystem all by themselves.

But, this is when the legitimized systems reject the introduced activity, kind of like a bad transaction on a blockchain that gets rejected by other nodes. However, in a society, introduced behaviors that are seen as beneficial by the group or some members of the group, can get and grow support to become legitimatized processes within the ecosystem. for example the introduction of second-layer tokens like LEO and then the continued legitimization of this path through supporting the development tract further.

We saw this same process in the negative with with the introduction and legitimization of bidbots back in mid-2017, only to have the behavior delegitimized by the community toward the end of 2019, as while many of the early community saw the benefits, a small group who saw the harm were able to over time create a groundswell of support for change. A mini paradigm shift that lead onto a healthier ecosystem, even if not everyone agrees, most do, legitimizing the change in culture.

This is the the way societies work, where social code is built and introduced and then rewritten to try and keep up with the changing behaviors of the group. However, no matter how good the initial code was, over time, it can get out of sync with the needs of society and has to be replaced. Yet, if there are incentives to keeping the system for those who also have the ability to remove it, those without the power to affect it will be forced to live under its rule, regardless of the harm it causes them.

This is where we are with the traditional economy at the moment, as while it is causing a lot of harm to most participants, most do not have the sense that they can effect change. However, with our ability to coordinate to generate value, and the coordinate to direct value, the majority of the "powerless" will begin to recognize the legitimacy of owning and taking responsibility for behavior, as a tool for directing the economy at the macro level. It is a grassroots movement that is rapidly pushing a groundswell of change that is going to affect all of us, whether we participate now, or not, as it will affect the entirety of society in which we all live.

The laws of supply and demand come into play in this, where behaviors are treated like goods and services, with some wanted, some not, some accepted, some not. Not every product is going to find a market and even if it does, that market might not be large enough to sustain it long term, unless it is able to legitimize itself and get more support from the group.

At the end of the day, much of what we do in society comes down to what we incentivize, as we are still largely driven by individual needs, meaning there has to be a "what's in it for me" component. Most people will not work if they do not get paid, most people will not play a game they dislike, most people will not read an article they are not interested in. There always has to be a payoff.

For far too long, we have been giving up our ability to make decisions with the payoff being the convenience of not owning and not needing to take responsibility for ourselves. Rather than organizing ourselves, we have proxied an authorities to do it for us, expecting that they will act in our best interest instead of maximizing themselves using our "stake". It hasn't worked out so well for us, which is why we are now using the tools at our disposal to change culture again, to create new norms, to legitimize the value of community.

We are social animals with the over-sized ability to organize ourselves and collaborate to develop much larger than we can as individuals. We are just starting to learn how to use our abilities at a global level.

Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]