"It's like the Wild West"
This is a very popular analogy for how the blockchain and cryptocurrency worlds are operating at the moment. I don't know how true it is, because I am not really a good student of how the frontier was actually expanded. My understanding, for what it's worth, comes from hours of watching TV and Movie Westerns showing gunfights, cattle-rustling, gambling and bank robberies and I suspect that most people start from a similar position of half-knowledge. Nonetheless, I regularly see people doing things that aren't strictly legal, but are possible in this grey area we're inhabiting, at least for the time being. That won't last - there used to be a time when you could say pretty much whatever you liked on Twitter - it might have been libellous, but no one did anything about it. That's changed now.
The work that Mattereum and others are doing to build the Internet of Agreements is about introducing the law to this space, but that's not quite the same as imposition of law and order on the Wild West through lawmen - Sheriffs, Marshals and Deputies and a judge that you have to drag out of the saloon to sign a sub-poena. It's not about law-enforcement so much as enabling open trade through improving legal infrastructure.
So if it's anything to do with the Wild West, it's akin to finding standard ways to create new states, and governance mechanisms, and establishing ways for trade to happen, fairly and freely in this new context of blockchain transactions that don't have a trusted third-party to guarantee them. And that means working out what is new (and requires novel solutions) and what is old and can be reused. Hence many conversations are dominated by arguments that "this is totally new and nobody knows how it's going to work, so leave us to work it out" or "this is nothing new at all, it's totally covered by existing technology and practice, move along, nothing to see here".
Disclaimer: I am not (yet!) writing on behalf of the Mattereum team. They are good friends and I facilitated their first conference and attended the second as a participant. So I do think what they're doing is interesting and posts like these help me refine my understanding, but there may be more to the story that I just haven't grokked yet.
Thanks for the explanation of Mattereum @lloyddavis. I was wondering what they were all about after your post the other day. Sounds interesting.
Do you have a legal background? Not as in are you a law-abiding citizen but was your profession in the legal area? 😁
heh, no, the nearest I ever got to real legal stuff was early on when I temped as an audio typist and then a bit later when I ran a team building a database for an expert witness team.
My background is that I trained as an actor and then also got a degree in Computing which took me to work in government - I was doing a series of posts tagged #iworkedhere but it didn't get past my early twenties yet :)
An actor? That's interesting. Explains why you're so comfortable on camera.
Did you actually work as an actor? Pray tell us more. 😊
I had one proper job, I got my Equity card in the chorus of The King & I at Cheltenham Everyman thirty years ago this month :)
I've done lots of performing since, but mostly music, it's kind of woven into the things I do now (like the vlog)
Oooo. I hope we get to hear more about this in your vlogs, maybe even a little ditty! 😁
Hello Lloyd... it seems the more time I spend in cryptoland the more I’m encountering that seems quite fascinating. I find the idea of “trust less”systems fascinating, but also a bit baffling in the sense that the moment ultimately the interface is with the human creature, one almost has to deal with trust if for no other reason because at some level, the human must be convinced to “let go”of their thing in order for it to be transferred to another... in the digital space, it seems easier... UT when one is crossing to the physical, it seems a bit more complex. On top of that, it also seems at least part of the story yet to unfold is what will current stakeholders in the existing status quo (read governments) actually get out of the way to stop muddying the waters for these alternate ways of doing things to rise... maybe this a bit of my own “tinfoilhatwearing”coming out, but it seems that as long as power, systems of control, and conferred status and benefits, can be milked out of existing systems, government and other legal entities will not easily relinquish their perceived role without a great deal of consternation.
How are you seeing efforts like Mattereum et al addressing this?
thanks Eric, I think the easiest way to answer is to say that I expect there will be a great deal of consternation! :)
One of the inspirations for Mattereum (I was having conversations with the founders before they launched) was the idea that they wanted to avoid a future that could be summed up as "Made in China, delivered by Amazon" - so how do you build a system of trade that's as efficient (or more so) than Amazon without it being tightly integrated and owned by a small number of people. They also recognise that the prices we (in the "West") pay for goods is kept low by actual and financial violence against other human beings, just ones that we don't generally see (and don't want to see), they talk about "you've seen what fairtrade coffee costs, now think what a fairtrade laptop or smartphone would cost"
I think we're currently seeing the unfolding consequences of the original internet - the "internet of ideas" in the chaos that surrounds news and information at the moment - what happens when you give politicians a tool like Twitter (which is a boiled down version of the thing called 'blogging')? Well eventually you get politicians who use Twitter as their main way to talk directly to ordinary people and you get a news media that mainly reports and amplifies whatever lies they choose to tell. Could we have done something about this ten years ago? Maybe, but it might have involved deeply lessening the power of blogging and microblogging technology and keeping certain people out. And that's countercultural for most of the people building the tools.
I hope that we've learned something but I'm not entirely sure.
If you've 90 minutes to spare sometime to listen to Vinay talking, this is where his thinking is right now. I'm still trying to get him to use his Steemit account a bit more :)
Its a good analogy it reminds me of when people used to call the internet bubble the wild west of facebook adds etc wow I even remember when youtube and even google video were very free of laws wow how things have changed @lloyddavis
a very precise analogy ,, you are absolutely right ..
Definitely what i need haha been having a hard time understanding blockchain and cryptocurrency but this analogy has been very helpful, and humorous at the same time 😂 thanks for this @lloyddavis