In the early days of Bitcoin, it became clear that expanding the block for processing general-purpose data would allow developers to decentralize almost everything.
We would not only take power out of state institutions, but entire corporations would be replaced by clever contracts. An early example of this in action is the Storj application running in Ethereum, which promises to completely decentralize and distribute Dropbox technology. The motive of universal decentralization unites developers of various political ideologies, discarding their theoretical differences. It is not important from whom we transfer power, but the fact that we transfer power to the periphery. In this process, we seem to open a box of social reorganization of Pandora, which can turn the human race into a kind of synchronous colony of ants, rather than a squad of monkeys with computers.
The unifying theory of decentralization Most of the ideologies related to the well-being of people divide the population into two groups: the ruling class of rich minorities and the broad masses. For the Marxists, the ruling elite consists almost entirely of capitalists, while the masses consist of workers. For libertarians, the ruling elite is a mixture of politicians and enterprises that support them, whereas the masses? Are people excluded from this relationship. There was much debate between the left and libertarians, who in society belongs to the elite, and who? - to the exploited.
However, there is one unifying ideal, shared by both, is the desire to take power from the elite and transfer it to the broader masses of the population. In other words, most people in the ideological spectrum want decentralization of power from powerful centers of society to disenfranchised masses.
One developer type Enter the blockroom. No center of power is immune from its decentralized powers. Regardless of whether it is threatened by the concentration of data in large corporations, such as Facebook and Google, or the functions of the state, such as issuing identity cards, providing public goods and social protection systems, blocking start-ups threaten to weaken all security agencies in society. National states and corporations are on the verge of extinction. Developers in this field have come together to work together to revitalize the unified human value of decentralization by shifting the traditional ideological lines of the front to the periphery of "broad discussion".
What Blockchain can not do (yet) Testifying about the death of the ideological separation that was taking place before my eyes, I could not help but worry about the infinite possibilities, and so for the past few months I have been studying Solidity? - a high-level language for creating smart contracts in the Etherium. The only thing I noticed is the limitations on what a blocking unit built on completeness by Turing (Turing-Complete) can do,. Decentralization of storage and execution means that it is necessary to find many compromises to support the entire system. I presented a non-exhaustive list of what I have found so far. (Note that the smart contract is the first class of Solidity. The contract is in Solidity, as a class for Java):.
Smart contracts have limitations on the compiled size. You can not write a contract of any size. This means that complex use cases should be broken down into several contracts that involve some non-trivial overhead costs.
The speed and processing power available for the contract is similar to the cell phone of the 90s.
Functions have a local variable and parameter constraints. Therefore, you can not carefully filter the needs of users with a large list of parameters. This leads to the fact that the functions become more universal.
Gas limit: each operation is associated with gas costs. This is simply a quantitative measurement of how costly the computing operation is. For example, multiplication requires more gas costs than adding. Ethereum miners set the gas limit to one block. It is necessary that contracts are not carried out indefinitely. If your code can not complete the job without exceeding the gas limit, it will be stopped at execution (or not at all).
Smart contracts can not be performed independently. They are, in fact, switches that must be included by other contracts or people.
At first I found that these restrictions are rather frustrating. If all the heavy processing is to be performed on traditional servers, then how can we expect true decentralization? Moreover, the fact that smart contracts can not self-fulfill led to the realization that "decentralization of all things" is a fatal mistake and dreams. I needed a whole mental shift to assess how much the blockades are decentralized. The blockade itself is not a decentralized computer, it is just a stimulant, an incentive engine. To show what I mean by the stimulus engine, I use an example of how I tried to overcome the constraint (5) above:.
"If you can work for the incentives do not work for anything else". Charlie Munger Autonomous Challenges of People In one of my early attempts at a smart contract, I wanted to create a kind of simple pension fund. The idea was that you initialize a contract that accepts funds from a particular user. At some distant future date the contract automatically pays the user the accumulated funds from the moment of the first deposit. I immediately ran into the fact that you can not plan a contract for the future operation. After I encountered some kind of frantic overflow, I came across an Ethereum timer. This thoughtful contract uses incentives to enable developers to plan a future operation. I will use a fictitious pension contract to illustrate this:.
EthPension? - This is a smart contract that has a Payout () function that needs to be called on June 31, 2057.
We place a bonus in the Alarm Clock Smart contract, which states that "the first person who will call the EthPension function. Payout () on June 31, 2057, will receive a prize in 1 broadcast ». This instruction is coded in Solidity, of course. I just use a simple language to explain.
Comes on June 31, 2057. By the time 1 ether costs $ 10 million, and a huge queue of users wants to be the "winner" in this lottery schedules.
After some reflection, the seeming weakness of relying on the consumer to turn the contract into reality was turned into force. Provided that sufficient remuneration is applied, incentive-based activation may be more reliable than a fleet of surplus server farms that carefully follow the internal clock. We successfully scheduled our timer with the help of a farm of human computers!.
That's why I treat blockade as a Stimulus Engineer. Using some code of a smart contract and an economy of human actions, we can mobilize the armies of anonymous people to make our instructions. Developed with sufficient care, a network of intellectual contracts can provoke very complex group behavior.
One of the first rules of the economy is that people react to economic incentives (rewards). Until now, very few people had the right to create broad incentives for society without resorting to coercive force or the creation of influential companies. Bitcoin opened the era of programmable incentives, to which everyone has access.
Tokens? - It's the glucose of the human hive Bitcoin requires quite a lot of human labor and electricity to exist and develop. Miners invest large resources and in many cases run the risk of network security. In turn, they are rewarded with the bitcoin token. This deficit token was enough to make bitcoin-blockade the most powerful supercomputer in the world in terms of raw processing power. The strength of the blockbuster is reached only by the people who control it, and to mobilize these people, tokens coordinate economic incentives through the price mechanism. Without tokens, the entire ecosystem will die, so the statements of the large corporate leaders that the blockades are more interesting than bitcoin, is to say that the brain is more interesting than glucose. Of course, the brain? - is where all the cool things happen in the human mind, but without glucose, the brain? - the dead piece of jelly. Similarly, tokens? - this is what keeps the blockage alive and prosperous.
The truth about decentralized applications is that they really are a lot of people working together to reach a group goal. Instead of goodwill or trust, the coordinating mechanism is the binding basis of the blockade and the protected tokens. To see this in action, let's return to the Storj example. Here, people who have excess disk space for data storage spontaneously provide parts of their hard drives to other people who need storage space. Users are not united by trust or goodwill. They do not meet on a centralized server that pays to those who have excess, and blames those who have a deficit. Instead, the Storj token connects them via the Internet in much the same way that Bitcoin links the miners, nodes, and purses together. In the Storj example, the block does not do more than write ownership. This work is carried out by users and their computers, freeing up space, running software for encryption, subscribing to the fast Internet, paying for electricity and so on. However, saving the ownership of the token and the exchange means that the Storj network is more reliable than the Dropbox servers. This network of people and their computers is documented as more efficient and faster than Dropbox and Google Drive, and it's cheaper! Who thought that user armies can provide better computational results than server farms, provided that the incentives were right?.
I think Satoshi Nakamoto knew this. In Bitcoin's example, the algorithm for proving the work is not performed on the blockroom. This occurs outside the chain on the mining equipment, and only proof of all the work and coordination is registered in the blockhouse. The Bitcoin and Ethereum miners should provide their own equipment, calculate the profitability of using electricity, install special software, take into account accelerated hardware depreciation and in fact mining,? - all this for serving tokens. Like the little ants that are rushing to carry out the orders of their token queen, human users collect and distribute each blockade without failures. Each successful token economy will create its own army of bona fide ants. At the moment, most tokens? -? Is just blocking, but, as demonstrated by Storj, ants can be created to run Dropbox-like services. Probably, soon the ants will create social protection systems, organize effective allocation of funding and create reliable sources of news.
An important understanding to be drawn from this article is that blockades will not become great processor centers of humanity. Instead, they will act as a connective tissue between people and machines through economic incentives. If humans are neurons in a great human hive, then blockchain technology acts as a connective tissue and neurotransmitters.
The mind of the Earth evolution from nation states and corporations to decentralized networks of intelligent contracts will transform humanity into the collective intelligence of the Hive, because we have learned social coordination mechanisms that were once the responsibility of rulers.
But this is not the case when a person is depressed. In this post-collectivist future, man will not be either superior or superfluous. Instead, the choice of individuals will depend so much on programmable incentives that the differences between individual well-being and greater good will lose meaning. Currently, groups of people can come together and use other groups for differential gain. The net effect of such an action always undermines the general wealth of society. Once the Stimulus Engineer decentralizes everything, individual actions that undermine the well-being of a wider human race will be as expensive as it is impossible. Every time a group is plotting against the majority, it will automatically create a profitable incentive for it to be destroyed by the best technology. The giant brain that is humanity will begin to act in its own interest, which will simultaneously contribute to the well-being of the individual.
I hope you are looking forward to the future Hive, as I am.
We? Our own liberators. We? -?.