Proof of Stake by Vitalik Buterin

Author:Vitalik Buterin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: technology;essays;smart contracts;cryptography;cryptoeconomics;binance;Satoshi Nakamoto;coinbase;mining;NFTs;polygon;solana;BTC;ETH;digital currency;dogecoin;bitcoin;DeFi;DAO;web3;blockchain;Ethereum;cryptocurrencies;cryptocurrency;crypto;Vitalik Buterin;ai;engineering;automation;engineer;engineer gifts;engineering books;internet;business;philosophy;economics;society;artificial intelligence;futurism;computers;culture;work;psychology;critical thinking;innovation;evolution;future;sociology
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2022-08-30T14:26:23+00:00

Coordination, Good and Bad

vitalik.ca

September 11, 2021

Coordination, the ability for large groups of actors to work together for their common interest, is one of the most powerful forces in the universe. It is the difference between a king comfortably ruling a country as an oppressive dictatorship, and the people coming together and overthrowing him. It is the difference between the global temperature going up thirty-five degrees Celsius and the temperature going up by a much smaller amount if we work together to stop it. And it is the factor that makes companies, countries, and any social organization larger than a few people possible at all.

Coordination can be improved in many ways: faster spread of information, better norms that identify what behaviors are classified as cheating along with more effective punishments, stronger and more powerful organizations, tools like smart contracts that allow interactions with reduced levels of trust, governance technologies (voting, shares, decision markets . . .), and much more. And indeed, we as a species are getting better at all of these things with each passing decade.

But there is also a very philosophically counterintuitive dark side to coordination. While it is emphatically true that “everyone coordinating with everyone” leads to much better outcomes than “every man for himself,” what that does NOT imply is that each individual step toward more coordination is necessarily beneficial. If coordination is improved in an unbalanced way, the results can easily be harmful.

We can think about this visually as a map, though in reality the map has many billions of “dimensions” rather than two:

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.