The Evolution

Authority Twilight

Anonymity Crime | Poster Extinction | Cognition over Ideology | Neanderthal Diplomacy

Anonymity Crime

a. zealous enforcement

Curious.

Presumption of innocence does not apply to cash flows.
Dirty money already exists when the only known crime is the unknown.
Privacy hides only details below the protection bestowed on us.
There is little we could not be hiding when we do not walk naked outside.
People see us walk like any dressed criminal.
Only crime can tell the difference.
That is not even enough but personal details do not help.
A misbehavior can be justified upon inspection of anonymous circumstances.
Enforcement gaps could be caught in intransigence or outdated laws.
Systemic interactions are more informative than fluid personas.
Financially, oppression translates into the presumption of dirty money.
It undermines the promise of fungibility;
endangers a currency credibility;
and costs legit holders a decrease in purchasing power.
Transactions are denied over risk rather than verified claims.
Innocent people pay for crimes surrounding them, without the proceeds.
FATF lists punish people for their state governance;
albeit they are not responsible for a single incriminating deficiency.

We could at least aim for relevance in the inclusion of sanctions.
Cases of escapism could be as many survival strategies as dirty moves.
Shift from legal identity to conduct spares the former, catches the other.
Excessive regulations incentivize crimes.
State of the art predictive analytics is adamant:
behavior alone gives the most insightful clues.
Identity is only a source of bias.
It is high time we updated our criminality models.
It is not worth running after all too often late and hypothetical intents.
The assumptions of AML and KYC look disproportionate.
They create fraudsters in unticked boxes of statistical prejudice.
We convict innocence in a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Let us save a few bits of privacy.
Do we want to live in a world with more false than true criminals?
This question alone should decide on the policy.
Justice is overwhelmed by zealous enforcement.
Regulators should be regulated.

Poster Extinction

b. superorganic policies

The hero of today is the villain of tomorrow.
The hero of tomorrow transpires more humility.
Popular personalities can step away from power.
Their advice will be heard.
Anonymity shields from biased control.
It should perhaps govern for responsibility to fall back on the protocol.
No one trusts the unnamed to take a decision alone.
The superorganism spirit goes as far as optimistic protocols.
They manage millions publicly on the very premise of honesty.
They assume successfully that anonymous users can be trusted, together.
A price system isn't inherently good or evil.
A compass can give directions but it doesn't decide on the destination.
The hive mind should govern for good use.
Price is the ultimate known form of consensual value.
When not oversimplified in votes, policy markets create public utility.
The more this value is distributed, the better the governance.

If there is any principle standing out from opinions in Ruled Power:
it would arise from a consensual epistemology.
Sides of a problem resolve in the same token because knowledge is a coin.
People like both privacy and transparency.
How could we have both?
If the two must be separate, privacy is personal and transparency public.
It does not resolve the issue of what must be personal and public.
In fact, the answer is the question.
If private transparency must be a consensus; the answer is pseudonymity.
We must free identity.
When the sun goes down, look at the ambivalence.
What you see above the skyline, is the liberation from authority.
Decomposed sunrays do not cancel each other in a single aggregate.
Each color has a name different than light.

Good evening, my name is purple.
On the other side.
Good morning, my name is orange.
Here comes the rain.
There comes the rainbow.
Stay a bit more.
Look at the horizon again.
Colors have changed.
Identity has not.
You could still call sunset what you could see.
Pseudonymity, that is.
How could day agree with night without twilight?
There is no privacy when there is nothing to hide.
Pseudonymous protocols reconcile transparency with anonymity.
Public action is the regulated identity.
A private name is only required to hand out fines.
They are patches made for dysfunctional protocols.
Let's first make sure that we do not design systems to incentivize abuse.

Cognition over Ideology

c. thoughtful choices

In 1968, there were insurgent answers but a single authoritative solution.

Conway explains:

It is an article of faith among experienced system designers that given any system design, someone someday will find a better one to do the same job. In other words, it is misleading and incorrect to speak of the design for a specific job, unless this is understood in the context of space, time, knowledge, and technology.

Space, time could integrate their resulting knowledge within institutions.
That would make them flexible enough to be characterized as adaptive.
Adaptive protocols put an end to uncompromising forms of dictatorship.
There would only remain innovation to overthrow institutions;
or deprecate a system of rules.
No reason to justify radical actions with variable arrangements.
They remain consensus solid despite diversity.
Of course, such complexity cannot be managed by a single actor.
This burden is actually a weight keeping us safe.
Consensus mitigates destructive reforms and unstable institutions.
Soft and proven methods crystallize learnings in slow moving protocols.

Neanderthal Diplomacy

d. asking for revolution?

Accountability is shifting from leadership and subjects to ruling systems.
Decentralizing trends reduce the confusion of power with representation.
Actions have consequences, identity should not.
The former matters, the latter does not.
That is one of the reasons why anonymity can actually benefit governance.
Consequences would be center stage before political divide.
The aristocracy legacy is more precious in its appearance:
agreeable manners and patronage.
Style contributes to semantics.
Much can be embellished or revealed from a poetic escape.
Allegories evade strict grammar and rational guards of a causal prison.
The practice of a refined life veils barbarian politics.
In ceremonials, monarchs hide a savage rule of law quelling dissent.
Actual debates look ugly because confrontation is apparent.
At least, they spare more than a few collateral damages.

Elite protocols decorate and distract the media with cordial images.
On the contrary, decentralized protocols encourage disagreements.
Authority is the most primitive form of justice.
The muscle was never made to decide alone.
That is why we grew a brain;
then a culture to soften muscles with the brain;
and finally a civilization to work out in a gym.
The tokenomy preserves an authoritative baseline in a consensual twilight.
Expertise sets the lower bound of democratization.
Below the competency line, distribution debases services in abundance.
Scarce supply remunerates added value, incentivizing diversification.
Open knowledge is the greatest strength and weakness of a dapp ecosystem.
When copycats grow more than the market, original dapps lose shares.
Yet, adversarial and free scrutiny of smart contracts nurtures excellence.
A second opinion is a low acceptance standard among elite decision-makers.
The bet is that the many know better than a few, no matter how qualified.

Web3 systems still face the expertise dilemma.
How much decentralization is too much?
Where the learning curve gets steep, most switch to a pricing curve.
Intermediaries grow where operation costs dissuade active participation.
Centralization feeds from busy ignorance delegating decision-making.
Markets sell a subscribed capacity to create goods and services.
Sustainability of mercantile relationships relies on long-standing needs.
Solving expensive knowledge in mediation locks a control over dependence.
The economy of knowledge acquisition allocates governance powers.
Pre-merge Ethereum showed accessibility is no less centralized than not.
A staking platform lowered barriers of entry for passive income.
The heavily marketable service turned a gateway into a perceived backdoor.
It only became a concern when capital concentration grew a bias.
As always, the last regulation mechanism left was social backlash;
until creators went on to decentralize control.

Too much decentralization occurs when the job is well done, but half done.
Accessibility reinforces centralizing managers before they realize it.
Governance tokens should perhaps not be separate from committed stakes.
Thereby, they would represent the already distributed user base.
It's a starting point; total value staked by provider is split by staker.
A service opened up opportunities in a provision of new rights.
But a passive income skew incentivizes more extraction than contribution.
Yield farmers do not cultivate the field of their harvest.
The danger is mostly misaligned interest in governance.
A stake turned into a liquidity pool creates a partial free-rider problem.
At least, active investing deserves credit for engaging mutual interests.
A prover market would solve the centralizing issue of passive income.
PoS farmers could directly invest into shares of validators able to stake.
Not sure if they should, though; token holders will figure it out.
We merely debated how to manage the manager.

Knowledge graphs design utilitarian systems without an architect.
Guidance stems from affected individuals.
A decentralized vision is a construction rather than a construct.
The leading process determines a posteriori results.
Utility is defined a priori to converge despite the lack of a master plan.
Centralization and decentralization meet in the middle.
By definition, in a pyramidal construct:
decentralization starts from a utilitarian epicenter at the top;
touches the bottom, and regulates centralization back to the top.
Architects build temples filled with believers working on protocols.
The doer power architects generic utility, framing laws in an executive.
The maker power designs protocols running on the executive.
And the user power regulates them all.
DLT markets value platform tokens of the executive.
Policy markets value protocol tokens of the legislative.
Ruled Powers do, make and use the trinity of democratic sovereignty.

The twilight of authority broke apart the national monopoly of regulation.