The result of our long history is that inequalities have been created. Depending on your political persuasion this could be a good or a bad thing. I say this because morality doesn't exist. We, and society, deem whatever we want to be wrong, right, bad, good etc, there is no objective yardstick.
Even rights do not exist in an objective sense. Who gives the right to life to the human and denies it to the chicken? Try to explain this concept of the right to life to a rabbit being chased by a fox. The truth is we invented them. To solve some problems (particularly political ones), which is appropriate, because all life is problem solving. So rights are necessarily self-serving.
In the exercise of these rights by some people, some other people have occasionally been disenfranchised. Or more specifically they have been oppressed. Oppression is only a problem to the oppressed, and so the general model has always been for the oppressed to rise above the oppression.
Save for a few exceptions, democracy has failed terribly. Personally I do not necessarily disagree with the results, I only point out that the results are not what democracy promised. Even in advanced democracies.
While the concept of social choice is itself problematic, the problem with democracy is the human element. People are always manipulating the system to their advantage, or attempting to. It therefore follows that, if a strict mechanism for enforcing the rules (of a certain society/group/organization) was adopted, democracy might be a little more successful.
In a less philosophical and more practical approach to a similar problem, such a system was developed in recent years, as an approach to decentralized governance (because it has always been clear that the merits of a decentralized system far outweigh those of a centralized system, a trivial demerit being a centralized system could be a single point of failure).
I speak of decentralized autonomous organizations.
But the first hint to such a system was indeed not decentralized, even in theory.
That was Bitcoin. A trivial observation is that the blockchain has far more uses than just being a token system, or a currency, the use to which it was put in Bitcoin. But Bitcoin is decentralized, so it might seem surprising that one could claim that it's not, even in theory. In practice it's not; relatively few mining pools maintain the integrity of Bitcoin, so it's hard to think of it as decentralized in practice.
In technical terms, a centralised system can be defined as one where the data is held at a central point and all the other nodes access this data. It's consistent to think of the Bitcoin's blockchain as a centralized ledger to which all nodes have to synchronize.
In the attempt to solve (related) problems, several decentralized autonomous organizations have been invented and implemented. These have a voting system, to determine matters pertaining to the governance of the organization, but the general trend is the weight of your vote is determined by your stake in the organization. A system where one were to have a single vote would be much simpler to implement. And again, the rules of the organization in question could be implemented and enforced in a blockchain.
The main problems with blockchains are (high) transaction fees, scalability (basically how the transaction speeds vary with an increase in number of transactions) and consensus.
Novel solutions that aim to solve a combination (or one) of these problems have been proposed.
It is my expectation that the decentralized autonomous organization model will be exploited and adopted, because of the potential it has to solve governance problems. As such, it presents an opportunity for humans to collectively make more progress.
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STOPCool Post. Since you got the bitcoin tag do you have a prediction for Bitcoin over the next few days? Also followed you for future posts :)
Speaking on the price of any coin besides bitcoin borders on speculation. No one really knows.
Besides (and including)