“I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.” - Mark Twain
Hey all.
I’m creating a condensed summary (ie. CliffNotes version) of More Equal Animals by Dan Larimer. My goal is to get the word count to 10% of the original. Hopefully this process will help me understand the concepts in the book better while giving other people a quick way to digest the book, especially if they are busy. This abridged summary is my interpretation and understanding of the book and its likely to miss out on rich context, examples and subtleties, but hopefully it will adequately capture many of the core ideas. I encourage those who have time to buy a copy of the book and read it here. I also plan to give my thoughts and feedback in the comments section of each post.
More Equal Animals - Introduction (Unofficial Summary)
This book explores new democratic processes to help build consensus and fix party politics. The author seeks to understand the role of government and find ‘non-violent means of organizing society.’ He has discovered first principles within ‘capitalism, libertarianism, socialism, Marxism, Christianity and atheism’ with the hope of bringing everyone together to agree to a process of dispute resolution. Instead of ideologies, we should focus on ‘consensus building and measuring progress.’ ‘Legitimate government is supposed to be derived from the consent of the governed’ and democracy is supposed to be the process to achieve consent through consensus building. Without consent society breaks down and ‘the government will evolve toward corruption and away from democratic principles.’
The author is ‘a computer programmer, economist, game theorist, and entrepreneur’ who’s life mission is to help secure ‘life, liberty, property and justice for all.’ He created three innovative blockchain platforms (Bitshares, Steem/Hive, and EOSIO), invented the Delegated Proof of Stake (DPOS) consensus algorithm and was the first to describe decentralized autonomous companies (DACs) and orgs (DAOs). He was also granted patents for ‘provably honest voting systems and decentralized identity validation’.
Next Chapter: The Tyranny of the Status Quo
(to be continued)
Thanks for this effort, I look forward to seeing how this turns out.
Thanks! It gives me a good opportunity to deliberate on all the concepts and understand them better.
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Commentary: I agree it’s important to be open-minded to all ideologies. It’s also interesting that consensus is not only foundational to blockchain technology, but to the democratic process as well.