Blockchain-ing the Future towards an Abundance of Trust. Part I

Technology has brought us to the point in which we can redefine almost any human interaction. The centralized, rigid systems that govern us today are an echo of a period in which humanity needed uniformity in order to move forward, this is no longer the case. We now need much more complex structures that can keep up with the ever-increasing variety of human interactions which in turn create new economic paradigms. This is much easier said than done, the responsibility of building new systems is something we need to strongly take into account because we have the obligation of tailoring them to real human needs in order to facilitate a natural and sustainable development of society.

We now have the understanding to change the game from surviving to thriving, but this is not something that will happen overnight, nor will it be something that comes from a centralized structure. We either collectively work towards this future, or the chances of it unfolding decrease drastically. We really need to find coherent models for such a structure and the most natural way of trying to understand how this can be done is through nature herself because life is a structure that creates very complex thriving systems. And I believe the best way to imagine a macro human structure would be to analyze the micro human structure.

The human body is a community of over 30 trillion cells, but this was not always the case. Life emerged on earth in the form of unicellular organisms which were called Prokaryotes. These single-cell organisms evolved and incorporated new systems that can be view as technology and have gotten to the point in which they could group with other cells and form multicellular organisms. The fact that several cells were now able to collaborate opened the door for diversity and life started to morph into different forms. With time, some cells evolved into having different structures and started serving different roles, thus creating even more diverse ways in which life can manifest. There is a very interesting parallel here because the fact that humans also have division of labor is one of the key aspects of our evolution so far. Fast forward through evolution and we see those cells transforming into organs and organs into systems of organs which form complex life such as human beings.

The human body is an eloquent example of collaboration, over 30 trillion individual cells interacting in such a way they form one entity, this is really impressive and also a model to study in order to apply parts of it to society. Let’s try to see what facilitates this collaboration and find analogs in human organization. In order for such a level of collaboration to exists, there needs to be a way for large-scale communication which took the form of the nervous system in the human body and the form of the internet in human civilization. Another key element of this collaboration is an all-encompassing economy which can distribute resources to every cell, cryptocurrency being such an economy that can create access to all individuals on the planet. Combine these with the fact that we also have the above-discussed division of labor, we seem to have all the major building blocks for a new creating a new societal model based on collaboration. But we have one central thing missing in this equation, which is trust, and there can be no real and sustainable collaboration without trust.

There is a fundamental distinction that occurs here, while the microcosm of human behavior is governed by natural law and all the cell intrinsically understand they are part of the same organism which leads to implicit trust. The human macrocosm is ruled by totally different laws, a combination of culture and authority has created a concept based system of governance in which trust is not an abundant resource in human interaction. So, it seems that we have a crucial need for large-scale trust between people in order to progress towards one global organism in which collaboration is the norm.

The good news is that we have the technology that will eventually pave the way towards this future. All we need is to build a blockchain infrastructure that can facilitate human collaboration and play the role of an immutable trusted intermediary which is beyond the control of any individual or organization and is also ergonomically fitted on real human needs and interactions. And we will build this!