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I wrote an article for steemit on why I think the blockchain will end the world as we know it. I would greatly appreciate any feedback that you guys have to give. Here's a link to part 1 and part 2, I didn't realize they had a character limit so I had to make the conclusion it's own post.

I wanted to introduce you guys to a technology which may change the future of our planet much more than Bitcoin will. It may even make Bitcoin obsolete. If you know how Blockchain works, this topic should interest you. ––––––––––– So... Does expending huge amounts of resources to solve math problems that nobody really cares about make the world a better place? Does "7 transactions a second maximum" sound like future world currency technology? Is it fair that approximately every 10 minutes one single computer likely part of a supercluster wins the lottery and decides which transactions get to be included in the next block? Is waiting for 1 hour for confirmation of a payment that even then isn't 100 % guaranteed sound viable in today's age, let alone in 20 years from now? I'd say no, no, no, and no. But is there an alternative? Yes. It's called Hashgraph. ––––––––––– Hashgraph is a Distributed Ledger Technology much like Blockchain, yet very different – and much better. In a nutshell, in Hashgraph every node (the client, like your computer running the program) tells random other nodes the data it has (transactions, coordinates, or other data), plus information it randomly received from other nodes. It's called "Gossip protocol" for obvious reasons and is not a new invention. So my node A sends my transaction to another node B, then A and B send to C and D, next round four nodes send out my information (exponential, so it only takes 20 iterations for 1 million nodes to know my transaction). Also, the nodes tell each other what they heard other nodes telling other nodes together with the timestamps, so they "gossip about gossip." The benefit of that gossip about gossip is that every node has all the data every other node has. This also demonstrates the fairness in Hashgraph, because all nodes are equal in power and no single node decides which transactions get to be included. To decide on the correct order of the transactions, a voting system is used. But instead of sending votes all around in the network of who has seen which data when and to "vote for it", we can just forget about that part because everyone already knows how everyone "would" vote if there was a an actual vote – hence it's called "virtual voting" and is, together with the Gossip protocol, what makes Hashgraph incredibly efficient. It's extremely efficient and fast, plus fair and secure. In fact, it's much more efficient, faster, fairer and securer than Blockchain! It's a straight upgrade. It was invented 5 years ago by Leemon Baired of http://www.swirlds.com/ and they have only been public about this technology since September 2017. ––––––––––– You want to learn more? See their website (above) or check out the following resources: Hidden Secrets Of Money Episode 8 featuring Bitcoin and Hashgraph (video) Overview of Swirlds Hashgraph (article) How Hashgraph Consensus Works (presentation) Swirds' Leemon Baird Talks Hashgraph (lecture) ––––––––––– It may sound like I'm here to advertise, but I am of course in no way affiliated to them. I just have recently stumbled across Hashgraph in The Hidden Secrets of Money and have been learning much about it. I find Hashgraph fascinating as this seems to solve all the problems that Bitcoin currently has. Most notably the extreme energy expense (between 1/2000th and 1/1200th of world's electricity!) and limited scalability. Maybe you guys find this interesting, too? Have you heard about it before? What are your thoughts? Cheers!

I'm a software dev and I've had an interest in blockchain and it's uses. I think I have a basic understanding but I watched a video and don't understand part of it. She talks about uncertainty and how blockchain can be used to remove that. IIRC, one example was creditability and being able to use blockchain to reveal creditability without knowing who the person is. I'm guess this would be thru transaction history almost like a YELP or eBay ratings type thing. What I'm trying to do is have a system where you have access to certainty without giving up your ID. This would be for something like contractual agreement enforcement. So two people enter into a contract and they need assurance that each will live up to their side of the agreement. I understand that a public ledger can be rolled back, so if there isn't an agreement, a transaction can be rolled back, but I don't know that this is what she means by blockchain providing certainty as this would be no different than an eBay feedback system. I can't seem to find any way to contact her, she had a Twitter and a LinkedIn, but I'm not sure that posting a cold question would be a good idea as it would be seen as spam. I tried a Reddit sub for blockchain, but no response and other forums seem to have died off. With all the activity, there has to be some dev group somewhere that discusses how these things work. Thanks for any direction.

I'd love to hear some thoughts on Lawrence Lessig's talk given at the Sydney Blockchain conference in December 2015. I was in attendance on the first day of the conference but sadly missed the second in which Lessig gave this talk: Deja vú all over again: Thinking through law & code, again. Lawrence guides the listener on a walk down memory lane to the genesis of the Internet framing it as a remarkably similar inflection point to where we find ourselves today in 2016 with blockchain technologies. He hammers home his point that the state is by no means obviable in context of "purely private contracts" (e.g. Etherum based agreements) while never touching on any of the more volatile topics around the monopoly on the use of force in any sort of human ethical context. Peaceful parenting is nowhere to be found ... if you were curious. Following the conference, I've learned that Lessig's talk was one of the most revered among many attendees ... both via personal discussions with attendees and conference recaps that have been published around the web. This gives rise to a bit of concern on my part over the feeling that we don't have very strong philosophical minds on the ground in the blockchain space at this crucial time in the development of this technology. I know Stef has been present as a speaker in past bitcoin/blockchain conferences which I'd love to see more of. I feel I did my small part with the few folks I spoke with at the conference to raise some critical and remarkably unasked questions to those within earshot. I suppose deja vú is the soup du jour at the "Philosophy of Humanity Café"! Hemlock anyone? With the recent launch of Bitnation [Estona e-Residency Program and Bitnation DAO Public Notary Partnership Announcement] and the myriad other blockchain based products and services being launched, the stage is set for a unique showdown, in my opinion, between the former and the future generations ... one that pits a generation that seems to value loose, ambiguous, and corrupt with strict, clear, and uncorruptable. Obviously there is a unity of these opposites that will ultimately unfold, however I can't help but to feel that an inter-generational battlefield is the "reality" that we actually inhabit. Depending upon the personal lens you view the world through each day, what it might mean to be on the "winning side" of history has never felt more critical to understand at a personal level to inform daily life. It's remarkable, exciting, and enervating all at the same time. Thoughts, observations, suggestions of other content ... all very appreciated! Good day to you all...

I have an idea I want to run by the community. It's rough so forgive me please. I am working on polishing it for better presentation but would like some peer review of it now if possible. I'm currently working on an idea that might allow DROs to take shape in today's world. It involves the use of blockchain technology to build a completely decentralized eBay like world market that people choose to enter by agreeing to the terms and behavioral guidelines. The advantage of using the system for transactions are reputation and protection. An ID number is assigned permanently in the system and effectively tied to a real person and ID#s are managed by popular concensus in a decentralized manner but require a personal acceptance into the system (almost clan like). Through the blockchain, member behavior is public. All transactions are subject to eBay like purchase complaint resolution. Proof of any interactions will be obvious and public. Also the fairness of the transaction will be subject to ratings and even the freezing of an ID# until sufficient number of people agree to concur, in the system, that the dispute had been resolved. Once we establish that system, the DROs will have to work within that ecosystem and risk losing participation in a valuable market if they behave poorly. You could literally have blockchain legal complaints resolution. Once a crime is committed an ID#/person can immediately report it. This is where a DRO steps in. Anyone can offer to resolve disputes and act as a third party. Obviously, not every DRO will even appeal to you in any way but you end up at least with your neighbors stepping up and saying "yeah man, I got your back. Let's make a DRO and make a few bucks helping people in our neighborhood." But that last example is how it would start. Through trial and error this market will decide what kind of DROs you actually really need versus what you used to think we needed. All of this would begin operations under state rule. But through such a system's growth, government would become less and less relevant. The details of what happens after that should become more obvious after the passage of time but I expect us to achieve a model that can evolve and compete with other such models in a free blockchain decentralized market. It would be important to have a decentralized dispute resolution within the system that cannot be perfect but would allow to remove incentives to ban ID#s from the system for trivial reasons. Perhaps for every complaint will require 10 ID#s/people to vouch for you that the dispute has been resolved etc. . still working on that part. In short, it would require a real interaction with your local community to gain traction and the value of the people operating within a given ecosystem would drive up the trade value of its currency. In effect, the community itself would act as a DRO. I also envision a Linkedin style profile that is permanent within an ecosystem or within all ecosystems that will follow you for your entire life and is not profitable to fake. Anyway, I'm trying to find holes in the idea so I would love it if you would think about it and let me know where you see it failing or how to improve it. Show less

The article below was copied in total from Bytemaster's Blog b/c I felt the information was so fundamental to a free society a simple link just wouldn't convey the importance. I can't force you to read it but I can reduce the obstacles that might get in your way. I am genuinely interested in discussing this. I'm not aware of any podcast by Stefan that goes into depth on the arguments presented here. If they exist please mention them. Search results using the keyword "contract" on the FDR podcast page show two (2133, 1866), but imo don't address the points raised here. --- The Benefits of a Contract Free Society Most libertarians think about contracts as the fundamental building block of a free society. I take a relatively unique position that contracts as we know them are the Achilles heal of attempts to form a libertarian society. I go so far as to suggest that we need a contract-free society because enforcement of contracts presents a significant challenge to the Golden Principle upon which my entire world view is based. What is a Contract? Pardon me as I quote wikipedia: In common law legal systems, a contract (or informally known as an agreement in some jurisdictions) is an agreement having a lawful object entered into voluntarily by two or more parties, each of whom intends to create one or more legal obligations between them. According to thelawdictionary.com: A legal obligation or duty is enforced by a court of law, it can be a debt and the legal responsibility to carry out what the law asks. The very term contract, as commonly understood, is an intent of two or more parties to submit to a government that will interpret and enforce the contract as it sees fit. Note the requirement for the contract to have a lawful object or purpose. If you attempt to construct a contract to insure against getting caught violating the law, then you can bet the government will not enforce the terms of that contract and therefore, by definition, it is not a contract. Contracts & The Golden Principle For those of you who have not read my article on “The Golden Principle”, I will summarize it here: “Do not do unto others what you do not want others doing unto you.“ You don’t want to be imprisoned even if guilty of a crime. If you steal something from someone, you don’t want them using force or trickery to steal it back from you. If you really think about it you don’t want to give up your free will under any circumstances, even if you had previously promised something to someone. This is a real challenging stance to take and one that will cause many of you to abandon me to my wishful thinking. So I am going to ask you to reserve your judgement and avoid jumping to conclusions until you have had a chance to fully hear me out. Murray N. Rothbard in chapter 19 of his book “The Ethics of Liberty” outlined the foundation of valid contracts in a way that would be difficult for me to replicate. I am going to quote liberally from his book and comment as I go. The right of property implies the right to make contracts about that property: to give it away or to exchange titles of ownership for the property of another person. Unfortunately, many libertarians, devoted to the right to make contracts, hold the contract itself to be an absolute, and therefore maintain that any voluntary contract whatever must be legally enforceable in the free society. Their error is a failure to realize that the right to contract is strictly derivable from the right of private property, and therefore that the only enforceable contracts (i.e., those backed by the sanction of legal coercion) should be those where the failure of one party to abide by the contract implies the theft of property from the other party. These two paragraphs lay the foundation for a contract free society with the exception of the part regarding “backed by the sanction of legal coercion”. Blockchain technology can entirely automate the management and enforcement of property rights in a non violent manner, but it cannot compel enforcement of promises. There is no need to use legal coercion to compel anyone to do anything. So for now I will simply ask that you assume there exists a non-violent (aka non coercive) means of motivating individuals to fulfill the terms of a contract. A contract should only be enforceable when the failure to fulfill it is an implicit theft of property. If Alice lends money to Bob under the condition that it be repaid in a year, then the contract stipulates a transfer of title to the money in one year. Bob has already transferred title of the funds to payoff the loan one year in advance. If the loan is not repaid then that is theft. Existing law would contend that Bob had “promised to pay” and thus set up the “expectation” of Alice that she would receive money. As we can see such rationale breaks down if applied consistently to all promises and expectations when it comes to enforceability of a contract. Suppose that Bob promised to marry Alice in one year in a written contract. If Bob jilts Alice does Alice have the legal right to compel Bob to marry Alice? Under the promise theory of contracts this would be the logical conclusion. Our current legal system even enforces a mild version of this by forcing one party to pay damages to the other for losses incurred due to breaking the promise. While forcing one party to pay damages may be less objectionable, it is derived from the same invalid principle. Lets return to Rothbard: Specifically, a person cannot alienate his will, more particularly his control over his own mind and body. Each man has control over his own mind and body. Each man has control over his own will and person, and he is, if you wish, “stuck” with that inherent and inalienable ownership. Since his will and control over his own person are inalienable, then so also are his rights to control that person and will. This gets to the crux of the matter, you cannot surrender your will and any attempt to use force to compel you to act against your will is almost by definition something you don’t want others to do to you and therefore a violation of the Golden Principle. Contracts depend upon Enforcement What good is a contract that cannot be enforced? Is it still a contract or is it something else? Without enforcement a contract is nothing more than documentation of an agreement among honorable men. The parties to an agreement understand that the sole purpose for writing the agreement is to help aid them in voluntarily resolving disputes without violence. At first this might seem like a rather weak foundation upon which to build a free society, but as you will see it is actually the only foundation and much stronger than alternatives at that. You see, Rothbard’s definition of a contract is so narrow and restrictive that it becomes difficult for society to accept. People intuitively feel that promises should be enforced somehow and yet Rothbard’s approach makes that impossible. The key to enforcing a documented agreement is coordinated voluntary shunning of those who fail to abide by their promises as decided by an independent agency to which an individual has voluntarily consented to judge them. Coordinated shunning is almost like a prison without walls. You become an outcast until you make restitution. The nice thing about coordinated shunning is that it does not use any force or violence against any party and yet has been proven extremely effective at “compelling” an individual to act. Dropping the Term Contract The reason I argue for a “contract-free” society is because we live in a society where the government as co-opted the language and defined terms. If you have an informal verbal agreement to meet at a particular time and place for dinner then there is little anyone can do to compel to attend or punish you for failure to attend. Even if you wrote it down in an email or text message, it is not a “legally enforceable contract” and thus the government has no standing. The reason the government lacks standing is because, despite the agreement, there was not an intent to create a legal obligation. There are many laws on the book governing contracts and what kind of contracts you may or may not enter into. You cannot sell debt or stock to the public because those contracts are regulated contracts and require SEC approval. You cannot insure against getting caught breaking the law. You cannot contract for certain work unless you have a license. While you may require a license to contract certain kinds of work, there is no license requirement for performing the work without a contract. If the work performed was a gift then the laws often don’t apply. So while you may want to argue that I really do support contracts and that all I am doing is changing the enforcement mechanism, there are other reasons for forgoing the term all together. I would argue that the coordinated shunning approach isn’t enforcement at all because it specifically lacks the use of force. The effect is the same, but its nature is completely different. Blockchain Technology Rothbard’s definition of valid contracts is actually quite useful. Lets review it one more time: This is where BitShares and distributed ledgers come to play. A distributed ledger is designed to track property rights in clear unambiguous terms. Rothbard’s definition of a contract could be entirely encoded into a block chain because “all legitimate contracts implies theft of property”. It is fairly easy to ascertain whether or not property has been transferred and who owes what when you have a public ledger. With smart contracts it is also fairly easy to automate the change of ownership in such a way that no one can “enforce” a contract and no one can “fail to enforce” the contract. It doesn’t matter who you coerce, the block chain is going to execute the smart contract and everyone will automatically respect the resulting change in property rights. You can think of an automated forced transfer of digital assets as a form of coordinated shunning. Everyone refuses to acknowledge the prior purchasing power of one individual and voluntarily honors the purchasing power of a new individual. Imagine if every body had a bond and arbitration agent on file with the block chain. Imagine everyone refused to do business with someone who had an unpaid judgement against them because their own bond was at risk if they did. BitShares is the foundation of a non-violent consensus on property rights that replaces the use of force to physically reallocate property. The Contract Free Society In a contract free society agreements are documented but everyone understands that there is no force that can compel any individual to abide by any contract. An arbitration agent is not compelled to make any decision. No one is compelled to act. There is no need to force anyone into court. There is no need for government. So long as we insist on living in a world of enforceable contracts we will continue to empower the very beast that enslaves us. We are operating on the implicit expectation of the right to use force and in turn manifest a society built on violence and coercion rather than love. You cannot change others, but you can change yourself. I specifically avoid committing to legally binding contracts when ever possible. It can be very challenging for some people who feel the need to reserve the right to sue you and coerce you into fulfilling your promises. In general these are the type of people we should be shunning. Every time we give business to someone who demands a legal contract we are supporting our own enslavement. So I challenge you to release your need to control others and instead learn how to interact with others entirely without any legal obligations what-so-ever. Discuss this subject at bitsharestalk.org. Recent Articles by Daniel Larimer: The Benefits of a Contract Free Society Provably Honest Online Elections are Possible How to Create a Free Society What is BitShares? Why BitShares is Public Domain Libertarianism for New Agers The Golden Principle Genesis Post Own Your Identity with BitShares Subjective Reality Simplified