Can Bitcoin Tech, bring DROs to life, in the next 5 years?

[Juan S. Galt]

Hello! fellow Philosophers. 

EDIT: To be perfectly clear, I do not endorse Bitnation. I only mention it as an example of people working on decentralized insurance companies among other things, Decentralized insurance or DDROs are my only interest in Bitnation right now. And it is their essense that intrigues me not the means in which they may be applied, atleast at this time.

There's a topic that I've wanted to bring to your attention for a while now and I'm exited to say the time has come. 

I'm not sure how familiar all of you are with the Bitcoin technology, but I believe it has the power to speed hack us to a free-er society in a variety of ways. 

For those that are not familiar with the back end of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a long list of every transaction that has ever been made, this transactions can carry anything from information about who owns what coin, to digital files that represent things in the real world. 

A google maps image of your house for example can be "hashed" and turned into a unique set of digits that once added to the blockchain along side a hash of a contract signed could prove transferred ownership of the house. 

 

This ledger is distributed among computers all over the world and in multiple jurisdictions and it is updated live. For a variety of reasons that I can get into if people are skeptical, Bitcoin's technology makes fraud very very very difficult. 

It also allows for what have been dubbed DAO's or decentralized autonomous organizations. 

This simply put means that one can create a program that runs ontop of blockchain networks and can not be destroyed or ended by any one party, since there is no central point of failure. The internet would have to be shut down, to kill Bitcoin and that which is being built ontop of it. 

The reason I mention all this, is because there are a few projects gaining strength that may allow for what could be decentralized, jurisdiction and bureaucracy free insurance companies. 

And if I remember correctly, insurance companies are essentially what DROs are, according to stef's DRO theory. 

I'll be writing an article about this topic during the next week or so that I'll be aiming to post on Bitcoin Magazine and will be interviewing  someone deeply involved in Crypto currencies and insurance.

But I also wanted to get your thoughts on this subject. 

If we had the possibility of having insurance companies that are not subject to government power. Than can we begin to build the anarchist heaven that we have dreamt of, ontop of the internet? 

Here is one project in particular that claims to know how to do something like this. Though I am skeptical of many of the claims they make, bitcoin insurance seems to me very possible and within our grasp.

http://www.bitnation.co/

I can elaborate more or anything if you wish. I have not looked into DRO theory in a while though, so this is part of the research for the article. 

My question is. If we can create insurance companies ontop of the internet, with their headquarters being a website distributed throughout the world, and with its core members being anonymous.  And if we can find ways to have users of insurance prove to these organization when damage to insure property has happened, than do DRO's come to life? 

How is government able to control and diminish the power of insurance today and why are DROs not currently alive? 

What would be the limitations of such a system, given that peaceful parenting has not yet become mainstream?

Thank you. I look forward to your thoughts. 

(PS: trying to find the right forum for this post has resulted in my posting it in 2 different sub forums here, sorry for spam)

[RuralRon]

Interesting I should stumble upon your post at this point in time. I've been extremely involved and focused on the bitshares community for the last 2 weeks. I began my serious research into bitcoin back in March after hearing it discussed and praised by Stefan Molyneux of FDR and Jan Irvin of Gnostic Media. The last post in this thread and this one will give you some background on my perspective.

 

I have only spent 5 minutes looking over the website you linked. The project is extremely broad in scope. The website looks very polished and professional, but I've only just looked at it on the surface.

 

My first reaction to the project is from the use of the word governance. It is a red flag to me. Granted, this is only my first impression and not a comprehensive review of the project.

 

I'm also somewhat skeptical due to the very near term release date, and that nobody has mentioned this site on the BitSharesTalk forum. An of course I have reservations about any project based on Proof Of Work blockchain technology. I did find bitnation mentioned on reddit.

 

I'll warn you however that you may not get much traction on that subject on this forum. It seems it's not that compelling of a topic here, perhaps because to fully understand it's merits requires a rather heavy technical CS background. Perhaps bitnation will be different. It certainly has more overlap with the topics discussed here on FDR.

 

I can only hope if it should get traction as a topic here it will be discussed from top to bottom, both philosophically as well as technically. If the tech is flawed that bitnation is based on then the philosophy will be corrupted that is built upon it.

 

The way I found this thread was from a global forum search using keyword bitcoin. There were 81 topics and I had read 64 of them or 80% of them. Only one was in the donator's only section which I don't currently have access to yet. A search for bitshares will likewise not produce many results.

 

However, anything built with blockchain technology has significant philosophical ramifications and IMO is a perfectly valid topic for discussion here. I sincerely hope to see much more discussion about bitnation and bitshares.

 

Update: I went back to to the bitnation website to look it over more carefully but discovered there are many links / menu items that are not active or don't point to content such as the one for the whitepaper.

 

Nit: notice the logo, vertical chain links. I guess that represents the blockchain, but my first thought was why not a broken link (as in breaking the chains of top-down government)?

 

I also watched about half of this video that was posted on the bitnation facebook page of the founder Suzanne Tarkowski Tempelhof. I wasn't too impressed with her answer concerning how governments might view the bitnations project:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Zp9LvrEzQY

[Juan S. Galt]

Thank you for the long responce! I've been focusing on NXT the past few weeks and would love to have a change and exchange knowledge on these second gen platforms.To be perfectly clear, I do not endorse Bitnation. I only mention it as an example of people working on decentralized insurance companies among other things, Decentralized insurance or DDROs are my only interest in Bitnation right now. And it is their essense that intrigues me not the means in which they may be applied, atleast at this time.I've made the same post on the science and technology sub forum and there is more conversation there.Here's a poste I made there that I think is relevant.Yeah, whether it is another altcoin or ontop of a second gen altcoin like Ethereum, NXT or Bitnation, does not fundamentally matter, it only does as far as the efficiency of transactions and the ease of application, I would say.For example, in the time that devs have been trying to build decentralized asset exchanges ontop of Bitcoin, NXT was able to build the asset exchange, decentralized encrypted messaging and an alias system. basically catching up with the development in the space and being the first to have a decentralized stock market per say.Why? because Bitcoin was arguably a high quality proof of concept that spread like health bringing beubonic plague.NXT another crypto created by an anon developer "BCNext" was much more effective as a second gen currency and seemed to learn and improve upon the lessons of Bitcoin.That said, they may have fucked up with the IPO, since, being a Proof of stake secured coin, the fact that the early adoptors got such large stakes, has left the currency with residual FUD (fear uncertinty and doubt), even if the early adoptors spread their stakes decently as NXT supporters aregue.I my self think NXT is the most developed crypto currency tech wise that there is right now, but one that can avoid this IPO problem or prove that is not at risk of a 51% attack by major stake holders would be even better.All this said, there might be proof that NXT is secure to that 51% based on stake ditribution and oh my goodness have I gotten derailed.