The Digital Community Manifesto (Digital Rights, Game Theory and Governance of Scalable Blockchains for Use in Network States)
Chapter 1 – Pre-Word
The legacy economic system only responds to legitimate parallel competition that treats people better.
Introduction
This book (and accompanying audiobook) forms a go-to reference for understanding and achieving true decentralisation in social community blockchains and digital Network States. We believe in a model with:
- No Pre-Mines (For further information see Annex I – Glossary of Terms and Acronyms)
- No ICO's (Initial Coin Offerings – for further information see Annex I – Glossary of Terms and Acronyms)
- No Companies or CEOs
- No Early Venture Capital
Instead, the community should guide the technology and governance, maintaining the neutrality of the base layer for itself, ensuring freedom and participation for everyone.
We will explore the game theory of network attacks, attack vectors, how to defend against attacks, guiding principles for decentralisation, a realistic vision for the future, and the best technical stacks for censorship resistance and governance. You will find an in-depth discussion of:
- Reputation and Governance Mechanisms
- Tokenomics and Immutable Communities
- DAO's and New Funding Models
- Future Implications of This Technology
Throughout, we emphasize how these decentralised approaches may reshape society. We plan to illustrate our concepts with real-world examples of communities that have implemented them. This is a fully open-source, community-driven work, freely available to anyone who wants to replicate or expand upon these principles.
Why Document This Now?
The community forming what has become the back bone of the Hive Blockchain has endured years of conflict, evolution, and successful defence against multiple takeover attempts yet it remains decentralised. The ability to remain decentralised over almost a decade at the time of publishing, means there is noteworthy knowledge to be gained and lessons to be learned from dissecting how Hive’s community achieved this resilience. In doing this, we reveal the critical requirements and pass on an industry standard for any other community network and Network State hoping to:
- Stand the greatest chance of true decentralisation
- Remain censorship-resistant
- Thrive economically and socially
Our ultimate aim is to document the “how and why” of proper and principled decentralisation, including the deeper implications for human freedom. In a world often controlled by entrenched power structures hostile to genuine decentralised, and therefore neutral systems, this knowledge is recorded immutably, and preserved under the account under the account @networkstate on the Hive Blockchain one of the most principled, battle hardened and proven communities in decentralisation.
The next 25 chapters (you are reading Chapter 1) are the product of 20+ months of filming, writing, systematic break down of underlying principles and technology and continuous reflection. Each topic builds on the last, culminating in a holistic framework for decentralised governance and secure digital communities.
For those of you interested in understanding more about how this book was created, go to https://hive.blog/@networkstate to see the discussions and conversations that went into the creation of this work, as well as see the immutable text version, stored on the blockchain, so that the ideas, essential for digital freedom within cannot be erased from our consciousnesses.
This is a new field of human understanding and so we invite your input. Constructive dialogue helps refine these ideas and is essential to the understanding of the principles required for this burgeoning field which is essential to the maintenance of digital freedom and digital rights into the future. It is long overdue that we share these methods in a digestible, publicly documented way, so others may replicate them and maximize their own decentralisation and digital self-sovreignty.
Scope and Purpose
Decentralisation, at present, is a term widely misunderstood in the crypto industry. Many projects, including Ethereum and most other leading, reputed crypto projects are not actually fully decentralised. Launched with conflicts of interest from ICO's, founder stakes, and pre-mines, amongst many other conflicts, such mechanisms often embed weaknesses that undermine genuine decentralisation in the long run.
We will contrast such pitfalls with a more robust formula for censorship-resistant design. In particular, we show how projects can thrive without centralised corporate structures or seed round investors. By removing these single points of failure, communities can achieve:
- Self-Sovereign Token Economies
- Immutable Social Layers
- User-Owned Governance and Reputation Systems
This work aims to become both an industry and societal standard on decentralisation for social and Network State type communities. By explaining the precise steps and technologies, we hope everyone can more easily understand and if they choose, build their own censorship-resistant networks, taking many of the foundational, timeless lessons explored in the following paragraphs about true decentralisation and what is required to achieve, maintain, attack, defend, apply, and expand it.
“You Must Know Your Worth Before You Can Be Worth Anything”
The Hive community has a history of being one of the only blockchain communities which successfully defended itself against centralised takeovers, removed exploitative stake, and fortified governance, and so sets a vital precedent which can be studied and replicated. These successes and the underlying lessons can serve the entire world as it searches for more equitable, secure ways to operate.
We believe there is a specific method for achieving and sustaining decentralisation, an approach offering genuine freedom and a more enlightened path on Earth. In a world where established power structures often oppose truly decentralised systems, it is crucial to document, debate, and preserve the knowledge gleaned from this text storage based blockchain community.
Make a Value4Value Donation to Support this work:
If you found the information in this work valuable, please do consider returning some of your value back to the authors way with some Value4Value.
Value4Value is a monetisation model, a content format, and a way of life. It is about freedom and openness, connection and free speech, sound money and censorship resistance.
Time - Your time & attention are valuable. Spending them is valuable in and of itself.
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Contributors:
- Voice for Audio book - @alohaed
- Cover Graphics - @rubencress
- Content assistance - @eddiespino
- Technical Input – Thanks to various Hive Blockchain community members over the years for teaching us this stuff. And in particular: @alex-rourke, @blocktrades, @brianoflondon, @meno, @rubencress, @ura-soul, @vaultec for their reviews of this book and for spotting our mistakes!
We invite anyone to challenge the ideas in this book at the official blog spot https://ecency.com/@networkstate We will incorporate your ideas in future editions and mention your username in this contributors part
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