If you have read the book by Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, you know the power of stories. Harari makes a case that what makes us humans great is our ability to tell and believe stories. Stories are just fiction, but if a story is practical and enough people act like it's true, humans can cooperate amazingly well in big groups.
One obvious example is money: it's just a fiction. Money doesn't have any absolute value. The value of money comes from the story that everybody believes. If everybody believes that money has value, it has.
Similarly, human institutions are just stories. They collapse if people stop believing in them. While getting rid of bad institutions seems very easy – "just stop acting like it exists" – usually people will have very hard time getting rid of beliefs on institutions that have existed for a certain period of time.
For example, the situation in Venezuela is horrible at the moment and getting even worse. There should be no question who is guilty: it's the government. But still, the people of Venezuela have very strong belief that the current government is the government that should be in power. They might be dissatisfied with it, but they don't question the whole story behind it. If they questioned, government officials would become just some crazy guys in uniforms yelling at other people.
The change could happen in overnight. But it won't because the human mind is really bad at changing stories that it believes.
This applies to marketing, too. In earlier posts, I've written about Geoffrey A. Moore's book Crossing the Chasm. In that, he talks about a gap between the early adopters and the early majority called "the chasm". When innovators and early adopters get excited about something new, the majority of the people just laugh at them. "It's just a fad" – and usually they are right!
What marketers need to do is to convince the majority that they should believe the same story that early adopters believe. That the product or service is actually something good. If the majority will also believe the story, they will buy the product.
So the billion dollar question is: How do you convince other people to believe your story? Especially in the case of something totally new, like a constitution for a blockchain.
I have somewhat evolutionist perspective on human institutions. It's really hard to convince a lot of people at the same time. Usually, the story and belief to it evolve over time. Seeds of ideas need to be sowed first, and then take care to grow the initial ideas to full-blown stories.
If you are familiar with the Austrian school of economics, you might recognize the resemblance to Hayekian perspective. Institutions have to evolve over time, they can't be created out of thin air just like that.
Very often people come up with great stories about new kind of institutions that would be superior to the current ones if other people would just adopt them. But that's not going to happen because the new story of a better institution doesn't fit well enough the current story.
When you look at the evolutive perspective, you can see what it actually means: in order to change a big and powerful story that everybody believes, you have to do it step-by-step.
When people say that "something was ahead of its time", what they actually mean to say is that "the new story was too different compared to the old story so only a handful of people believed it and that's why it didn't gain traction".
There needs to be first enough groundwork storytelling to predispose people to the new ideas. When the actual story is finally told, people can truly get it and believe it. They can understand how it connects to the other stories they believe.
So, with this introductory story, I can finally get to the point. I have some skepticism towards the concept of blockchain constitution designed by Dan (if you are not familiar with the topic yet, check out his posts How to create a meaningful Blockchain Constitution and What could a blockchain Constitution look like?).
You might have already guessed my point: A legally binding constitution for a blockchain is a very new concept. It might be so new that people don't know how it fits other stories they believe currently.
What happens if people don't believe it?
I can see two different outcomes:
If people don't care about it, it means they don't believe the story. The "legally binding contract" will be just a dead letter.
Another danger lurks in decentralization. If the blockchain is too decentralized in the beginning, there is a risk that too few will want to keep the initial constitution. Dan's example constitution and his reasoning are very much libertarian. There aren't really that many libertarians in the world. If there are too many non-libertarians who don't share the same story of philosophical reasoning, they can edit the constitution to be something different that fits better to the stories they believe.
What to do, then? Some possibilities came to my mind:
Both of these require that the decision making power of the whole blockchain is centralized enough to make the changes. I find it a little bit worrisome that there won't be any designated tokens for the founders in EOS. Young blockchains are like young humans (aka babies) who can't survive in the world on their own. They need to be taken care of until they grow up. If the founders don't have the power to direct the development of the blockchain, the development might become too random and inefficient.
Note: I've had reservations about some things when Bitshares 2.0 and Steem were launched, but I didn't take my time to write them down and create more discussion around them. This time, in the case of EOS, I'll try to write down everything that might pose a risk. Even though I find something to criticize it doesn't mean that I don't believe in the project. It's still the most promising blockchain project at this point and I will invest in it. I just want to find ways to make it even better.
One of Dan's weaknesses is to create something totally new and then let people figure out themselves how it actually works and how to use it. This time he seems to be having a great team supporting him, but to get this kind of completely new kind of system to function as intended needs a huge amount of work. They seem to be pretty confident about it which makes me suspect that they haven't realized how much effort this will require.
