Blockchain-powered communism

While minus times minus is plus, two shitty things don't make a working one.

NFTs are like the product of blockchain powered capitalism. What could be the product of blockchain powered communism?

@Lensflare Probably genocide. Communism tends to do that when the first thing the rebels do is define a new elite.

@lbfalvy where is the blockchain in that?

@Lensflare right. It’s fun to rag on communist governments and all, but I want to think philosophically. Capitalism aims to acquire capital. So it needs a way to store it. NFTs store capital, as long as others believe they do. Communism doesn’t aim to store anything (a fundamental flaw) and instead the workers do everything via the community and the means of production. But no one can accumulate the means of production. So a communist powered crypto currency would be the labor contracts, the exchanges that happen due to the lack of currency (philosophically). So then what are the NFTs? Perhaps they are in fact art again, but that would imply ownership by the artist… I’m thinking they would definitely be something trying to solve the tragedy of the commons through communal transferable ownership, but I’m not sure how that plays out.

@jeeper nfts are not in fact art, they are fart act

@bvs23bkv33 fartifacts if you will

I think you are on to something

But just to make the bureaucracy a bit sparklier, let them make the blockchain transaction validation by hand, with pencil and paper

Just imagine factories and warehouses full of comrades, sharpners and prime number tables in hand, pulling hairs around the clock to meet the quotas enforced by the party

Aahhh glory to the blockchain, owned by no one and owned by everybody!!

that's like weapons-powered peace, religion-powered tolerance, or sex-powered abstinence.

@Drunkzee Actually, a blockchain that doesn't end up concentrated in the hands of 3-5 capitalists would need to be based on proof-of-personhood, which would mean that it needs a large and inconvenient underlying system to assert that each person holds exactly one identity and each identity belongs to exactly one person.

This is also why democracies are great at keeping files on their citizens even though there's very little causal connection between surveillance and majority voting. You need a comprehensive database of every person to run an election, and while you have that, you might as well use it to keep track of other things.

@lbfalvy I mean, would you preffer to have a bunch of people unregistered, going around and doing whatever?

Just imagine you eitness a crime but the perpetuator cannot be punished because they don't exist om the record

@Drunkzee A state that keeps records of innocent citizens just for the police's need to potentially go after them is called a "police state".

@Fast-Nop and there's far too many of those around, communism or not.

@tosensei In states that aren't that fucked up, the ID card database isn't connected to the police database. The latter usually contains criminals who have "qualified" to enter the police's system.

@Fast-Nop That is the worst case scenario, but there are other less grave, but more common use cases such as
* taxes
* population evidence
* statistics (natality, mortality, emigration etc)
* medical data shared across institutions
* inheritance
* property evidence
* mandatory military service

A state that keeps records of its population is exactly that: a state

How would it be to have a company that doesn't know who are its employees, what is their role and how to contact them?

@Drunkzee Yeah, you'll need some sort of administrative structure once shit gets bigger than a few villages. Other civilisations before ours, such as Egypt and Rome, had something similar.

@Drunkzee Obviously a record of everyone's existence and some key information is useful, I didn't mean to imply that it isn't, it's just that under some systems of power distribution adding fields to the record seems to be a slippery slope.

I actually think that while blockchains are nuts, a direct democracy based on unique and personal digital identities doesn't sound so bad. It obviously wouldn't solve all problems, but it would remove a lot of middle men who are far simpler to individually bribe or blackmail than the population.

@lbfalvy Those "middle men" aka politicians will sabotage that just like they already do for direct democracy with paper based voting.

@lbfalvy "far simpler to individually bribe or blackmail than the population."

....ever heard of "marketing"?

@lbfalvy the sad truth is that we have nothing close to a perfect system from all perspectives: software can be flawed, same as the people writing it

But i agree with your slippery slope example. All fun and games until you have the last party you voted for attached to your name, leaked

@tosensei Yes, marketing is public communication. Everyone knows not just what marketing wants them to know but also what was exactly said, and a bunch of marketing experts' opinions on the strategies involved. Convincing people to vote for the laws that help your business is far more honest than getting the politicians to pass those laws and then convincing the people to vote for the politicians without actually disclosing the laws they will pass in advance. Most parties in the world have a partial and very cherry picked program before elections, which they promptly expand with unpopular economic policies as soon as they're in power.

@Drunkzee A trustworthy software background to the democratic system may be the only place where distributed consensus may have a valid place, and even then I still think that the only actually democratic system is proof-of-personhood.

@Fast-Nop Paper based voting is very slow and inefficient and requires a great effort from the voter which harms turnout, especially in the working class who may simply not have time to regularly go vote, so it's not a good foundation for day-to-day lawmaking, but I agree that it's way underutilised, likely because any given political elite will prefer if the (edit: rest of the) population don't feel involved with the democratic process.