On Nathan Schneider on the limits of cryptoeconomics

Blockchain-based contraptions have a lot to offer the world that other kinds of systems do not. On the other hand, Nathan is completely correct to emphasize that blockchainized should not be equated with financialized. There is plenty of room for blockchain-based systems that do not look like money, and indeed we need more of them.

The only reason why political and legal systems work is that a lot of hard thinking and work has gone on behind the scenes to insulate the decision-makers from extrinsic incentives, and punish them explicitly if they are discovered to be accepting incentives from the outside. The lack of extrinsic motivation allows the intrinsic motivation to shine... See more

Positive and negative externalities: "Environmental costs are classic externalities—invisible to the feedback loops that the system understands and that communicate to its users as incentives ... the challenge of funding"public goods" is another example of an externality - and one that threatens the sustainability of crypteconomic systems"

The world of cryptocurrency is very economic (lots of tokens flying around everywhere, with lots of functions being assigned to those tokens), very neo (the space is 12 years old!) and very liberal (freedom and voluntary participation are core to the whole thing). Do these critiques also apply to blockchain systems? If so, what conclusions should w... See more

Nathan focuses on three key problems:

Financialization, as Nathan points out in his conclusion, has benefits in that it attracts a large amount of motivation and energy into building and participating in systems that would not otherwise exist. Furthermore, preventing financialization is very difficult and high cost, and works best when done sparingly, where it is needed most. However, ... See more

Limited exposure to diverse motivations: "Cryptoeconomics sees only a certain slice of the people involved. Concepts such as self- sacrifice, duty, and honor are bedrock features of most political and business organizations, but difficult to simulate or approximate with cryptoeconomic incentive design"

Plutocracy: "Those with more tokens than others hold more [I would add, disproportionately more] decision-making power than others..."