The Saoirse Creatives festival evolved from people involved in the anti lockdown/mandate movement in Ireland over the past 2 years, coming together to celebrate each other and our shared love for freedom and independence with music, dance, poetry, stories, etc.
Since reading "More Equal Animals" by Daniel Larimer (inventor of the Steem/Hive blockchains), I was looking for a community to demonstrate how the decentralised election process works without the use of technology. Saoirse Creatives provided the opportunity. These people had little to no experience with blockchain and the concepts around it, but they were captivated by the story of the Hive Blockchain.
I am preparing another talk, for Sovereignty.ie community (who meet on Tara Hill or in front of the presidents house in Pheonix Park every 2nd Sunday of the month). If anybody has any experience with co-operatives or the setting up of any sort of organisation like it, your input is more than welcome!
Here's the transcript from the talk!
Knowledge is POWER.
Does anybody know who said: “Knowledge is power, community is strength and positive attitude is everything”?
Apparently, Lance Armstrong said it. But I hope that doesn’t make it sound any less inspirational…
I’d like to prove the strength of community with 2 things: a story & a demonstration.
We all came here aligned with each other in a way. We all came together to share a special weekend. So, in a way we’ve become a community (even if it only lasts the weekend).
Just imagine if somebody said there wasn't going to be one next year. Imagine the organizers decided we can’t do it again next year without a guaranteed 1000 people. If we had to decide who should take responsibility for that before we left this room, do you think we could come together as a community to make that happen?
I could stand up and say “I'll do it”. But how do you know I'm the best person? We would probably want a person who appreciates what we all love about this festival and wouldn’t make it all about them. I could say to Gerry, don't worry I'll get you a thousand. 3 months later I've got loads of speakers & they're all talking about blockchain or politics!
That's not what you all wanted…
So, let’s try something else! Using this hypothetical situation, let me show you something that would make sure that the festival happens again next year and includes all the things we want as a community.
There’s lots of talents in the room, probably lots of ideas to share but it would take too much time for everyone to get a turn to talk & express what they can do. Sometimes, the quieter people who are not so good at selling themselves are actually the ones who have the skills the community needs. So, here is a way we can make sure every voice is heard, in a short space of time.
I have a deck of cards. I’m not going to be performing any magic tricks, but I’d like some volunteers to choose a card, check what card it is & then find the other people with the same card as you.
This is a process that I learned about on my journey, learning about blockchain … as an autonomous technology that enables communities to be decentralized & SOVEREIGN. I’m going to tell you about that journey after this little demonstration.
We’re going to demonstrate a process for choosing people to be responsible for something. And to do that we have to have some KNOWLEDGE of the people in our network.
KNOWLEDGE IS POWER
Most people here probably KNOW a little bit about bitcoin or cryptocurrency or blockchain, but in my opinion almost everybody is looking at it from the wrong perspective.
Most people look at bitcoin or cryptocurrency as a way to make money that's in theory free from the banks. It was designed to be free from the banks if people were using it as money but in reality, people are mostly just buying and selling it with what they use as money instead of using crypto as money. And they do this on a cryptocurrency exchange which is the equivalent of a bank but for crypto. So, for people trading it, it's neither money nor free from banks.
So, if there’s something I want you to walk away with from my talk, it’s some new empowering knowledge of the real purpose and power of Blockchain, as a way to make a community SOVEREIGN.
Now that you’re all in your groups, you’re going to pick somebody from your group who you think is the best person to represent what you want to see at next year’s festival.
Each group has to pick somebody who they think really listened and understands what they loved. It should be somebody they trust will make the effort to bring more of that if they were organizing the festival next year.
You all have to pick the same person in your group. If you can’t all agree on that person, then nobody gets picked and your group loses.
Now we have a group of people who were selected by their community. Each of them is armed with the perspectives of the people from their previous group.
They can work together to get performers & ensure that we have 1000 people and that it's still the type of festival this community wants.
For this group to co ordinate, they'll probably need to choose another leader by repeating the exact same process again. But this time, we all get to listen.
If we had 150 people participating in this process, then we would have ended up with 25 – 30 people elected, and they would all move to the next round of 5 – 6 groups where they would speak for everyone in their previous group, and we can all listen to one groups discussion.
What you just demonstrated is an election process for decentralised communities. A decentralised community is one with no central authority. They have no rulers.
This process ensures that everybody’s voice is heard by making all the groups small, and all the discussion happens at the same time. The person elected takes the perspectives from their group with them into the next round.
Party collusion is not allowed.
If we allowed people to go into whatever group they wanted, then people could game this process.
My family all came to this festival together. If my family decided we wanted to take over and be the new organizers, one way that we could give ourselves an advantage would be to make sure one of us is in each group. Then there’s a higher chance of my family getting in. Instead, everybody was assigned to a group randomly, using cards.
“Majority rules” means 51% rule over 49%. If the community wants every voice to be valued they need to use the “supermajority rules”.
For simplicity, I had you all agree on the same person, but in this process, if a small group can’t get the supermajority to vote on one person, they all lose. People work harder to come to an agreement when there’s a cost if they don't.
I came across this process when I was invited to join an online community called Eden. I was invited by an old friend from a blockchain community I used to make a living from called HIVE.
So let me tell you a little about that journey.
I learned about Bitcoin about 8 years ago when my brother bought me a small fraction worth for Christmas.
He got the same present for my whole family and it wasn’t much, but it got us all interested, and we played around and experimented with it. Over the years I noticed Bitcoin had its own problems. It was supposed to be faster and cheaper, but there was a limit to the number of transactions that could happen at a time and as more and more people were using it, that created backlog and bidding to get your transaction through faster, which meant it was neither fast nor cheap at the time.
Luckily, bitcoin is not the only cryptocurrency out there. Remember Bitcoin is a prototype. It’s the first of its kind, kind of like Bebo or MySpace before Facebook came along. But I didn’t know anything about other cryptocurrencies, so I lost interest in the whole thing.
Until, one day my brother invited me to join a social network called “steem”. This was a social network based on blockchain where people were earning cryptocurrency by posting content.
Bitcoin is money without banks. Steem was social media without Zuckerberg.
- That platform is now called Hive, which I’ll explain later. But when you hear me say Hive and Steem, I’m talking about the same thing, but Steem is the old version and Hive is the clone. That’s actually where this story will get really interesting, but we’ll get to that later.
This social network was full of programmers & computer scientists which I felt was way out of my league. I thought “that’s cool but not for me!”
Next thing my brother shows me a post that made $31K.
It was a girl my age. She got paid that for a make-up tutorial.
See I forgot that computer scientists are not just into technology and coding. They’re also into girls!
I started by introducing myself and my first post made $500 dollars’ worth of the Steem cryptocurrency. The next few posts would make just a few dollars here and there but as part of this community I was building my brand and eventually I started a podcast called VOTU which was about the politics of blockchain. I made a living for 2 years just posting to this community.
Now I’m not here to teach you how to make money from social media.
What I’m here to talk about is how blockchain empowers communities to be sovereign.
Here's how the Hive blockchain empowered us.
You can fund anything you want without spending any money.
Nobody had to take money out of their pockets to pay me for my content. The blockchain released a certain number of tokens every day and they were spread across the network to all the content creators and voters, based on how much people voted for the posts.
Because this currency could be used to promote the content you voted for, it had a demand. People wanted to buy it.
Whenever I made money from a post, half of it went to my wallet and half went to my vault. From my wallet I could take it out any time. Send it to an exchange and sell it for Euro if I wanted to. The money stored in my vault couldn’t be taken out whenever I wanted it. I had to withdraw it gradually over 3 months. But while it was in the vault it was voting power. Which meant it gave me power to decide who made money, without spending that money myself.
I was able to pay people anywhere in the world just for engaging with my content.
I funded friends who were fleeing Venezuela when their currency was hyperinflating.
Our voices can’t be censored on Hive.
- Blockchain is a great tool for censorship resistance because nothing can be removed or deleted from a public blockchain.
There’s no owner.
- There is no Mark Zuckerberg at the top of Hive. Nobody who can take a bribe. Nobody to blackmail. Nobody who could make a deal with the devil and sell out the community.
- We are the owners of this social network. And we get the value for building it. We own it with our voting power which most of us earned by engaging with each other.
But it wasn’t all a Utopian dream.
Not everybody was successful making money from the platform. People could be anonymous so there were lots of trolls.
There were members of the community that would abuse their power. They voted selfishly and didn’t care about anybody but themselves.
Even though there’s no central authority, it is possible to change the rules of the blockchain.
- We vote for people we trust and the people elected are called witnesses.
- They have to all work together and completely agree in order to change the rules.
- We could vote them out any time we wanted if we didn't like their ideas. There were no elections to wait for.
- We discussed the rules as a community a lot, and sometimes we’d actually agree to change something.
- We made some bad decisions. We trusted the wrong advice, and when people weren’t happy, we paid the price of the token losing demand.
- But for the most part, we worked together to make this social network a place for everyone. We really cared about the people we’d connected with and wanted the community to flourish.
But it all went wrong for Steem.
The very first account that was created on the blockchain belonged to the company who launched the blockchain. That company wasn’t doing so well. They lost their CTO and they weren’t making money.
They had money in their Steem vault, but they never used it as power to vote over the community because if they did they would have been seen as a dictator.
2 years after launching the blockchain, they decided they wanted their money, but they didn’t want to spend 3 months withdrawing it like the rest of us.
Instead, they decided to sell the whole vault at once, giving the new owner all that voting power.
The new owner voted for their employees to be witnesses of our blockchain, and so they had the power to change the rules without our consent & even censor anybody who didn’t like what the company did.
The blockchain went from being a decentralised autonomous community, to being a centralized public platform owned by a Chinese company.
They took our blockchain… but they didn’t take our power!
What happened next was a magical representation of the strength of community.
Blockchain is open source & our community is full of computer scientists who had spent the last 2 years building relationships. A group from the community came together and cloned the blockchain. It was an exact copy but with two differences. It had a new name which is Hive, and the account with the power to hijack the blockchain was gone.
The community left Steem and didn’t even have to start fresh. The new Hive blockchain had the same history of transactions. Everybody had the same number of tokens of Hive … as they had on Steem. Everything we built on Steem was still there … and could be moved to Hive. It was like pressing rewind, reversing back to before the disaster happened, and then carrying on with some new wisdom.
This is not the first time this happened in blockchain.
In 2016 there was a fund raiser built on the Ethereum blockchain. But there was a vulnerability in the code and a hacker figured it out.
The hacker stole 150 million dollars’ worth of Ether, one of the largest crowd funds in history.
So many people in the community were shook by this theft that they wished it never happened. They wished so hard in fact, that they got a group together who cloned the blockchain. They fixed the code that the hacker found, and then launched the blockchain from the time right before the funds were stolen.
That community split into 2 groups:
- People who wanted to recover the funds from the thief back to their rightful owner
- People who believed the thief was the rightful owner.
The old blockchain became known as Ethereum Classic, and the new one where everyone’s money was recovered is known as Ethereum.
COMMUNITY IS STRENGTH
Remember when we said KNOWLEDGE IS POWER?
Blockchain is really knowledge, and knowledge is very empowering.
Knowledge, or “what we know” is made up of lots of information. And data is the same as information. That's what makes data so empowering. Data is information and a huge collection of data is knowledge and KNOWLEDGE IS POWER.
A blockchain is a huge collection of data. But it needs the strength of a community to yield it.
In theory, you can take over a blockchain. But if the community doesn’t consent to that takeover well the blockchain will lose its community and all the value the community gave it.
We started this talk with a demonstration of an election process for decentralised communities.
That could be:
- A sport or a game.
- Keeping a social media platform free from censorship.
- Parents & teachers coming together to teach their children the same shared education & values.
- People living off-grid.
- A group who shares food sources and work together to maintain them.
- People funding and relying on the same healthcare facilities.
- A co-operative using the same decentralised currency to spend on each other’s businesses.
- People who came together for an arts festival
Even though you were picking somebody to be responsible for all your perspectives and to form a team who would make sure next years festival goes ahead, you would have ended up selecting people who showed leadership skills.
Blockchain communities are DECENTRALISED because they have no owners and NO RULERS, but that doesn’t mean there’ll be no leaders.
This is a comparison of a centralized & decentralised network. Notice that it still has central points of contact and they’re all in contact with one another, but what makes it decentralised is they don’t have authority over one another.
Here is what our election process produces.
Actually, that’s not right, because it’s upside down.
Now you see the real structure. There’s the community at the top, and those who we vote for form a bridge of communication to everyone else.
This election process is from a book called ‘More Equal Animals’ by Daniel Larimer, a computer scientist who has built 3 blockchains and started the first Eden community where I learned it from.
So, there are no rulers, but that doesn’t mean no rules.
Often communities still need rules.
Having no rulers over your CURRENCY is essential to sovereignty. No central banks to change the rules when it suits them.
But if a currency had no rules, then you could take a leaf from a tree and use it as money.
With blockchain the rules are already written by the code and people who use it are agreeing to those rules.
But somebody had to write those rules, for the community to decide if they agree to them. Those people are not rulers, they are leaders.
Leaders lead people to information, answers, and solutions. They help people figure out what rules they all agree on and form a community, and sometimes they are trusted to make decisions on the community’s behalf when it’s necessary.
When there is a problem to solve, leaders help the community solve it together.
That’s why it’s important to choose your leaders wisely, so in the end you don’t just have one leader at the top. Instead, everybody in the community now has a direct contact with somebody helping the community achieve their goals.
The first key to community sovereignty is a common goal or value that holds them together.
The second one is using and accepting decentralised currency as payment.
And the third is an election process that is:
- Resistant to party collusion.
- Gives everybody a chance to speak.
- Is easily repeated when new problems arise.
- Creates multiple layers of leadership and responsibility.
These are just some of my favourite lyrics.
There are a million and one other tales I’d love to tell from my experience on this blockchain but it would take all night and I’d probably bore the arses off you so I want to finish with what I hope I’ve inspired you with.
Blockchain is very empowering as a source of truth.
But a blockchain gets its power from the love of a community.
When the Hive community salvaged their social media platform, the power didn’t just come from the blockchain. They had the strength of the community, and their love for what they stood for as a community.
The blockchain gave them the power to reverse time and continue like nothing happened.
Can you imagine if we as a community could have rewinded to before covid, and just removed the Emergency Health Act?
§ If our legal system or our constitution had been built on Blockchain, which I believe in the future it absolutely will be, we could have literally done that.
This is part 7 of a series:
Peace & Love...
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