I've been thinking a lot about the neighborhood cryptocurrency post by Luke Stokes. Reading about the ideas of decentralized organizations and self-governance has been pretty eye-opening. Especially since I had just been catching up on all of the drama around the Steem/Hive hard fork.
I had just watched What is a DAC? - Explained which is a fantastic dive into what a DAC could be and likely why I've been thinking about this so much.
Luke talks about the idea of neighbors of a community coming together and building their homeowners association on the blockchain allowing residents to utilize the DAC to register and vote on issues and what the HOA should do all governed by the residents themselves.
I really enjoyed taking it a step farther and started thinking about how this could scale from a neighborhood to an entire subdivision. Where I live, in the Memphis, TN suburbs, everyone is quite spread out and we don't always know the neighbors. This kind of digital interactions would be more real than the cold nature of Nextdoor, or your other favorite geotargeted social media app.
Nothing says yikes faster than finding out your neighbors are awful via whatever their neighborhood social app preference, but maybe the realness of identifying yourself on a blockchain would force people to not be terrible. The internet gave us all anonymity and too many hide behind this to air out their own internal biases or indoctrinations. Maybe realizing you live next to actual human beings forces people to treat their neighbors better.
While I'd love to hope humans will do the right thing I'm much more interested in the journey to where this kind of self-governance is commonplace. Blockchain technology is still hard to explain to people. It needs to be molded and tempered down to the average human. Today that pretty much means everything needs to be able to happen on an iOS or Android device.
The software tools to be written, the UI elements to be designed, and the infrastructure to make it all possible is what I enjoy thinking about. It brings me back to my early open source roots of discovering open Perl and Python tools to manage Linux systems.
The FIO Protocol is exactly the type of thing I'm referring to. FIO (Foundation for Interwallet Operability) is making it easier to send cryptocurrency to other users. If you haven't yet experienced it I highly recommend giving it a spin. I've been enjoying the Edge wallet (Which supports FIO!). FIO's goal is to abstract the user-unfriendly practice of having to deal with public wallet addresses. You can simply use joepferguson@edge in any FIO enabled wallet to send me cryptocurrency.
There has to be much more of this. FIO is just one part of what the entire ecosystem needs. FIO is going to enable eCommerce and less tech-savvy users to join the blockchain world.
What else needs to be built? What else needs to be easier?