What is democracy?
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This weekend I have been studying the topic of democracy and how we should govern ourselves on this forum in a way that produces the best outcome.
For me Democracy is not the ‘tyranny of the majority’ but rather something like [i]the strong taking care of the weak[/i]. We are at the mercy of the dead who leave us with a culture, tools, language and history over which we have no control. Even in my lifetime I feel like I have had very little say over how my local park or streets are setup and organised; I have more control over my personal appearance than I do over my environment.
And yet sometimes I don’t even want to be free. I like being told what to do by someone else provided I trust them, they are accountable and take responsibility for their actions. Then they can free me up to concentrate of the things I care about.
[b]Our ability to turn constraints in to variables is incredible to me. I think what’s important is that it is easier to get to the top than it is to stay there.[/b] The biggest enemy is the status quo and the lack of choices.
One thing I am sure of is that a dictatorship, benevolent or not is no way to run a civilisation as is based on a control mentality, on the assumption that only one person can talk at a time. Now that we exist in a distributed world where you go online has little to do with where you were born or whether you can drive; where you go online is based on how much you care.
You don’t need to get on a train to go from Facebook to Twitter. You vote your with your time, we all get the same number of hours in a day and what you choose to do with yours is how you tell the world what you believe in and how you want to be represented.
I was inspired by one of my heroes, Jimmy Wales in his TED talk in 2007
[center]
[url=http://youtu.be/WQR0gx0QBZ4]http://youtu.be/WQR0gx0QBZ4[/url]
[/center][i]Wikipedia is a blend of Democracy, Aristocracy and Monarchy.
The majority view is not necessarily neutral.
Our passion is for the quality of the work not the processes that generate it.[/i]He talks about Wikipedia Democratic Process 16m40s - youtu.be/WQR0gx0QBZ4?t=16m40s
And this is one of my favourite Podcasts ever, Prof Robert Harrison talks with Josiah Ober on ancient Athenian democracy on [url=http://french-italian.stanford.edu/opinions/ober.html]Entitled Opinions[/url]
I still have a lot to learn about this so if anyone has any insights of thoughts I’d be really grateful if you could share with me, especially if anyone has anything on Anarchy for beginners, I’d really like to understand that better.
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Was Gavin Andreson, lead developer at Bitcoin, elected to his position?
It would appear not:
[quote]
Nakamoto was active in making modifications to the Bitcoin software and posting technical information on the Bitcoin Forum until his contact with other Bitcoin developers and the community gradually began to fade in mid-2010. Until a few months before he left, almost all modifications to the source code were done by Satoshi â€" he accepted contributions relatively rarely. Just before he left, he set up Gavin Andresen as his successor by giving him access to the Bitcoin SourceForge project and a copy of the alert key.
[/quote]
Source: [url=http://incryptowetrust.com/who-is-satoshi-nakamoto/]http://incryptowetrust.com/who-is-satoshi-nakamoto/[/url]This is what I always thought anyway. Anyone know?
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[quote name=“chrisj” post=“28839” timestamp=“1379857359”]
This weekend I have been studying the topic of democracy and how we should govern ourselves on this forum in a way that produces the best outcome.For me Democracy is not the ‘tyranny of the majority’ but rather something like [i]the strong taking care of the weak[/i]. We are at the mercy of the dead who leave us with a culture, tools, language and history over which we have no control. Even in my lifetime I feel like I have had very little say over how my local park or streets are setup and organised; I have more control over my personal appearance than I do over my environment.
And yet sometimes I don’t even want to be free. I like being told what to do by someone else provided I trust them, they are accountable and take responsibility for their actions. Then they can free me up to concentrate of the things I care about.
[b]Our ability to turn constraints in to variables is incredible to me. I think what’s important is that it is easier to get to the top than it is to stay there.[/b] The biggest enemy is the status quo and the lack of choices.
One thing I am sure of is that a dictatorship, benevolent or not is no way to run a civilisation as is based on a control mentality, on the assumption that only one person can talk at a time. Now that we exist in a distributed world where you go online has little to do with where you were born or whether you can drive; where you go online is based on how much you care.
You don’t need to get on a train to go from Facebook to Twitter. You vote your with your time, we all get the same number of hours in a day and what you choose to do with yours is how you tell the world what you believe in and how you want to be represented.
I was inspired by one of my heroes, Jimmy Wales in his TED talk in 2007
[center]
[url=http://youtu.be/WQR0gx0QBZ4]http://youtu.be/WQR0gx0QBZ4[/url]
[/center][i]Wikipedia is a blend of Democracy, Aristocracy and Monarchy.
The majority view is not necessarily neutral.
Our passion is for the quality of the work not the processes that generate it.[/i]He talks about Wikipedia Democratic Process 16m40s - youtu.be/WQR0gx0QBZ4?t=16m40s
And this is one of my favourite Podcasts ever, Prof Robert Harrison talks with Josiah Ober on ancient Athenian democracy on [url=http://french-italian.stanford.edu/opinions/ober.html]Entitled Opinions[/url]
I still have a lot to learn about this so if anyone has any insights of thoughts I’d be really grateful if you could share with me, especially if anyone has anything on Anarchy for beginners, I’d really like to understand that better.
[/quote]I think we need to consider that democracy may not actually be a good form of governance for a project of this sort.
Democracy means that people vote, and the majority wins. But one might be tempted to ask oneself: Why should that be the case?
Will the majority implement the features voted on? No, obviously not. So why should they get to decide what gets worked on?
Instead let’s consider a different social structure: Capitalism. It’s based on the golden rule: Whoever has the gold makes the rules.
Why shouldn’t feature development work that way? We’ve got X amount of developer resources. I want feature Y, someone else wants feature Z. Who wins?
In my opinion, the guy who’s willing to put up the most cash should win… and guess what, he does, because he can hire the developers to get it implemented.
Then you have adoption, which works the same way: As a user am I going to accept a feature that won’t increase the value of my coin? No. So, again, the feature with the most money making potential gets adopted by the most people. Once you have a 51% consensus, you can do a hard fork, and the rest is history.
In my observations, this IS the way it works… not by democracy, and not by dictatorship, monarchy, union, tyranny, aristocracy, or monopoly. People pay for the things they want, either with their money or their time and effort, or both, and the population decides on it’s favor-ability with (or with a lack of) a consensus.
A lack of democratic process isn’t the problem here. It’s a lack of organization, transparency, and leadership that’s hurting the community and the value of the coin the most by not enabling a capitalistic process to emerge.
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[quote name=“chrisj” post=“28895” timestamp=“1379883527”]
Was Gavin Andreson, lead developer at Bitcoin, elected to his position?It would appear not:
[quote]
Nakamoto was active in making modifications to the Bitcoin software and posting technical information on the Bitcoin Forum until his contact with other Bitcoin developers and the community gradually began to fade in mid-2010. Until a few months before he left, almost all modifications to the source code were done by Satoshi â€" he accepted contributions relatively rarely. Just before he left, he set up Gavin Andresen as his successor by giving him access to the Bitcoin SourceForge project and a copy of the alert key.
[/quote]
Source: [url=http://incryptowetrust.com/who-is-satoshi-nakamoto/]http://incryptowetrust.com/who-is-satoshi-nakamoto/[/url]This is what I always thought anyway. Anyone know?
[/quote]No he definitely wasn’t. He, like ALL The other Bitcoin developers, [i][b]BOUGHT[/b][/i] himself into his position, capitalist style, by investing his time, effort, intelligence, expertise, and patience into the project… which directly equates to money.
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Gonna come back on this thread tomorrow… I couldn’t disagree with you more on this Kevlar. On nearly every point.
Big money buying power provides angles for immorality, corruption and destruction.
This will be a meaty one for me, so I will add it on the morrow. Watch this space.
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[quote name=“Kevlar” post=“28977” timestamp=“1379977889”]
[quote author=chrisj link=topic=3749.msg28895#msg28895 date=1379883527]
Was Gavin Andreson, lead developer at Bitcoin, elected to his position?It would appear not:
[quote]
Nakamoto was active in making modifications to the Bitcoin software and posting technical information on the Bitcoin Forum until his contact with other Bitcoin developers and the community gradually began to fade in mid-2010. Until a few months before he left, almost all modifications to the source code were done by Satoshi â€" he accepted contributions relatively rarely. Just before he left, he set up Gavin Andresen as his successor by giving him access to the Bitcoin SourceForge project and a copy of the alert key.
[/quote]
Source: [url=http://incryptowetrust.com/who-is-satoshi-nakamoto/]http://incryptowetrust.com/who-is-satoshi-nakamoto/[/url]This is what I always thought anyway. Anyone know?
[/quote]No he definitely wasn’t. He, like ALL The other Bitcoin developers, [i][b]BOUGHT[/b][/i] himself into his position, capitalist style, by investing his time, effort, intelligence, expertise, and patience into the project… which directly equates to money.
[/quote]Ok this is great, I feel like we are getting more constructive now. Can you show me like the perfect example of how an open source project is run that I can study so that I can get ideas for how we should run things here?
Thanks so much.
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[quote name=“Entimp” post=“28989” timestamp=“1379985115”]
Gonna come back on this thread tomorrow… I couldn’t disagree with you more on this Kevlar. On nearly every point.Big money buying power provides angles for immorality, corruption and destruction.
This will be a meaty one for me, so I will add it on the morrow. Watch this space.
[/quote]Awesome, I very much look forward to your reply. :)
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[quote name=“chrisj” post=“28994” timestamp=“1379992696”]
[quote author=Kevlar link=topic=3749.msg28977#msg28977 date=1379977889]
[quote author=chrisj link=topic=3749.msg28895#msg28895 date=1379883527]
Was Gavin Andreson, lead developer at Bitcoin, elected to his position?It would appear not:
[quote]
Nakamoto was active in making modifications to the Bitcoin software and posting technical information on the Bitcoin Forum until his contact with other Bitcoin developers and the community gradually began to fade in mid-2010. Until a few months before he left, almost all modifications to the source code were done by Satoshi â€" he accepted contributions relatively rarely. Just before he left, he set up Gavin Andresen as his successor by giving him access to the Bitcoin SourceForge project and a copy of the alert key.
[/quote]
Source: [url=http://incryptowetrust.com/who-is-satoshi-nakamoto/]http://incryptowetrust.com/who-is-satoshi-nakamoto/[/url]This is what I always thought anyway. Anyone know?
[/quote]No he definitely wasn’t. He, like ALL The other Bitcoin developers, [i][b]BOUGHT[/b][/i] himself into his position, capitalist style, by investing his time, effort, intelligence, expertise, and patience into the project… which directly equates to money.
[/quote]Ok this is great, I feel like we are getting more constructive now. Can you show me like the perfect example of how an open source project is run that I can study so that I can get ideas for how we should run things here?
Thanks so much.
[/quote]BitcoinJ [url=https://code.google.com/p/bitcoinj/]https://code.google.com/p/bitcoinj/[/url] Hibernate [url=http://hibernate.org]http://hibernate.org[/url]
Python [url=http://www.python.org]http://www.python.org[/url]
Drupal [url=https://drupal.org/]https://drupal.org/[/url]
Gnome [url=http://www.gnome.org/]http://www.gnome.org/[/url]
The Apache Software Foundation [url=http://www.apache.org]http://www.apache.org[/url]
MySQL [url=http://www.mysql.com/]http://www.mysql.com/[/url]
Ubuntu [url=https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ContributeToUbuntu]https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ContributeToUbuntu[/url]
Reddit [url=http://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev]http://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev[/url]
You should start with BitcoinJ as your example because it’s a great model for how to get started. It also happens to be run by Mike Hearn, the same guy who’s name is on BIP 0037, and the HTML5 spec for bitcoin: addresses.Make a check list of the things they have:
Wiki
Dev mailing list (open to the public, anyone can subscribe, anyone can post)
Formal process for pull request acceptance
Development homepage to tie it all together