Amentum GP and Founding Partner, Steven McKie, was just recently on Delphi Digital’s “Chain Reaction” podcast to discuss crypto fund investing and our thesis, with their Host, Tom Shaughnessy.
Delphi Digital delivers succinct and highly detailed research on the greater crypto ecosystem, and we were delighted at an opportunity to discuss our methods with their audience.
Links to the Episode 🎙
🎵Listen on iTunes
🎵Listen on Spotify
| Sep 26 | Public post | 2 |
I’ve personally been deep in crypto for many years now. Over this time I’ve amassed a multitude of perspectives on cryptocurrencies, specifically on how they should be architected, governed, and secured while being iteratively improved. This post is an attempt to aggregate these many thoughts into a single cogent resource that others can reference and use accordingly. I hope that these views are not exclusively my own — and I thank those who’ve provided me the fodder over the years, as this is an amalgamation of my many peers enlightened ideals.
There have been many discussions lately surrounding the topic of governance, specifically in regards to cryptocurrencies and how or who should dictate the guidance around a protocol’s improvement and architectural decision making.
In crypto, things move fast. One day we’re toying with the concept of crypto+the economics of protocols engineered with incentive mechanisms (which we aptly dubbed, “cryptoeconomics”). And now, with the emergence of new blockchain-based systems that seek to rewrite the rules of “governance”, and others attempting to merge wet-organic rule-making — that is typically laden with governance — with software, these discussions have amplified greatly.
A sound blockchain, one that is scalable, architected using modern software best-practices, built on the most popular languages - blockchains with multiple, working consensus-aware implementations, with the capability to be used in a general purpose manner is a big enough challenge in and of itself altogether. Now, imagine concurrently working to add new features, too. Sound hard? These challenges, as arduous as they may appear, only account for a small portion of governance altogether.
I propose that good governance doesn’t just mean more features; it means cohesive decision making about the features the global community (or a localized population) wants (or needs), in a both a timely and efficient manner.
This decision making — ideally — would be derived from diverse, disparate groups or entities, with various motives and perspectives (foundations/cooperatives, funds, private company researchers). In its ideal form, these motives and varied perspectives would be loosely-coupled from one another, while being tightly-coupled to the sustainable well-being of the protocol itself.
Through their concerted efforts, cooperation and decision-making can be achieved, collectively, and action can be taken accordingly when necessary to ensure the integrity of the blockchain. Because governance and social consensus takes time, and is an emergent property, you want to ensure you create a sound ecosystem that can interoperate well to perceive that emergent consensus & signaling.
The structure I will outline makes three assumptions on the basic foundations a decentralized software ecosystem needs to grow sustainably, and to remain efficiently flexible, while also not being wholly programmatic with regards to on-chain governance:
[Researchers and Private Companies] The protocol needs maintainers, as it must be improved iteratively, so as to be sustainable long-term; those engineers will have a highly-specialized skill set that will need to evolve overtime. The only purpose for these entities is long-term sustainability, and low-level scientific research that continually pushes the protocol to the bleeding-edge (i.e. Starkware).
[Foundations/Cooperatives/Open Source Communities] The protocol needs developers, therefore it needs to incentivize its participants to improve upon it, research, evangelize, and educate others to eventually become core protocol maintainers and developers. They aid in the facilitation of developer conferences, outreach, and maintaining technical documentation, while educating the community on technical roadmaps and improvements.
[Hedge Funds and VC] The protocol needs market speculators and entrepreneurs; capital allocators whose sole purpose is taking the wealth and the tools created, and reinvesting them back into the ecosystem. These protocol capital allocators and speculators play the important role of growing the ecosystem, so it can support a growing developer base — which eventually equates to more highly-specialized engineers researching or creating private companies.
Now that we understand what some of the core pillars of maintaining a decentralized open-source software system are, let’s begin to wrap our heads around what obstacles exist currently for blockchain-related systems.
When you begin to think about building the best forms of governance, what you first want to ask yourself is “Will my change/system add complexity to the greater decision-making process?”. But, how does one go about determining that?
For most crypto-related systems, off-protocol decision making (layer 0) directly attenuates outward to the other layers, whether we want it to or not. Decisions made in key software engineering collaboration forums (i.e. GitHub, sub-Reddits, technical forums and at developer conferences) play the largest role in determining governance around layer 1 (the consensus mechanism layer, i.e. Casper FFG) and eventually, layer 2 (additional substrates built off the root-chain in layer 1, i.e. State Channels/Lightning).
As you move outward, the number of parties and decision makers becomes fewer, because the layers become more loosely-coupled from the protocol itself as you move up into the additional layers. These are emergent structures (layer 2) that utilize the root-chain itself to provide cryptographic assurances of trust, and allow a chain to scale to new use-cases, without affecting the integrity of the root consensus mechanism (layer 1).
When making changes to the overall blockchain stack (here’s an excellent breakdown of that from the team at Mechanism Labs), there are many considerations to be made.
Borrowing from Mechanism Lab’s post, here’s how changes can be categorized when making determinations on what parameters will be improved in a blockchain, and it’s effect on the system itself:
Notice how governance is just one part of how you can modularly improve cryptocurrencies. The only difference is good governance makes augmenting or improving all the other listed parameters far more easy if the processes and stakeholders are appropriately managed.
A Sustainable Crypto Trilemma
To more appropriately align a blockchain-based ecosystem for success, there are various factors that work in tandem to maintain the communities at large — stakeholders, in a more traditional sense.
The stakeholders in a decentralized ecosystem are tricky, because given low switching costs, the general community members can easily move on to “the next big thing” with a few clicks on their local exchange. That said, in order to create a sticky network effect, you have to be very aware of the early contributors and how they’ll eventually scale and mature as the blockchain itself does as well.
This leads us to what I like to call “McKie’s Triangle” (someone said you can’t name your own figures, and I say shove your rules…anyways). This triangle is a figurative illustration of the balancing act that various groups play in a maturing crypto ecosystem.
McKie’s Triangle (in reference to blockchain-based systems) can be defined as followed:
There exists a trilemma when maintaining a public chain protocol, one that requires a multitude of entities working separately in tandem to sustain the protocol itself. Protocol advancement, community stability and growth, as well as speculative and long term value creation, all play major roles in creating a funnel of participants into each of the various groups to maintain a public chain system.
In order to maintain this balance, you want to have loosely coupled entities focused on the key components of pushing a blockchain-based system forward, while remaining tightly coupled to the protocols longevity and sustainability itself.
Each facet offers a different improvement to the network, as illustrated below:
As depicted by the figure above, speculative value creation, community growth, and protocol advancement all play into eachother. Speculation creates new opportunity; community stability creates a fertile ground for developer resources; and protocol advancement adds to the resiliency of the blockchain itself, allowing the system to improve itself iteratively (and most importantly, securely).
When designing cryptoeconomic mechanisms, too, there are many design decisions that must be considered, showing just how important it is to maintain a diversity of thought early-on. That starts with creating a foundation that can easily and readily support those mechanisms.
Programmatic governance, governance naturally derived from blockchain based systems (those with standard Proof of Work sybil-filters, and byzantine fault tolerant consensus mechanisms), enable us to create root chains and an anchor of trust; one that allows us a redundant basis by which to build more complex, interoperable systems (whether that is through Layer 2 solutions like Lightning, Generalized State Channels, Sidechains, etc).
Generalized computational platforms, such as Ethereum, allow you to build the core consensus logic in such a way, that extendability and rich functionality moves up into the additional layers of the stack (i.e. Layer 2). This means DApps or tokens built atop Ethereum are loosely coupled enough such that if you were building a mission critical applications, as long as the core root layer is truly decentralized and secure, you can experiment with a myriad of different combinations of centralized and decentralized services on top, without disturbing the other users of the chain. This allows for ample speculative opportunity, as well as more fertile beds to create new developers (which ultimately aids the long-term feedback loop).
Now that we understand the structures that are needed for loosely-coupled governance, let’s briefly discuss the importance of experimentation and support for flexible changes to governance structures to meet the needs of a dynamic, ever-evolving populace.
Like an organism, social orders grows and expands based on what its fed, and flexibility is important for security and growth. Loosely-coupled network topologies have existed in theory, but have only recently been capable of existing sustainably in the wild amongst adversarial conditions (i.e. Bitcoin, Ethereum).
However, when we move to make improvements to those systems (either layer 0 or 1), or build new ones atop (layer 2), the ethos of decentralization should hold true — and they too should possess the same resilience (when architected appropriately).
Modular componentization of service structures creates innate flexibility and creates further extendability for social and economic structures and services; especially those that seek to serve global audiences with various different niche needs and expectations.
Systems that depend on a root chain for fraud proofs and stability are more resilient to tragedy of the commons (low cost to switch, little risk to join); it also aids in the avoidance of monopolistic plutocratic governance models where decisions are tightly coupled to fixed entity sets.
Blockchains are governance. Therefore there must exist embedded checks and balances, otherwise individuals will secede from the union, so to speak, in the form of hardforks (great post on this, here). This comparison between programmatic governance that is non-contentious can be analogous to the tenants outlined formally in the U.S. constitution. Of which, our current laws are built and interpreted — flexible, freedom expanding governance, derived from words written on paper (held in place by the imagined order that is the United States of America).
Think of loosely-coupled applications and systems built atop these root chains as individual cities and states. Where, if a citizen deems a certain state insufficient to their needs or liberties, they can easily move to another that is more sufficient for their well-being.
What we are seeing here, is the slow evolution from States that are tightly-coupled to legal entities (Federal governments) to the dependence on state-machines built on blockchains that can provide you the utility and access to services you deem most useful to your personal independence, similar if not better than those of the existing legacy state.
Understanding the importance of loosely-coupled statehood is important in realizing my next point which is in regards to mining cartels and collusion.
When you have a decentralized protocol with a novel PoW (i.e. SHA256, ETHHash, Equihash, etc), it’s important that the core security of that system — especially initially — has the flexibility and time to maintain as much distributed support globally as possible.
Ethereum and ZCash saw the formation of major mining entities and acted accordingly when developing their PoW algorithms. Now, with the proliferation of mining economies of scale, the barrier to entry for new chains is even higher given the potential onslaught of miners throwing cash to develop ASICs for every new major asset based on some substantial/reasonably secure cryptographic hashing algorithm.
The folks from the Sia team did a very thorough analysis on this that outlines this potentiality with the formation of mining cartels, here.
An excerpt that sums up things quickly from the Sia team:
“We know of mining farms that are willing to pay millions of dollars for exclusive access to designs for specific cryptocurrencies. Even low ranking cryptocurrencies have the potential to make millions in profits for someone with exclusive access to secret ASICs. As a result, an informal underground industry has been set up around secret mining. The heavy amount of secrecy involved means it’s disconnected and mostly operates off of rumor and previous relationships.”
If a miner controls an economy of scale (i.e. PoW hardware manufacturing), they ultimately control the liquidity/velocity flow of the State/Federal level cryptos that are derived from those root chains, given a lack of market competition. Therefore, direct influence over said monopolistic entities are then tightly-coupled to future tokenized cities/states, which means that entire political-monetary interfaces, globally, if adopted and built upon, could be centralizing governance in ways many might not immediately realize — until it’s too late.
Many of us have exclaimed for years that PoS (Proof of Stake) was one of the only ways forward. An early lead in crypto PoW mining allowed the earlier miners to take advantage of inefficiencies that PoW assets provided them, entrenching their competitive advantage through economies of scale.
Hardforks, secret mining cartels and more have exasperated this further, with the help of geopolitical pressures, access to cheap manufacturing, energy, and brigading to prevent new competitive entrants, it continually compounds. The best way forward would be to reduce the dependency on PoW and hybridize more systems with periodic PoS validations to slowly stymie the IV drip of PoW mining profits to major miner manufacturers (PoS researcher Vlad Zamfir has been a big proponent of this, historically).
The decentralization of mining can be made more competitive, faster, if we make it more advantageous for the growth of new outfits that compete on par with current incumbents given continued in-protocol limitations and improvements that further distribute that power and financial upside outward.
There needs to be a balance for PoW to scale now between new manufacturing entrants, infusion of fresh capital, and back room trade deals pushing PoW to decentralize globally at this point in the growth of our nascent industry, for things to continue to proceed smoothly.
One major point of note: These large mining entities know that PoW won’t be their ace card forever. They’ve diversified with masternodes on various upcoming/existing chains, and have PoW/PoS agnostic pools for this very purpose to ensure their network effects and influence grows and/or sustains for the long-term. Tread carefully.
Some of the prime conditions for market collusion in oligopolistic markets can be described as:
Number of Active Firms: The greater the concentration of major market participants in an industry, the higher the incentives are to collude (to boost profits in a highly-competitive market). This ensures there are greater profits, while at the same time distributing those profits to fewer firms.
Informational Transparency: Given a transparent market with perfect information, it becomes easier to ensure that firms participating in collusion are following the agreed upon strategy. Collusion is more difficult in industries where its harder to detect changes in a firm’s prices or output; due to the nature of cryptocurrencies, however, the majority of all this information is easily accessible and quantifiable.
Multimarket Contact and Coopetition: If miners compete for hashrate in more than one blockchain, collusive agreements become even more stable and scalable. Firms that compete together in many markets can establish multi-trigger strategies that can be applied to these markets — which when combined with control and influence over exchanges and stable-assets — creates an even more sustainable and devastating strategy for non-participating market competitors.
When you expand beyond PoW to other more experimental consensus mechanisms like EOS’s dPoS, things get even more interesting. However, that falls outside the scope of this essay — we did a light analysis of how we thought EOS would play out, here (spoiler: we were right). We’d also suggest this post by Vitalik Buterin on plutocracy, and this tweet thread by Nick Szabo.
Social primitives, or the shared common beliefs of the participants of a system, will fall redundantly to the lowest common denominator in times of social and political duress. In crypto and Blockchain-based systems, that is codified trust and entropy — Proof of Work (or Proof of Stake/hybrid systems).
Systems built on technical foundations that serve as bad behavioral black holes means that overtime — through motivations of grandeur and greed — participants in that system will inevitably trend towards those norms as a means to acquire more resources as a means to concentrate wealth, compounded over the lifetime of the chain (much like how if the most successful of individuals attended college, and worked 40hrs a week, the majority will follow that trend until that system becomes unsustainable, because that wealth creation practice is a zero-sum game, on a long enough time-scale).
The trustless and decentralized technical components of cryptocurrencies dont just serve a use because they’re fast, fair, secure and efficient — they also promote similar tenants outwardly into what’s eventually built on top on the additional substrates via layer 2 and various other forms of middleware.
Lack of ambiguity over an agreed upon state (either meatspace organic or a patricia trie) builds externalized trust overtime as history moves forward and participants mature with the system itself, whether it’s religious structure and an agreed upon social state of norms, or a financial one like a centralized monetary system. Studies have shown that when there is a lack of ambiguity around trust, people are more apt to cooperate efficiently — governance via blockchain-based systems allow the creation and proliferation of those trust-less systems..
We want to avoid the further entrenchment of centralized bodies like banks and governments who may seek to leverage blockchain-based technologies to harden and further push their ulterior strategies and advance their control further. Central banks and governments will be some of the first participants seeking to garner this control (i.e. the Venezuelan Petro token), automating their control.
Decentralized marketplaces and prediction markets (see the drama around Augur killing their kill-switch) could serve to empower criminal activities more, but it’s my firm belief that positive use-cases of crypto outweigh the negative, and try as you might, criminals are going to attempt to leverage systems to increase their own wealth — they’ll just have to get more creative (and technically proficient).
That’s why it’s important we continue to grow our network of subject matter experts and protocol-level researchers who are competent to provide us the insights and innovations to steer this ship as it sails forward, with the winds of good-faith effort, using the structures and initiatives I described earlier.
Our challenge as a growing industry is for us to find a way to extract the good that technology and new social systems can afford us, without enslaving ourselves to their potentially burdensome by-products or dystopic perspectives.
The overall Ethereum community shows a good faith effort towards this with the Ethereum Magicians initiative as they work to improve their layer 0 governance structure; I think this is a vector of decentralization that all major public chains should research as a community.
If we can work to follow similar guidelines as I’ve described, perhaps we will realize that vision many of us possess of a truly connected P2P society. By solving scaling and interoperability, our most powerful and prolific machines can be decentralized in nature. Loosely-coupled, dynamic, hyper-localized networks that provide storage and interoperably-linked computation to everyone with a connected device.
By tokenizing novel, human-meaningful systems, we can grow and mature these tokenized ecosystems more efficiently, while allowing other individuals the range and right to tokenize their own innate skills, interest, and self-actualize through their own passions.
With the rise of tokenized ecosystems, blockchain-based governance, and a focus on speculative value creation and capture, we can build to make humanity unstoppable, and resilient, while making us more capable of resisting violent power structures. This protects our long-term viability with the creation of new redundant systems that enable us to more easily bounce back from major catastrophic events.
The thermodynamics of the human economy and the creation of value and money has reversed in the favor of human independence and self-actualization; rather than live in world where you are a liability, burdened with the need to create more output than you consume inputs — the very blockchain-based systems you interact with and join in the future will allow you to move from a liability, to an asset where value flows to you from your individual inputs — allowing you the capability to truly be free.
| 2 |
| Aug 25 | Public post |
In a previous post, we went over the concepts surrounding the emergent governance processes present in the communities and expansion of major crypto-assets like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and ZCash. It is of utmost importance that when designing and analyzing decentralized systems, one understands functionally the concept of emergence. Maintaining complex systems of varying stakeholders can be difficult with so many moving parts, personalities, and communities, so it is essential that incentives work correctly from the ground up.
Forms of governance inevitably change and evolve, especially at scale. However, the static institutions that comprise robust governance (specifically in crypto) must be resilient, and able to adapt to perturbations. Whether that is through the direct will of a collective body of legal persons, or through the actions of other emergent processes, adaptivity and liveness through various forms of rigor determines a system’s future lifecycle. This path dependency is crucial, as the present state of the system, and its past, are what help a complex system to be less chaotic over time as it weathers the stresses of the market.
Hayek, for instance, was interested in showing that institutions need not be designed in order to be effective. Institutions such as language and free markets are effective even when they are not under direct authoritative control. They arise naturally, emerging in response to common human problems, and have a tendency to self-optimize (for example, languages add vocabulary to communicate new ideas, and markets identify new situations which in exchange enhances welfare). He called these kinds of institutions “spontaneous order” and contrasted them with centralized government institutions that try to design complex systems in detail and from the top down. Governments, he rightly argued, do not integrate information as well as spontaneously ordered systems.
But there are two ways of looking at institutions. One way is to look at individual institutions, such as the Spanish language or the Australian government. A second way is to look at classes of institutions, such as “language”, and “government”. Every “class” of institutions looks like a case of spontaneous order: After all, government as such seems to repeatedly “spontaneously” arise in human society, just like markets and language. Conversely, individual instances of the same spontaneously-arising classes of institutions can be quite fragile, and often fail spectacularly to integrate necessary information. For example, even if language as such lasts forever, particular languages routinely evolve something entirely different, or else pass from use. Likewise, spontaneously arising governments, markets, and economies frequently fail to integrate needed information, resulting in their own collapse.
That’s why we think the Hayekian worry about centralization, planning, and non-spontaneous order really hinges on the concept of authority. By concentrating authority over a complex system in some person or persons, institutions involving authority (not only governments) can create a sort of information-bandwidth choke-point — leaving an otherwise stable system gasping for spontaneity so it may evolve.
Authority is a form of spontaneous order. We won’t get rid of it, because it solves coordination problems. But we can restructure it, in making it more information-rich and legitimate. Blockchain systems promise to enable this by making authority more shared and participatory. Here are a few criteria for the emergence of healthy, flexible authority in emergent blockchain-based institutions:
Democracy
Systems aren’t fully participatory / legitimate / responsive if they aren’t democratic.
Democratic systems allow people to form rich, responsible identities by giving them participation in power.
But democratic functioning depends upon (among other things), privacy:
Democratic systems permit authority to be legitimized by the active input and consent of the governed. But, of course, democratic mechanisms can be information-rich or information-poor. Voting processes that distort or compress information from voters do a worse job at this than processes that transmit high-resolution information and encourage maximally active participation from a greater majority of those actively being governed.
Identity
People cannot vote in a democratic system unless they know that other participants are real, unique, and accountable. But it is insufficient.
Power should be shared socially, not only resting with the individual
Traditionally, we think of the individual as a unit/agent inside a democratic systems. This is not a bad place to start, but it is increasingly important to consider groups and networks as having their own kinds of interests and being unique constituents of sound democratic processes. The simplest way of understanding why is simply to acknowledge that in many cases individuals do not really act as individuals. They make their decisions under the influence of social pressures, they have genuine concern and empathy for others, and they may even collude. All of these are cases where voters are not specifically “thinking for themselves”. Democratic systems need to acknowledge these non-individual interests and make political decisions about whether they should have a seat at the table, and why.
Hard Privacy
Privacy enables people to vote privately, thus exercising their judgment in steering institutions without being influenced by others. This is important because where there is collusion and pressure, we aren’t getting the full sum of all participants’ intellectual contribution or political honesty. Privacy also enables the kind of important activity that takes place within democratically governed institutions. For example, people may wish to transact or converse anonymously. These things should be possible. And, in an information rich democracy, people have to be able to feel safe so they may eventually converge on a solution, or organize to take action against a tyrannical force.
Related to identity, privacy is a necessary but insufficient tool to incentivize voters to “think for themselves”. After all, where there is collusion or pressure, voting processes aren’t really enjoying the full benefit of the participants’ participation. Privacy makes collusion and pressure harder to orchestrate at scale, curbing the efforts of malicious parties by making identity verification to punish less likely.
Interoperability
In order to build these kinds of rich emergent institutions, we need architectures that allow people to verify certain aspects of their identities (while obscuring others), dynamically and flexibly. This is necessary to verify key facts such as voting eligibility and uniqueness, without revealing other aspects of identity that we desire to keep private. That means a lot of important institutional activities will need to take place in zero-knowledge black boxes, and it is likely that independent identity protocols will need to evolve to allow identity information from one system to port over to another.
The extensibility and generality of a rich democratic system enables and sustains the growth of spontaneous emergence, allowing a system to socially evolve to more greatly benefit the needs of those acting as free citizens.
Institutional Evolution
Over time, our conceptions of identity in a democratic system will continue to evolve. The hastening pace of technology assures that sound governmental systems focused on fair participation and outreach will never remain static for long. Cryptographic assurances of privacy and democracy allow for continued innovation and reinvention of what it means to be a free citizen in a functioning democracy. Though you may be able to grant others access, or insights into your collective identity and political perspective, our unique digital identities deserve their own rights and protections against undue influence.
Services such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are prime examples of centralized institutions that individuals presently permit to influence their democratic experience. We trade them information for access to their platforms, sometimes at the expense of subtle but important personal freedoms.
The importance of privacy in a centralized world of permission-less digital authority must not be understated. The growth and expansion of machine-learning and A.I. related tools will make it more difficult to rein in and protect the integrity of your own digital identity. Keeping your data away from the hands of unwanted institutions that may seek to influence your future freedoms is extremely important in maintaining personal sovereignty. That means strong privacy is a must when constructing systems that will expand spontaneously overtime. As the evolution of institutions continues, their need to directly harbor your data publicly, without your permission, should slowly perish.
Your personally identifiable data points hold value and power. Strong privacy assures that both individuals and groups can retain control of their identities, making them productive and empowered members of a fair society.
By: Steven McKie and Matthew Prewitt
| Jul 30 | Public post | 1 |
Often in the day-to-day mumblings around crypto, especially in the Ethereum community, the conversations around governance continually evolve.
Now that more literature has become available on the topic [1, 2, 3, 4], we must strive to continue to dive deeper into these discussions around privacy, governance, and community; doing so concurrently, while deriving the appropriate norms to more aptly achieve our goals of decentralization, collectively.
Whether you’re an investor, engineer, or a retail speculator on the sidelines, you have to respect the second order desire for all of us to somehow build resilient, trust-less systems that stem from our deep infatuation with spreading the ethos and concepts of decentralization.
To do so requires apt and timely communication that is delivered from diverse groups of stakeholders, consistently, to the appropriate parties, in order to distill these perspectives to the generalized public.
Note: The Systems Bible is an entertaining read for anyone interested to an introduction to systems project management
My project management teacher in college stressed over and over to “be here now”, and focus on the task at hand. Only by being present, can you truly listen, and effectively communicate with vital stakeholders (both technical and business) to see a project to its successful fruition.
In technical project management, there are a lot of moving parts. We’re all building machines, but we ourselves are not mechanical, and we need fluid communication to ensure milestones are completed in an efficient and timely manner. When working to build decentralized, distributed systems, this becomes even more difficult with all the diverse stakeholders at play. It’s a game of mass social coordination — one now aided by incentives presented by public blockchains.
But, there are rules when we have to coordinate on the social layer to enact our grand technical visions on a massive scale. To ignore these norms and strategic methods to making a team cohesive, means you’ll either have to learn to implement these skills on-the-fly in the future, or never get the chance due to almost assured failure.
Organizational Behavior 401
We’ve discussed governance in the form of blockchains, emergent governance, DAOs and the usefulness of programmatic assistance when coordinating groups and motives, but what about the most basic of norms and strategies for aligning groups to complete localized goals?
Have you ever heard of the concepts of “forming”, “storming”, and “norming”? If not, you’ll definitely want to. In short, it’s described as the natural process any group goes through when adjusting for performance upon initial formation. A new formation (forming) of highly exposed public facing devs may cause drama while things storm (tumultuous period of establishing common practices and communication), and eventually normalizing those into methods to be cohesive on a regular basis (norming). It’s an emergent phenomenon that every group goes through. And, no group is exempt from this process; it’s simply a model of how people engage and interact.
When going through these phases, clear and concise communication is paramount, as imprecisions in language are typically what causes humans to work together ineffectively.
And like real governance, social governance should move slowly. You want a slow and rigorous process of checks and balances so a tyrant can’t reign in control and inflict damage on your governmental norms and legal procedures. This is a feature that ensures tyrants can’t disassemble precious social norms and inflict societal damage on a populace, and is a part of making sure the citizens’ (or users) stay in control at all times.
Fig. 1: The scale of social governance and distributed coordination can be visualized as notated above. Citizens in control means they are empowered to make choices (ideal); citizens who are given symbolic powers, but officers of the law and decisions are still made without them, are mostly just consultants to the incumbent political forces. Once the citizen has no power (bottom of the scale), they become subject to manipulation.
Let’s now get to root of how this is all done, so we can make note of how to best establish the norms necessary for further social scalability. Let’s break it down into sections for what’s most important to remember:
Participation: Individuals participate in systems in variable ways, and they should seek to act together. And the support of independent community interests should be funded and supported. Important so the individual isn’t disillusioned to their real capability or power, even if participation is limited by function.
Entrenchment & On-boarding: Many systems can struggle to sustain due to the inadequate construction of initiating individuals into a group. Without this initial engagement, eventually social trust erodes.
Control: When creating decentralized systems, we must decide how little or how much control to allot to others. This means deciding where on the ladder in Fig 1. you wish to place your eventual citizens/users.
Granted Powers: Participants must then of course understand their power and abilities, else they can’t exercise them. You cannot fear loss of control, power must be distributed evenly from the start so it doesn’t appear a scarce resource worth capturing.
Defined Roles & Practices: The participants in your system must then know their individual roles, given their granted powers, and what is ultimately expected of them as a practitioner maintain your open source system.
Stakeholders & Community: You must engage with, and actively maintain your community to continue to onboard new users to grant the power of controlling your system so it may scale outward. Everyone who participates in a system will not do so equally, so you must understand who holds the most influence (in crypto this is technical developers writing code/specs).
Partnerships: These partnerships can come from anywhere, and should not be confused with stakeholders and community. They are outside parties with mutually beneficial interests (think public assets, and the exchanges that list them and provide liquidity). All the partners don’t have to contribute equally, but they do have to trust and share the commitment of those building your community.
Commitment: You cannot let apathy get the best of your growing system. People must commit to achieving some goal (often communicated via memes in crypto). If people seem apathetic to your proposals in your community of stakeholders, it’s likely they don’t relate to the interests of those formalizing them. This is why diverse community engagement and growth is crucial.
Group Accountability: The concept of “not invented here, not accepted here”, is very prevalent in technical communities of developers. To reduce the likelihood of this zero-sum group-think, practice running many different workshops and events to think through hard problems presented to the community and attest to their practicality. This allows the community to slowly negotiate with others as to whats deemed acceptable when compared against an existing framework of organically constructed community norms.
Confidence: To tie all of the above concepts together, you need people capable of delivering these visions in your community. In crypto, this is again the aptitude of the low-level developers you have actively participating in their roles. Your stakeholders need to feel confident in everyones’ ability to deliver on their accepted milestones. The ability to make complex decisions and integrate them in a moving system does not happen overnight. These norms are honed and learn in time, by utilizing best-practices.
Keeping the above in mind is just the beginning of understanding the key parts of organization at scale. There are other best-practices you can employ as well.
Here are some other other tips to improve upon your social coordination methodology, and increase your propensity for success.
Public discussions with community stakeholders with wide variety of interests are great for improving participation in a fledging community. But remember, a conference panel limits major discussion points, who can speak, and only address some of the perspectives of community members in the audience. Use them wisely and strategically. Stick to purpose-built events for more engaged discussions on specific matters.
Know who’s accountable, and make sure they have the skills to deliver. Important not to just give power to those who have too much responsibility, and/or lack the ability to deliver, simply because they appear best for the job on paper.
Recognize that volunteer groups that formalize outside of your core community are important. However, they will possess their own agendas, budgets, and motives. They should not be seen as mere neutral “helpers”. Ensure to empower the volunteer orgs that are deemed healthy after checking your sources, and utilize their expertise where you can.
Understand that subject matter experts are merely consultants, and do not represent the full voice of your stakeholders and community members. And, those experts may also not feel comfortable being seen as representatives of a whole community (think Ethereum core developers).
When employing the use of outside consultants to help educate or come to consensus on a future matter to be deployed, make sure the consultants’ purpose and power is clear, and there exists healthy boundaries between them and your stakeholders in the community. Encourage them to ask difficult questions that others may not have thought to inquire, and make sure that whoever employs these consultants can deliver on integrating their feedback, to avoid community unrest if social sentiment trends towards others complaining of stagnation in its implementation.
Do not downplay an opportunity to consult subject matter experts as consultants when a project’s success may depend on it. To excuse that opportunity may have future consequences, with multipliers too. If skipping SME consultation is absolutely necessary, explain the constraints why clearly (to the whole community), and produce an educational resource for those that may miss those points so they can have a crash course. This helps ensure smooth social consensus.
This essay will hopefully serve as a future resource for anyone trying to wrap their heads around decentralized communities, and how to best govern their community of granted stakeholders more effectively. Sound governance processes and procedures should be met with equal efforts in employing structured and sensible community governance standards.
By: Steven McKie
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CEO of Amentum, Steven McKie, was recently on a string of podcasts in a continued effort to educate others on the deeper fundamentals of how crypto works.
He provides context on a social level, as well as what it takes to master the innate technical complexity when investing in this new disruptive asset class.
The “POV Crypto” Podcast: A popular independent podcast interviewing developers and investors in the crypto industry.
Arca’s “Baselayer” Podcast: A family office focused firm with a podcast focused on crypto investing.
🎵: Spotify Link
🎵: Podbean Link
🎵: iTunes Link
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