Building trustworthy and trusted communities

Governance
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Hey everyone!

It’s Ben- researcher in Mina Foundation’s protocol governance team :wave:

We continue to share our research on key governance concepts, principles and best practices.

This is the first in a series of blogposts that explores themes about trust.

Trust is essential to societal cooperation; without it, society doesn’t function. Crypto systems are ‘trustless’ to the extent that they do not need trusted intermediaries to implement and enforce their rules. However, trust is not eliminated since we still need to trust various groups of people and organisations who are responsible for the protocol and defining its rules.

This raises the question: how can we ensure this ‘social layer’ remains trustworthy to maintain confidence in the protocol? How can it be prevented from acting in untrustworthy ways that could undermine confidence in the protocol? How could demonstrating the trustworthiness of this social layer confer crypto communities with a competitive advantage?

We welcome any initial feedback on this draft before we publish it shortly!

For example, some questions to consider:

  • We propose key principles for trustworthiness, including transparency; comprehensibility; verifiability; and shared values and visions. What other principles do you think are relevant?
  • We also present a case study that highlights assumptions about crypto systems and the trust placed in their social layer. What do you think about this case study and the assumptions it reveals?
  • What assumptions does the community make about the trust placed in Mina’s social layer?

Please feel free to provide comments in the document linked above as you read or leave messages directly here in MinaResearch. We are planning to publish this blogpost next week so feedback before then would be great!

Best wishes

Ben

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Hey Ben, love the topic of the essay! Trust is a super important concept with respect to protocol governance, especially in the context of Mina’s ‘httpz’ mission.

I have 3 pieces of (hopefully) constructive feedback:

  1. It may add value to explore the relationship between trust in a system and the existence of a “social contract” among participants. Beyond the obvious comparison this draws between blockchains and modern nation states, this perspective could help explain the foundations on which ecosystems such as Mina are built (i.e. how certain blockchains are able to attract large amounts of financial capital, as well as facilitate global human coordination). This could also help introduce and explore the question: is trust a means or an end (and to what end)?

  2. I think the LUNA case study could be strengthened a bit by briefly describing the “so what?” To do this, it could be helpful to think about the following questions:

  • How was LUNA — in many people’s opinion, a fraudulent project — able to attract so much “trust” (ie money)? In general, what is the relationship between money and trust?
  • What implications did the LUNA case have on the rest of the crypto industry/other blockchain projects such as Mina?
  • How do we avoid similar cases in the future (i.e. how to change the way we generate and allocate trust)?
  1. A final thought for your next piece: you may also consider exploring the interaction between the concept of trust and other values that the wider crypto community values, such as decentralization, censorship-resistance, permissionlessness, etc. I think Vitalik’s older post on Legitimacy is a good place to start here.
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Greetings All,
I wonder if the community will consider a constitution and a constitutional committee to ratify all governance actions as a way to ensure trust. Cardano governance has followed this path.

Ben’s article mentions that Bitcoin was built as a response to central bank corruption.
In fact the Bitcoin genesis block makes reference to this purpose.

The scam all central banks are running is to take a commodity (in the past this was gold) and turn it into receipt money, then fractional money, and then disassociate the receipt from the commodity which makes the currency fiat. Then the central banks can print as much money as they want because there is no commodity backing the receipt.

Currently, Bitcoin is under attack from the central banks and BlackRock via the ETF.

  • With BlackRocks new Bitcoin ETF we are now seeing the conversion of Bitcoin from commodity to fiat.
    This video queued up at the relevant time shows one scenario of which the central banks have many.
    You can see in the video that BlackRock maintains the option to choose which fork of Bitcoin they will honor.
    Basically, BlackRock maintains custody of customers Bitcoin - Now Bitcoin is receipt money not a commodity.
    Now BlackRock can take in more Bitcoin investment than it holds and lend it out - Now Bitcoin is fractional money.
    Finally, BlackRock starts a panic by making investors aware that there is not enough Bitcoin to cover all investors.
    Blackrock saves the day by forking Bitcoin with some changes that allow Blackrock to print more Bitcoin. - Now Bitcoin is Fiat money.
    Extra surprise! Bitcoin is now a CBCD and government (really the central banks) decide who can access it.

The linked section of Beemocracy as some information on this topic and proposes some constitutional amendments to protect the Mina project from central bank attacks.

Mina governance also seems to be leaning toward governance by randomly selected juries or committees as a way to establish trust. The beginning of Beemocracy discusses some ways this might be accomplished.

Also, I should mention that the Internet Archive’s WayBack machine has been under an intensive DDOS attack since October 8th. This makes difficult if not impossible to determine when Government and NGOs are changing policy and what those changes are. So immutable documentation is essential for trust. Some ideas for immutable documentation are also discussed in this section of Beemocracy at this link.

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Hi @samccarthy27
Thanks so much for your post

Comments 1 and 3- we’re on the same page. I’m already thinking about a future post to explore legitimacy and constitutions, so could explore social contract ideas there. Please do share any relevant literature to draw on!

Comment 2- thanks for these steers to sharpen the analysis.

I’ll also chew over your prompt about trust as a means or an end (and to what end). For me, trust is a means to achieving societal cooperation, so I make this point more clearly.

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Hi @johnshearing
Ditto as my comment to Sam above- watch this space for a future discussion about constitutions and legitimacy etc!
Re: leaning toward governance by randomly selected juries or committees. Would this establish trust? Or what kinds of trust would it presuppose?

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Thanks @BenK ,

I would expect that randomly selected juries in mina governance would instill the same kind of trust we give to trials buy randomly selected juries of our peers in civil and criminal trials as opposed to verdicts decided by appointed judges.

Also the fact that nature has selected for something close to random juries or committees when in debate and deliberation for new home selection in honey bee colonies, makes me think that this idea produces the best possible collective decisions. I map nature’s endorsement of citizen juries in the bee colony onto the idea of trustworthiness.

Now that I think about it, we have seen in the recent U.S. election that huge numbers of citizens have put their trust in citizen journalism on X.com over main stream legacy media. When looking at this video of bee democracy, it is easy to see the parallels to citizen journalism. So we are seeing not only are random citizens in the bee colony making the decisions, but also that random citizens are collecting the information which is used to make the decisions. Clearly humans are starting to do the same.

These are the three types of trust that random citizen juries or committees evoke in me.

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Thanks @johnshearing
On your last point- there may well be a move to citizen journalism over mainstream legacy media, and this could be interpreted as a signal for moving towards bee democracy.
However, would you have arrived at the same conclusion decades ago when trust in mainstream legacy media may have been greater?
Or is the move to citizen journalism due to us now having the digital means for it rather than because trust in mainstream legacy media may have been reduced?

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Thanks @BenK, I appreciate the question.

I built this device (the privatekeyvault) for crypto-journalism back in 2017 and open sourced the build instructions, source code, and laser cutter files in 2018.

As I wrote back in 2018, Crypto-journalism is citizen journalism where anyone can safely create a journalistic body of work and prove that they authored the entire work and that it has not been tampered with all while allowing the author to remain anonymous if he or she so chooses.

I can tell you from personal experience that this tech didn’t just appear, but rather I created it specifically because citizen journalists who contradicted the state’s mainstream media narrative were being jailed, and some even killed.

So the means for citizen journalism comes from the need, not the other way around.

All of this matters because without free speech, collective intelligence disappears and centralized intelligence rules the community. Most will agree that we can not build trustworthy and trusted communities when information is controlled by centralized authority.

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Hi John,

Thanks so much for making this post and for posting the link to Beemocracy. It’s a really amazing read and I liked it very much.

I don’t have comments yet on Beemocracy - it is a new concept for me and it will require some time to think about it.

I have a couple of questions and comments about the preamble - current BlackRock holdings in Bitcoin are about 2.238% of the total supply. What are chances, in your opinion, to make the scenario with the fork real?

It has become public, and multiple sources confirm that, that Bitcoin has been secretly accumulated by governments for at least several years (and those are not El Salvador and Bhutan, the above countries do it publicly). If there are multiple parties involved, perhaps there isn’t that amount of Bitcoin in circulation to make this scenario real.

One more consideration is that Mina is no competitor to central banks, because it is not p2p cash.

I was trying to find the Chris Blec’s post in X, which is mentioned in the video linked above, to read the comments

Screenshot_20241115-164532_YouTube
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but unfortunately haven’t found it, because it was posted in 2023, and there are many many tweets since then. If you have a direct link to that post, would you share it please?

Thank you very much, it’s a really interesting discussion and I look forward to more people joining it

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Thanks for the encouragement @Berkeley!

Gold, oil, minerals, land, food, crypto and other commodities are not competitors with the banks they are the prey.

I can not put a number here, but the central banks and BlackRock must think the chances are good or they wouldn’t have allowed the ETF to pass.

The scenario I am thinking of is not quite the same as presented in the video. The scenario I am thinking about comes straight from the central banks standard playbook. Go from receipt money, to fractional money, to fiat money, print as much fiat as they want at the expense of the currency holders until the whole thing collapses, then start the game again. This game has been going on since the 1500s

Please consider that it was not necessary for the central banks to have the total supply of gold in order to turn the US dollar from receipt money (redeem your gold from the dollar) into fractional money (most of your gold in the banks is lent out but you can still redeem it as long as some was there) to fiat money where the dollar is no longer backed by gold so the banks can print as much as they want. Oh, and they still have the gold. Now it’s theirs. The banks never needed to have a large percentage of the total gold. All they needed was to convince the population to give up self-custody.

It’s the same game with Bitcoin.
Get a receipt for your Bitcoin.
Blackrock lends out more Bitcoin than it holds.
Start a panic and save the day with a new fork of Bitcoin.
This cuts the ties between the Bitcoin commodity and the receipts and makes the new money a CDBC.

This scam does not require holding a large percentage of Bitcoin. Rather it depends on convincing the population to give up self custody of bitcoin.

The old Bitcoin still exists and it is still held by the central banks but the receipt holders no longer have any claim to it (The central banks successfully stole it just like they did with the gold).
Worse, it’s a CDBC. The banks control the citizens by controlling the value and use of their own money which is largely the cognitive glue of the masses.

Here is a deep dive on where the controls are with respect to the Masses:
Introductory video with Michael Levin and Benjamin Lyons, Prices as Cognitive Glue
Their joint paper on the subject is found at the link below:
Cognitive Glues Are Shared Models of Relative Scarcities: The Economics of Collective Intelligence

This is not just about money this is about control.
It’s about governance.
This makes an interesting dilemma for governance because governance is not supposed to control our collective intelligence but rather help it come to good collective decisions.
That’s why I bring it up here.
Money is governance and Mina is money completely reimagined.

So how can we use Mina to build trustworthy and trusted communities?
I am in the beginning stages of asking questions and collecting information on that topic for a work much like Beemocracy.
It will be titled BioElectocracy in honor of Michael Levin’s work on BioElectricity and Benjamin Lyon’s work on mapping it to economics.

The whole idea for the project came from bouncing ideas around with @BenK and the rest of the Mina Governance Team. Much thanks to them!

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One of the fellow validators shared this slide from the Staking Summit 2024 which took place in Bangkok a few days ago:

IMG_20241115_221006_521
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This means it is already (or will be soon) in the agenda

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Great find @Berkeley,

In twenty years all the Bitcoin will be mined and the miners will only have transaction fees. This will make proof a stake appealing to the miners and they may not resist a BlackRock/CentralBank POS fork which will likely remove the limit on how much BTC can be created. Smells a lot like fiat currency to me, and perhaps a CDBC as well.

My understanding is that Mina has no limit to the amount of Mina that can be produced as block rewards so there will not be any instability due to a cap on Mina as we may see with Bitcoin.

Bringing this back on topic:
@BenK mentions in his draft that blockchain was a solution to misplaced trust in financial institutions. To that point, a trustworthy blockchain governance is always vigilant and guarding against predation by centralized powers. Since the blockchain itself is cryptographically secure, the attack will be focused on either governance or public opinion. This is why governance and the platform for debate must be decentralized if it is to be trustworthy.

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