Thinks 390

The Generalist on Decentraland: “The virtual world has grown its users by 3,300% over the past year and reached a peak market cap of $12 billion. It may prove the best challenger to Meta’s long-term ambitions.”

Economist: “Health care consumes 18% of GDP in America, equivalent to $3.6trn a year. In other rich countries the share is lower, around 10%, but rising as populations age. The pandemic has made people more comfortable with online services, including digitally mediated care. Venture capitalists detect a sector that is uniquely ripe for disruption. CB Insights, a data provider, estimates that investments in digital-health startups nearly doubled in 2021, to $57bn (see chart 1). Unlisted health-care startups valued at $1bn or more now number 90, four times the figure five years ago. Such “unicorns” are competing with incumbent health-care companies and technology giants to make people better and prevent them from getting ill in the first place. In the process, they are turning patients into consumers.”

Shane Parish: “Being contrarian isn’t hard – anyone can say the opposite of what most people believe. But being contrarian *and* right is extremely difficult. Those who can both go against the crowd and be correct achieve outsized rewards. This is called Advantageous Divergence and it’s a mental model for thinking through ideas.”

UVI: A Blockchain Political Platform (Part 4)

Blockchain and Politics – 1

There have been many announcements and writings about political parties and public participation in decision-making via the blockchain. (I have not tracked the most recent updates of these.)

From a press release in Oct 2019: “ Æternity, the next-generation, open-source blockchain for building decentralized applications, today announced a collaboration with the Uruguay Digital Party to optimize the participation processes of citizens through the use of blockchain technology in internal voting. This initiative aims to make decisions more transparent, thus building a new system in which citizens, and members of the Digital Party in particular, can participate in a decentralized manner in the political decisions of their community. For that, Æternity will work in two main areas. The first phase of the project will focus on the development of a decentralized application based on the “liquid democracy” model, which operates with tokens using a basic set of smart contracts that the Digital Party will use for its internal governance. A technological solution will also be developed for the collection and validation of adherent identities. This will allow the Digital Party to create a secure and transparent database. In this way, each citizen can vote on proposals and give ideas directly and safely, thanks to encryption techniques that ensure a verifiable process separating the identity of the vote, which is kept secret.”

More on Liquid Democracy from Wikipedia: “Liquid democracy is a form of delegative democracy whereby an electorate engages in collective decision-making through direct participation and dynamic representation. This democratic system utilizes elements of both direct and representative democracy. Voters in a liquid democracy have the right to vote directly on all policy issues à la direct democracy, however, voters also have the option to delegate their votes to someone who will vote on their behalf à la representative democracy. Any individual may be delegated votes (those delegated votes are termed “proxies”) and these proxies may in turn delegate their vote as well as any votes they have been delegated by others resulting in “metadelegation”.” More from Chiara Valsangiacomo: “The core idea behind LD is that, for each issue to be decided, each citizen has a single vote that can be transferred to a trusted person (or ‘proxy’) at will. In other words, citizens can freely decide whether to cast their vote directly or to delegate it, with a given citizen potentially choosing different proxies for different topics. Anyone can become a proxy, meaning that the number of ‘elected’ representatives is potentially unlimited.”

Mariana Todorova: “Liquid democracy gives the opportunity to combine the advantages of direct and representative democracy, while neutralizing to a great extent their disadvantages…DG Agora is a P2P system for providing confidence and organization of power. It may serve not only for the establishment of new social organizations, movements, parties, and cooperatives, but also for democratic structuring and organization of already existing power organizations of private, state or cooperative characters, as well.”

Australia’s Flux: “Flux is a political movement promoting a new system of democracy called ‘Issue Based Direct Democracy’ (IBDD) which enables voters to influence how an elected Flux representative will vote on legislation in Parliament … Flux is a gateway Australians can use, to participate directly in parliament, making the need for trust in elected officials a thing of the past. Elected Flux MPs and Senators give up their autonomy and use their votes in line with the outcomes produced by the Flux ecosystem; an ecosystem comprised of ordinary Aussies…IBDD has three main aspects: Voters get to have a say on any issues they want to, but can abstain from voting if they don’t want to; instead of voting directly, voters can choose to delegate their vote to someone else – like a specialist, politician or just a trusted friend; and voters can assign priority to the issues most important to them.” Flux uses an idea termed as “liquidity tokens.”

Thinks 389

Anna Wiener: “If the metaverse materializes, it will probably look and behave like a video game, at least for a little while. For millions of people, video games already serve as everyday, immersive virtual experiences; gaming companies provide infrastructure for Hollywood films, spatial visualizations, and live performances. Aesthetically, the metaverse could have the gauzy realism of 2019’s “The Lion King,” the anesthetized cheerfulness of The Sims, the pixel-art graphics of the sixteen-bit era, or any other vibe. Physically, it will probably be accessed through headgear—V.R. headsets, A.R. glasses—or simply a computer screen. Financially, it could look something like FarmVille, in which players spent millions of dollars on virtual windmills, fertilizer, farm animals, and water, tending to what Alenda Y. Chang, an associate professor of film and media studies at U.C. Santa Barbara, has called an “ecologically absurd” landscape, in which dying crops could be revived by “unwither” spray, and sheep produced wool sweaters after eating tomatoes.”

Shankkar Aiyar: “India’s biggest challenge is to shift its workforce to productive domains. Reconfiguring growth calls for sequencing and speed in reforms. The rise of China illustrates this. In 1990, China’s GDP was $360 billion and India was at $320 billion. China modernised agriculture followed by rapid opening up of its economy in the Deng Xiaoping era. India was slow off the block. The much praised ‘1991 liberalisation’ came in the wake of a crisis, and reforms have been in fits and starts. Economic growth demands the leveraging of the factors of productivity — land, labour, capital and now technology.  Attempts to liberate productivity have been shackled by parochial partisan politics at the Centre and the states. Leverage of technology is constrained by inadequacies in the regulatory landscape. In 2021, China’s GDP stands at $ 16.8 trillion while that of India is $2.95 trillion.”

Read: 2 books by Toshikazu Kawaguchi in the “Before the Coffee Gets Cold” series. A total of 8 short stories. 

UVI: A Blockchain Political Platform (Part 3)

Blockchain – 2

From IBM.com: “Blockchain is a shared, immutable ledger that facilitates the process of recording transactions and tracking assets in a business network. An asset can be tangible (a house, car, cash, land) or intangible (intellectual property, patents, copyrights, branding). Virtually anything of value can be tracked and traded on a blockchain network, reducing risk and cutting costs for all involved…A blockchain network can track orders, payments, accounts, production and much more. And because members share a single view of the truth, you can see all details of a transaction end-to-end, giving you greater confidence, as well as new efficiencies and opportunities.”

The Economist describes blockchains as databases which represent an immutable shared history: “A blockchain is a database that contains the history of whatever information it was designed to store. It is made up of a string of “blocks” of information that build on top of one another in an immutable chain…What distinguishes a blockchain from other databases is that its ledger is distributed, publicly available and replicated on thousands of computers—or “nodes”—around the world. Rather than a centralised entity, like a bank or a tech platform, ensuring that the ledger is accurate, it is verified by a decentralised network of individuals… Unlike private networks, open, public blockchains are transparent (anyone can view them), permissionless (anyone can use them) and censorship-resistant (no one can stop them).”

Tim Roughgarden: “Blockchains are not about payments per se. They’re about a new computing paradigm—a programmable computer that lives in the sky, that is not owned by anyone (or rather, is owned by thousands of people all over the globe, including yourself if you like) and that anyone can use. (There might be a usage fee you have to pay, but there’s no access control—you don’t need anyone’s permission.) When thought of this way, how could blockchains not unlock a totally new generation of applications?”

He describes the blockchain stack thus starting from the bottom: “Layer 0 [is] the Internet. That is, it provides at least a semi-reliable method for point-to-point communication between untrusted parties…Layer 1 is the consensus layer, and its job is to keep a bunch of computers (potentially scattered all over the globe) in sync, despite possible network failures and attacks…Layer 2 [is] the scaling layer. Essentially the goal here is to implement the same functionality exported by a layer-1 protocol, but a lot more of it…Finally, on top there is an application layer (as there is in the Internet stack), which refers to the applications built on the functionality provided by the previous layers.”

Builtin elaborates on a key innovation that has taken blockchain beyond just being a platform for cryptocurrencies: “Originally created as the ultra-transparent ledger system for Bitcoin to operate on, blockchain has long been associated with cryptocurrency, but the technology’s transparency and security has seen growing adoption in a number of areas, much of which can be traced back to the development of the Ethereum blockchain, [which] lets developers create sophisticated programs that can communicate with one another on the blockchain.”

Jesse Frederik: “Blockchain generalises the bitcoin pitch: let’s not just get rid of banks, but also the land registry, voting machines, insurance companies, Facebook, Uber, Amazon, the Lung Foundation, the porn industry and government and businesses in general. They are superfluous, thanks to the blockchain. WIRED made a list of 187 things that blockchain could supposedly fix.”

Decentralisation, transparency and trust are the fundamental ideas in the blockchain. Indian politics needs all three of them.

Thinks 388

Vanita Kohli-Khandekar on Indian media: “At 468 million unique visitors a month, digital’s reach is just a little over half of TV’s 892 million. Print has been at a steady 421 million a month. On the revenue side — TV brings in roughly half the Rs 138,300 crore (pay and advertising) that Indian media and entertainment (M&E) made in 2020. In second place is digital at 17 per cent.”

WSJ: “Latin America suffers from too much government. Taxation, regulation, weak property rights and corruption conspire against entrepreneurship and self-discovery. Yet in the 1980s most of the region returned to democracy, giving the struggle for liberty a fighting chance. That chance is slipping away. In the past two decades, the institutions necessary to ensure political and ideological competition have been destroyed in several countries. Freedom dies when this happens…The problem isn’t any one election in which a politician, who prefers socialism over individual freedom, prevails. It’s the extremist view—left or right—that an electoral victory is a mandate to dismantle the institutional framework that protects minorities and blocks the ambitions of absolutism…Nations don’t vote for despotism. But looking back at Lenin and Hitler, Mr. Hinds shows that when a nation is seduced into handing over broad discretion to a messianic figure, that nation seals its fate. “Leaders play a crucial role in unifying people around a destructive idea. But such leaders emerge in response to a demand from the people,” Mr. Hinds writes.”

Donald Boudreaux: “Smithian economists – those who research, write, and teach in the tradition begun by Adam Smith – make their livings by exposing the many economic fallacies embraced by the man-in-the-street and peddled by vote-hungry politicians and click-crazy pundits. These economists will never want for work. The reason is that they are opposed by anti-Smithian economists who give to the man-in-the-street seemingly credible assurance that each and every one of his untutored instincts about the economy reflect his genius.”

UVI: A Blockchain Political Platform (Part 2)

Blockchain – 1

In the past few years, interest in crypto-currencies has skyrocketed. As per CoinMarketCap, over 9000 currencies are now valued at $2 trillion. Just five years ago, this was at just $10 billion. While the currencies are many (bitcoin and ether being the most prominent), the underlying technology is similar in all cases: the blockchain.

Wikipedia explains: “A blockchain is a growing list of records, called blocks, that are linked together using cryptography.  It’s also described as a “trustless and fully decentralized peer-to-peer immutable data storage” that is spread over a network of participants often referred to as nodes. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp, and transaction data (generally represented as a Merkle tree). The timestamp proves that the transaction data existed when the block was published in order to get into its hash. As blocks each contain information about the block previous to it, they form a chain, with each additional block reinforcing the ones before it. Therefore, blockchains are resistant to modification of their data because once recorded, the data in any given block cannot be altered retroactively without altering all subsequent blocks. Blockchains are typically managed by a peer-to-peer network for use as a publicly distributed ledger, where nodes collectively adhere to a protocol to communicate and validate new blocks.”

Tyler Cowen: “Centralized services typically are run by companies or institutions, such as Facebook, Twitter or Amazon. There is a command structure and a boss, and changes can be made by deliberate decision. In this parlance, even Wikipedia counts as centralized, though the editors and contributors are scattered around the world. Decentralized services are harder to define, but two simple examples may be helpful. The first is email, which consists of networks of rules and interconnections not owned by any one company or institution, even though your email provider might be. The second is the World Wide Web itself, a series of protocols with a huge amount of stuff built on top of it. Bitcoin also operates in a decentralized way, unless a majority of the blockchain miners decide otherwise, which is very difficult to pull off.”

Investopedia adds: “One key difference between a typical database and a blockchain is the way the data is structured. A blockchain collects information together in groups, also known as blocks, that hold sets of information. Blocks have certain storage capacities and, when filled, are chained onto the previously filled block, forming a chain of data known as the “blockchain.” All new information that follows that freshly added block is compiled into a newly formed block that will then also be added to the chain once filled…In a blockchain, each node has a full record of the data that has been stored on the blockchain since its inception. For Bitcoin, the data is the entire history of all Bitcoin transactions. If one node has an error in its data it can use the thousands of other nodes as a reference point to correct itself. This way, no one node within the network can alter information held within it. Because of this, the history of transactions in each block that make up Bitcoin’s blockchain is irreversible.”

Thinks 387

WSJ on the James Webb Space Telescope: “The Webb’s ultrasensitive infrared sensors are designed to capture light emitted more than 13.6 billion years ago by primordial stars, gargantuan furnaces that were hundreds of times larger than any stars shining today. It could reveal the earliest star clusters and supernovas, where almost all the elements were forged. “We want to see the first objects that formed as the universe cooled down after the Big Bang,” Dr. Mather said. “We don’t know exactly when the universe made the first stars and galaxies, or how for that matter. One way or another, the first stars must have influenced our own history, beginning with stirring up everything and producing the other chemical elements besides hydrogen and helium.””

NYTimes: “Stoicism is many things — it was devised and refined over centuries — but the basic principles can be summed up quickly. Excellence of character, or virtue, is the only true good, and we should spend our lives pursuing it. Virtue is its own reward, but as a free bonus it will also make us happy. We should cultivate feelings of kinship toward all humans. We should not whine or gossip. We should mentally rehearse all the undesirable events that might befall us (including death) so that we’ll be prepared if and when they do happen. But we should not do this in an obsessive way; more of an imaginary-exposure-therapy way. We should make a distinction between what we can and cannot control, and quit worrying about things in the second category.”

James Buchanan in 1975: “Burgeoning budgets are an outgrowth of the American liberal tradition which assigns to government the instrumental role in creating the “good society.” The arrogance of the administrative and, particularly, the judicial elite in changing basic law by fiat arises from the same source. If the “good society” can first be defined, and, second, produced by governmental action, then men finding themselves in positions of discretionary power, whether in legislative, executive, or judicial roles, are placed under some moral obligation to move society toward the defined ideal…If our Leviathan is to be controlled, politicians and judges must come to have respect for limits. Their continued efforts to use assigned authority to impose naively formulated constructs of social order must produce a decline in their own standing. If leaders have no sense of limits, what must be expected of those who are limited by their ukases? If judges lose respect for law, why must citizens respect judges? If personal rights are subjected to arbitrary confiscation at the hands of the state, why must individuals refrain from questioning the legitimacy of government?” [via Atanu Dey]

UVI: A Blockchain Political Platform (Part 1)

State of Parties

I have written previously about United Voters of India (UVI) as the alternative to all of India’s existing political parties. India’s politicians and their parties are India’s greatest enemies, as they have chosen to restrict freedom and continue with perpetually planned poverty. The parties have concentrated power at the top in the “high command”, silenced the voice of the people, created authoritarian regimes, continued with dividing Indians in their quest for staying in power, and extraction and exploitation of the people – just like the British colonisers did for almost 200 years. In other words, India’s freedom movement failed – it delivered Independence but did not free the people. All it did was replace the white-skinned rulers with their brown-skinned inheritors.

Fourteen Indian Prime Ministers have perpetuated the legacy of British Governor-Generals by denying freedom and prosperity to the Indian people. The rulers changed but the rules did not. India shining and stock market highs notwithstanding, India is still a poor country. Hundreds of millions of Indians are still dependent on government handouts for daily survival.

Every political party in India started out claiming to be different from the Congress but has ended up cloning its structure: one or two people at the top who concentrate power and glorify themselves, eliminate any form of inner-party democracy (from discussion to elections), invite with open arms defectors from other parties who until the previous day subscribed to a diametrically opposite political ideology, whimsically decide on state Chief Ministers riding roughshod on the wishes of the local MLAs, and indulge in horse-trading of elected MLAs and MPs. Economic policies are more a continuity rather than the change that is needed for a transformation; almost every underlying idea can be traced back to the Nehruvian era, which in turn continued with the British rules. The result: a continuity of the kakistocracy (where the worst rise to the top) and anti-prosperity machine, which together deny both freedom and prosperity for the masses.

India’s positions in global economic indices says it all.

Indians need to unite in a new movement – a political and economic revolution – to put the nation on an irreversible path to freedom and prosperity. This is where Nayi Disha comes in – with UVI as the vehicle for political power, and Mission 10-20-30 as the agenda for prosperity for the new government.

UVI enables all those not committed to supporting any of the existing parties – the non-aligned and non-voters (NANVs), comprising  two-thirds of eligible Indian voters – to come together and create a genuine alternative to the Congress clones. UVI should be a decentralised platform where Independents chosen by local voters via primaries should be contestants – and presuming they win, we would have a Lok Sabha of Independents, uncontaminated by present day politicians and their parties.

The big question: how to create such a political platform that cannot be hijacked by a single leader and ensure that the people have a voice through their representatives, rather than career politicians helming the parties. This is where the idea of UVI as a blockchain-based political platform comes in. Think of UVI as a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO), which Wikipedia defines as “an organisation represented by rules encoded as a computer program that is transparent, controlled by the organisation members and not influenced by a central government.” 2022 will see many state and local body elections. Can UVI’s encoded rules offer an alternative to disillusioned voters, as a template for the 2024 national elections?

Thinks 386

David Chalmers: “I think what moves a lot of people is the idea that somehow if you were in a virtual world, it would all be fake, it would be an illusion. Maybe the are like video games: Nothing that happens there really matters; it’s just an escape from the issues in the real world. Whereas I think what happens in virtual worlds can, in principle, be very significant. You can build a meaningful life in a virtual world. We can get into deep social and political discussions and decisions about the shape of society in a virtual world. Rather than living in a video game, my analogy would be more like we’re moving to a new, uninhabited country and setting up a society. The issues will be somewhat different from the issues where we came from, but I wouldn’t consider that escapism. Also, I’m not saying abandon physical reality completely and go live in a virtual world. I think of the virtual world as a supplement to physical reality rather than a replacement, at least in any remotely short term.”

WSJ: “Freedom is the central component of the best problem-solving system ever devised…Free choice relies on persuasion. It recognizes that you are an important participant with key information, problem-solving abilities and rights. Any solution that is adopted, therefore, must be designed to help you and others. Coercion is used when persuasion has failed or is teetering in that direction—or when you are raw material for someone else’s grand plans, however ill-conceived. Authoritarian governmental approaches hamper problem-solving abilities. They typically involve one-size-fits-all solutions like travel bans and mask mandates. Once governments adopt coercive policies, power-hungry bureaucrats often spout an official party line and suppress dissent, no matter the evidence, and impose further sanctions to punish those who don’t fall in line. Once coercion is set in motion, it’s hard to backtrack.”

Nikolai Wenzel: “Capitalism is the world’s most effective anti-poverty program. From early capitalism in 1800 to today, world life expectancy has grown from 26 to 66 years. The world’s income per capita has increased by a factor of nine. Before 1800, everybody was poor. In 1820, 94% of humanity subsisted on less than $2 a day in today’s money. That fell to 37% in 1990 and less than 10% in 2015—all from the gradual incorporation of more people into freer markets. Heyne reminds us that “a compelling social vision will be one that both explains and inspires”—capitalism explains, but economists often forget to inspire. Conversely, the anti-capitalist mentality inspires, but fails to explain, based as it is “on a belief remarkably immune to either theory or evidence.” Of course, much more remains to be done. But the good news is that capitalism—when it’s tried —lifts hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. So why do we still see poverty, and school teachers who aren’t paid “enough?” Simply, because the world doesn’t have enough capitalism; too many are still excluded from markets.”

Nayi Disha: A People’s Pipe for Prosperity (Part 12)

First Steps

The solution to India’s problems does not lie with the politicians; they are the ones who are the problem. Every Indian leader has determinedly worked, despite having all the power, to constrain the people. Every leader comes in thinking they have the power of God to remake our lives. New schemes get launched or old ones are renamed; every one of them funded by productive money taken from the people.

A broken education system ensures that few actually understand why some nations are rich. We are taught about India’s long past but not the recent past of countries like America which have created the rules that have led to their residents becoming among the richest in the world. We are not taught why Indians are poor, why our freedoms are controlled, and why many British-era rules are still in place. If we question the Indian Constitution (a derivative of the 1935 Government of India Act written by the British colonisers), we could be charged with sedition. In such an environment, no politician or party will come to our rescue. It is a revolution that has to be engineered by the people.

Even as we begin celebrations for India@75, we need to ask ourselves: are we truly free? Does just having the right to vote mean we are free? If we are really free, why are we not rich? Why do 800 million Indians still need to be provided free food by the Indian government? If that isn’t the biggest indictment on our politicians, what is? Why is the average Indian’s annual earnings only a fifth that of the average Chinese when just 40 years ago both were at the same level? And why is the average Indian’s annual earnings just 3% of the average American? Why does India rank so low in various indices of human development and economic freedom? All have the same answer. Freedom, denied to us by the British and then their successors, the Indian British who have successfully established British Raj 2.0 in India.

It is this that Nayi Disha seeks to overturn. A Nayi Disha for India will only happen when the people awaken and act. The pipe is the crucial step in getting alternative narratives to them to counter the government propaganda machine that works in overdrive with money from every Indian (since all of us pay taxes in one form or another). It is the pipe which has to do the “Moh Bhang” (break the illusion) of the love affair that some of us have for the Indian politicians, their parties, their policies. The growth of digital and its primacy in our daily lives has created a new opportunity for rebirthing India – we, through our cooperation, have the power to change the future of 1.3 billion Indians in our hands. What we now need to do is to use it for the greater good and a better future for each of us. Maybe India@77 will truly see the start of a free and prosperous India.