That point from the Poverty and Wealth of Nations is something that I think you instinctively understand because you mentioned it once in {redacted}.
It's the idea that Trust (an extrapolation of loyalty) is a very valuable resource. It's why places like Africa, South America, and Mexico cannot succeed despite having more resources than places like South Korea or Japan. The citizens have resources, but the system is extremely inefficient because people cannot be trusted to carry out labor or transactions. Trust is a combination of performing a task at a required level {of comoetency}, performing it within a required time.
Nations without physical resources can barter their trust. It's no wonder that those two examples do so well in the digital age where trust itself is the resource of abstract or intellectual developments.
Obviously the opposite of this would be low capacities for doing a task on time and at high levels of skill.
It's hard to do both at once. It seems that the average person would sacrifice quality for quantity (because time is such a rare resource that they'd rather be overloaded with constant material), but the lasting stuff {art} takes more time.
I like that your content hits multiple levels of the craftsmanship/quantity matrix. I'm kind of just rambling here, but that idea from the book holds as one of the great laws of economies, and because economies are made of people they tend to follow the same laws. Constituents of systems often follow the laws of the higher echelons. "As above, so below". Its kind of like how all Alts follow BTC to a degree.
In regard to trust we see this play put in economic systems as well.
Bureaucracy is like a parasite. A department (EPA as a government example or Moms Against Drunk driving as a public one) are obviously made up of people. These people have a vested interest in being employed. Not just the lower levels but the higher levels as well. It is their will to power. After their initial goals are met (reducing pollution or enacting legislation to implement sobriety standard (Blood alcohol level of .12) there job is done, but the desire for employment is not. It's easier to keep a business rolling than start a new one. That's called friction. It makes an object at rest require more force to move than an object in motion. Because of this these entities have an economic incentive to continue their existence.
What could justify such an existence?? Encroaching legislation and more standards. Bureaucracy as a parasite is realised at this point. For Moms Against Drunk Driving it is increased sobriety standards and more liquor laws. There is no discernable difference between the average person's capacity to drive at .08 BAC and .12, but this goal gave MADD more reason to lobby. Similar things happen with teachers or labor unions.
The more legislation that is in place, the more paperwork there is for people to comply with. This happens at all governmental levels. Agencies increase the amount of rules and soon enough you have a web of them that makes it harder for a businessman to move forward. You're familiar with this, I'm sure.
Jordan Evans
This isn't an elaborate shill for ChainLINK, but just a justification for its usecase. ChainLINK's ability to make smart Contracts more usable allows people to more readily handle this entanglement of legislation and policy. You're not waiting days or weeks for paperwork to get verified. It's instantly done. Aside from SIBYL attacks that confound node reputation, it's very solid.
Anyone that understands economics as a whole (not those fucking Keynsians) knows that the market seeks to move as efficiently as possible. Each piece of legislation is like a rock in the river and the water flows around it. Smart Contracts will shrink the size of those rocks (that will still be there), so there is an incentive for business adoption. It's not a matter of if, but when.
As a whole it will reduce corruption by quickly verifying contracts and executing them therefore increasing the market TRUST (despite being trustless haha) and therefore increasing the intabgible capital of reliability and timeliness that is so important to economies.
I didn't intend for this to lead to ChainLINK. My original thought was tying it into the concrete applications of race and culture, but that's already apparent
Camden Johnson
>people cannot be trusted to carry out labor or transactions why do you think this is?
Ayden James
Low "IQ" or inability to understand the long term effects of their decisions. I cannot argue if this is heritable or a symptom of weak educational infrastructure, but 3rd world nations' inability to develop more than the most rudimentary and discarded technologies makes me think it's more heritable.
I think this is what Sergey was hinting at by helping people. This may be able to help them bootstrap themselves. There are smart people in those nations, but it's more effective for them to immigrate than stay because their society has low Trust, which makes the transition between economic classes harder.
Benjamin Wright
Can you give some examples of how smart contracts would help in third world countries? If the issue is corruption, wouldn't the people who write the contracts still be corrupt and even though the contracts would be automatic, the way they are devised may still benefit the corrupt people in charge.
Leo Barnes
Interesting thoughts. I've got nothing to add but this will probably go over the head of 90% of LINKies.
Carter Richardson
Smart contracts can be read so that you know exactly what conditions you're agreeing to. Without such basic functionality they'd be useless.
Henry Garcia
People knew exactly what they were agreeing to when they took on huge student loan debts or mortgages at the peak of the economy. Those loans were still pushed hard by people who stood to profit from them. That's why I'm wondering why or how automating such a thing would decrease corruption.
Connor Ramirez
Nice analysis. Sergey has openly stated that smart contracts solves a simple but very deep problem: It's easy for centralized authority to make empty promises, and blur the lines. If there was just a way to make contracts absolutely black-and-white, data-driven, and immutable (definition of smart contracts), instead of fuzzy and subjective, then we'd see a big societal shifts. Central authorities like banks and governments will be subject to to a "higher authority", to ensure contracts are carried out as intended, not as "promised"
Keep in mind that this was in 2014, long before smart contracts became a buzzword. He's definitely one of the innovators in this space
Colton Fisher
>I cannot argue if this is heritable or a symptom of weak educational infrastructure Not sure if it's purely heritable. At some point, a few hundred or thousand years ago, the first world must have been a low trust society also. What changed culturally to make it a high trust society?
Colton Howard
What you're describing isn't corruption. It's just predatory behaviour from lenders and stupidity from borrowers.
Cameron Smith
Some society accidentally became more prone to high trust behavior because of an advanced bartering method (mirroring today's shift) and eventually outbred their competitors.
Drastic changes like that are either genetic or through highly disruptive "technologies"
People with means will take advantage of the naive. The superfluous man will either be eliminated from economic participation or enslaved by it. I'm sorry, but we are entering the enslavement age which is congruent with the Oediapla nature of the Kali Yuga
Kevin Perez
Interesting thread op
Winter. The snow shaped European evolution by requiring the stockpiling of resources
Joseph Clark
Thanks. I was in correspondence with someone else and had a bit of an epiphany while rambling. I'm very excited for smart contracts. All of this was said in fewer words, but its finer details might have flown over the heads of less discerning minds until they had time to think it out (my own mind included). It's also possible that even Sergey or Vitalk didn't realize the implications of the problem they were were solving by introducing this disruptive technology. Such is often the case of great inventors. They underhype the implications of their own achievements.
Leo Martin
Bump for insight from other anons
Gavin Russell
I understand the desire to move away from centralized authority. But what is not clear is how exactly smart contracts will help to stop corruption. The corrupt and powerful will just make smart contracts work for them. Look at a recent example on this board. Some dude puts up a Pepe Shop similar to CryptoCities, run on smart contracts. People jump in, and he shuts it down, restarts a few times and shuts it down again, and keeps the coins.
I'm just wondering if anyone has any clear vision for how smart contracts could actually solve real world problems, with specific examples of a broken process that could be fixed to decrease corruption and increase trust. I'm not shitting on this thread, OP, I think it's fascinating. Just trying to visualize how this future might look.
Blake Sullivan
Philosophically speaking, I think it would need authority at some level to make it work. Someone has to make sure that people are behaving civilly.
This piece of technology is one more link in a network of technologies that can be leveraged to increase overall trust. Kind of like how all philosophies are based on something, well there has to be an authority for a system to work. That authority is the government of the developing nation. Sure it's corrupt, but as more systems come into place the network utility function of TRUST inducing technologies will help bootstrap that system. People with worse educational infrastructure will need more nodes in the network of TRUST building systems to help them bootstrap.
I appreciate the critique because it's a valid one.
I think that this is the first of many technologies that will work towards making society more reliable by reducing inefficiency and unreliability. Blockchain itself provides a public ledger which is great for accounting purposes. Smart Contracts give greater utility to this record keeping system. Oracles make these smart contracts feasible.
Hunter Roberts
The individual in your example could only 'keep the coins' if the smart contract were programmed that way. Smart contracts can also not be restarted. They exist on the blockchain which I'd hope you're aware is immutable.
I think you fundamentally misunderstand how smart contracts work. All participants in a smart contract can determine exactly what they might be agreeing to before doing so. You can't just 'make smart contracts work for you'.
Jaxson Young
Basic principles
* smart contracts increase market efficiency
* market efficiency increases trust/reliability in a network and reduces the barrier to entry in the form of managing paperwork
* developing nations can use this to slowly remove one level of corruption that happens when notarizing or executing contracts requires a bribe. It also reduces contract friction by automating the verification process
Hudson Wilson
the behavior indicates a perception that it is more profitable to cheat than play by the rules
Ian Phillips
Are there really people on Veeky Forums who don't understand game theory?
Zachary Sanchez
is there anyone here that DOES understand game theory?
Dylan Ortiz
Does every topic have to be morphed to somehow be about nigger IQ with /pol/?
David Morales
I didn't mean you. I'm just fascinated that there are people on this board that don't understand why people would do things to others detriment and there own gain.
Henry Lewis
*their Fuck
Logan Edwards
i've been reading for a few years now but i'm having some trouble with this.
Brandon Barnes
It can't be avoided when discussing why 3rd world nations cannot bring themselves into the modern world. There is a pessimistic and optimistic view to the problem.
Pessimistic >they cannot be helped and will have to be babysat for eternity
Optimistic >the proper resources will change their way of thinking and allow both environmental and epigenetic IQ growth over time
Brayden Johnson
I'm definitely not up to speed on smart contracts.
But it seems to me a smart contract just automates the terms and auto executes conditions as they are triggered. Let's take the example of student loans. The smart contract is essentially the terms of the loan. This doesn't change the situation that the loan giver convinced the debtor to get a $100,000 loan so they could get a useless degree in Harry Potter studies. Smart contracts don't write themselves, they are written for a purpose and the people who will write them will have the same power and authority they have now.
I'm not sure how smart contracts are anything other than a form of automation that will be used to reduce costs and make business more efficient. They seem to be the robots of the legal or accounting world.
What am I missing about smart contracts?
Ian Turner
The problem you're describing is greater than simply trust. You're absolutely right that people could well be sold a bad deal because society or the media has convinced them that it's in fact a good deal. I don't see how smart contracts can change anything in that regard. Solving the problem in your example requires either a reduction in tuition fees, change in government policy regarding the loans or a public opt-out of university . Capitalism is inherently predatory, for better or worse. Smart contracts can't prevent people from trying to exploit others' naivete, but it can allow consumers to see exactly what they are agreeing to, and this can never be modified. In the West we have legal protections against this form of exploitation, but in the third and even second world consumers are much more likely to get duped by corrupt actors.
