My fellow retards,
William Forster Lloyd came up with the Tragedy of the Commons as an economic theory in 1833. Long ass time ago but still fits today, because humans have not figured out effective coordination on larger scale than that of a community, except by threat of violence.
The theory refers to the “commons” as a naturally-occurring resource. Whether it is fish, forests, oil, air, doesn’t really matter. Just something that exists, and is shared and is desired by many.
The tragedy that befalls mankind time and again, across game board and geopolitical landscape alike is that individuals (or corporations) will make decisions that benefit them, without the consideration of these decisions effect on others.
If you look at their mandates, the corporate raison d'êtreis is solely to increase profit for shareholders. The board is *required* to make decisions to increase profits. There is no requirement to save the forests, protect the fish, restrict mining of rare earth elements dug up by little African children so you can drive your “eco-friendly” EV of choice.
So long as corporations play within the rules, or rather, keep the amount they pay out in damages lower than what they gain with their abusive practices, they are within their mandate. Sick, savage, and perfectly reasonable given the context.
Perhaps if part of the context was to publicly hang executives who knowingly do heinous acts with the belief that a fine is *worth it*, executives will think twice before acting in a nefarious manner. Sick, savage, and perfectly reasonable given the context.
Picture the commons... For the smooth brains amongst us, imagine a lake with ten fishermen. There are enough fish for all ten fishermen to catch, sell at market and support their families. One day, fisherman Peebo decides he is going to catch twice his normal amount of fish and sell them. Others become jealous of the new hot tub Peebo installs at his lake front house, so they decide to overfish too. Next season there’s only enough fish to support 4 fishing families. This is because the natural equilibrium of the lake was broken by overfishing. In this case the lake and its fish are the commons. Each fisherman can make a decision to increase their own yield, but in aggregate they fuck the commons, and now they are all screwed, sell their boats, mortgage their houses, and have to go work for some corporate megacharter. Sad times when we destroy the commons.
Tragedy of the commons has been central to a recent experiment in monetary policy. Now it’s not fiat itself being dove into here, but there may be an entire series of pheverdreams on that in the future…
Instead rewind the clocks twenty years to the start of the Eurozone. A group of European nations came to the realization that there would be efficiencies if they joined a larger governing body and gave up some right at a national scale. Primarily immigration and monetary policy. They adopted the EURO and no longer had the nimble ability to perform their own open market operations to react to challenging times.
When the times were good, this was a great decision for smaller/less powerful countries such as Italy and Greece. Their borrowing rates decreased because they were now “backed” by the EU. Trouble is, when 2009 rolled around, they lost all ability to make decisions to help their own people who were struggling. They could not print more lira or drachma to bailout their businesses and people. Instead they were at the mercy of the leaders of the EU, who were effectively the leaders of the most powerful nations. This Euro crisis is a true example of the tragedy of the commons. A multi-national commons was built around a new idea for monetary policy, and when times were good it worked great. When times were rough, the Greeks had to fall back on their all too familiar history of living through the tragedy.
This commons is something that is very apparent in blockchain world. The most glaring example is blockspace. It is a commons all can utilize. Similar to forests, fish and clean air, there is a limited quantity. When some individuals or companies decide to spam that blockspace, or flood it with transactions, then we all suffer. We’re not sure Satoshi envisioned this to be a problem, since n the early days bitcoin had so few users that increasing block size was never a problem. You were always able to get your transactions confirmed on the next block. In 2022, this isn’t the case, and now normal users are competing against intelligent algorithms living in the underworld, operating the MEV processes to ensure they get greater value out of time and blockspace than you can imagine.
Does Phonon fix this? In a way, yes. It does so by ridding the world of the idea of blockspace. Phonon scales linearly with the number of users. If you add two more users to the system, you increase TPS by one. This is a very nice benefit as Phonon is designed to scale with humanity and the rise of the machines. While bitcoin, Ethereum and other L1s become more expensive and more challenging to use as more actors join their platform, Phonon is the opposite. This is a very nice benefit that many overlook now because there aren’t millions of users…yet. Much joy will be realized from the design decision that allows for linear scaling, once the world wakes up to what is being built.
Join the linear swell at Phonon DAO discord.
Tips to phonongod.eth will be invested in bounties that advance the Phonon project.
Hatemail to phonongod@protonmail.com will be scathingly considered.
Targets for the marketcap of PHONON DAO remain:
$1b by Q2 2022, $12b by EOY.
On the high end, $300b marketcap in 3 years.
(fucking weirds me out how my mind and yours kinda seem to be always on the same path/direction).