去中心化法权基础设施
Decentralized Infrastructure of Right
For as long as only the state could enforce a contract, the anchor of order was the state’s monopoly, and people had no choice but to accept it whole.
This system sets out to be an open market for order that anyone can use and help build: a place to enter freely chosen contracts with others, to have blockchain infrastructure guarantee their execution, and to see every act of building trust recognized and priced by the market.
A contract serves shared and long-term interests, while breaking one often pays in the short term. Without a mechanism that guarantees enforcement, no cooperation at scale or over time can be sustained.
So human societies evolved a rudimentary mechanism of guarantee: organized violence at scale, the machinery of the state. Whatever its political form, the state has always been the guarantor of last resort: its function is to enforce a commonly recognized set of rules.
Justice is the fundamental value on which the state, as a guarantor, rests. A state exists because it is just, and ceases to exist when it is not. To make law with care and to enforce it fairly has therefore been the overriding theme of politics for thousands of years.
People revere just rulers, who bring prosperity, because those who trust that the rules will be enforced cooperate readily; they detest corrupt rulers, who bring depression and unrest, because those who fear betrayal no longer dare to cooperate.
Yet betrayal pays in the short term, and that holds for the state as well. When a betrayer takes the guarantor’s seat and the social contract is torn up, the state becomes oppression laid bare. People no longer dare to cooperate, and the prosperity that went before tends to vanish. In human history this has happened again and again.
The blockchain opens a new technical possibility: people can enter contracts freely and have mathematics guarantee their execution. Guarantee and trust, once a scarce and costly product that took organized violence at scale, can for the first time become a market within everyone’s reach. Sovereignty, once a single whole monopolized by the state, can now be borne by individuals as well, in the form of distinct domains.
Order used to be castles that rose and fell one after another. Now it can be a river, in which different ecologies of trust flow like water. People can choose among them, and they can take part. In this age the individual is no longer an appendage of the state; the individual can truly take its place.
Once the monopoly of bundled sovereignty is broken, the worth of any order, and of anything people make, will be measured no longer by a central standard of allocation but by the choice of each person who needs it; and the strategy of the social game will shift from “finding the chokepoints of the current allocation system” to “making what others are willing to choose”.
The Decentralized Infrastructure of Right is open in form. There is more than one protocol standard, and more than one kind of product. Every product is fully open source: anyone may take it, change it and improve it, and everything is left for people to choose.