Yeah my choice would be the æ symbol, but I'm kinda flexible depending on strength of argument. I'd be interested in hearing smooth's opinions on the symbol issue.
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Those my thoughts.
Frustratingly enough, after I spent a lot of work typing out the topic I have to concede that you are right. Someone already posted, so I could only lock the topic - not delete it outright.
As far as a system of social management for the currency I will give it some thought, but it is likely a difficult problem. My initial thoughts on the matter:
It will either be decentralized, centralized, or a mixture of the two. Direct democracy attempts to create a completely decentralized system, but like all systems has its weaknesses. It relies on all nodes to be equally informed and have equally altruistic intentions. This is never the case, and this problem manifests itself in situations where an entire population might vote for something clearly detrimental or ethically abhorrent because they have been persuaded to do so or simply out of tradition. As well, total democracy lends all voices an equal weight - a problem that can be illustrated as easily as creating a poll topic here on the message board. People who only have a passing interest in Aeon suddenly have the same weight as smooth or myself.
The US System of government seems better than a pure democracy in that it is not the (possibly uninformed) individual nodes who vote, but politicians who are
elected by the nodes. This gives everyone a say because even if you are not informed enough to be a direct voter yourself (politician) you always have a say in
who is having a say. One of the problems with this system is that it leads to corruption of said politicians and manipulation of the individual nodes (voters) while also not guaranteeing those elected will be any better suited to making decisions than the voters themselves. (See the perpetual incompetence of some Senators and Congressmen for an example of this) That also does not seem ideal, but it has parallels in the body. The cells of the limb trust the brain to make decisions for it, even though sometimes that brain mistakenly puts the limbs in unnecessary danger for no tangible benefit.
I have considered the mechanics of a system that would use the currency itself as a mechanism of 'voting'. I think burning is silly, as it takes perfectly good tokens out of circulation forever, but for the system to be decentralized this voting also cannot funnel into any 'trusted' account. Perhaps participants could send voting money to be used as future transaction fees. This system is decentralized and self-sustaining but possibly open to abuse on its own.
Example: Aeon has a 1000 Aeon (an arbitrary number) fee to suggest new measures. Participants can 'soft burn' Aeon by sending it as excess transaction fees in a controlled transaction between two addresses they control. The Aeon gets distributed to miners and incentivizes the network while also serving as a measure of voting on a particular proposal.
Problems: This creates an oligarcy - literal rule by the rich as those with lots of Aeon now have the power to propose and pass laws that benefit them. The fact that the Aeon gets distributed among the miners isn't really relevant because if/as Aeon grows in value, it could theoretically also be used to purchase more mining power leading those who 'soft burn' their votes to have a way to attempt to recover them through increased mining. It also doesn't provide much in the way of the 'little guy' having a voice.
Changing tracks, if you are wondering about the possible issues with any sort of 'foundation' you only need look as far as the 'Bitcoin foundation' and the schism that still occurred in that community.
This is obviously a
very difficult problem, as it is one that humans have been attempting to solve for millennia (since at least the invention of writing). It is not clear what the ideal solution is at the moment, but it is clear what doesn't work: direct democracy, oligarchy, and dictatorship all fall prey to various weaknesses.
Meanwhile it is also clear what qualities an ideal system should/might have: those who are more involved and with more at stake should have a larger say, no one entity should ever make all the decisions in a vacuum, and the system needs to either completely resist the "power pyramid" that tends to form where a small group at the top control the masses at the bottom
or it needs to embrace it fully. Bear in mind the ideal solution may also be the complete opposite of what we expect.
In trying to figure out how to make digital cash work, the early pioneers were going about it all wrong. They knew that data was not inherently a precious object, and could be copied at will. How then could they create a digital object that had scarcity? If you are a student of cryptographic history, you will know that many of our brightest minds puzzled over this for a long time. The marvelous solution, as embodied by bitcoin, was to stop resisting the problem altogether: like the flow of energy in a martial art - take your opponent's energy and make it your own.
Hence, the solution was found in extrapolating all the way to the other end of the spectrum:
if we can't make a digital object precious in our network, let's make it collective and ubiquitous. There won't be individual and precious cryptographic objects - there will be one shared ledger and every member of the network will have a copy. Perhaps a new ideal of governance of any system, whether biological, governmental, or even financial will be embodied by a novel idea along the same lines:
if there are certain challenges or forces hindering us from solving a problem, is there a way to instead reverse those difficulties and transform them into a solution? I urge any bright mind reading these words to reflect on this and try to help me brainstorm. I am constantly amazed at how bitcoin took pieces that already existed and combined them in a novel and unexpected way to generate a solution to an ancient problem. The theme of that solution though, in many ways, was to
stop resisting the inevitable and embrace it. I am convinced that there may be other significant problems that puzzle us today (including ideal social governance) that may fall to the same techniques of creative thought.
