Quote from: TooDumbForBitcoin on November 11, 2015, 09:46:54 PM

Mr. Higgins is much more qualified to follow up, but IMO the thrust of his post is not "plebiscite", but rather "central authority".

Indeed, that was my intention. And, after giving the issue more thought ... from my perspective there are two core real-world issues with profound implications for the selection and development of operational tactics and strategy:

i) the absence of a hierarchy of control is real, as are the consequences - dooglus' description of one possible future is valid.
ii) there is no inherent notion of identities or individual accounts which makes it impossible to distinguish reliably between human and machine agents.

My take on it is: technology has produced an as-yet-largely-unexplored solution to a huge problem that's been plaguing us as a species since forever, i.e. co-ordinating our behaviour and for which we are currently using a wildly inefficient and trivially corruptible solution (a hierarchy of power projection developed in response to limitations of communication). Advances in technology have removed any geographical barrier to exchanging pleasantries with anyone, anywhere; we are now broadly free to co-ordinate ourselves.

This is completely unprecedented and clearly many people in central governments around the world hold strongly negative perceptions of the potential consequences (the weakening of control) of allowing people to communicate freely amongst themselves.

In this broad topic area, my cross-disciplinary background gives me some comparative advantage in terms of having a wide variety of sources to draw from. For example, I've gained some benefit (in terms of clarity) from comparing the attributes of a Teal organisation with the attributes of an altcoin (details: Reinventing organisations).

The insight I gained is:

a community of cryptocurrency users naturally forms a Teal organisation because it is constrained to do so by the inherent characteristics of the implementation

It's nowhere near a perfect fit; Laloux follows Ken Wilber's original formulation of integral theory (done back in the 1960s) in which a hierarchy is viewed as natural and, ideally, healthy. That rather questionable assumption of the inevitability of a hierarchy of control persists even at the (developmentally) higher organisational levels of Turquoise and Indigo, so there's only so much that can be reasonably adapted from the Teal organisational model.

This week, I 'ave been mostly been ... revisiting Herbert Marcuse and looking deeper into the notion of collective intelligence.

I guess my point is that we've been precipitated into a brave new world; there are a number of entirely new problems to recognise, characterise, analyse and resolve. Perhaps it's all a bit too new and too demanding for people to handle successfully on a collective basis --- and 2500+ mostly-failed altcoins suggests that might well be the case. We'll just have to see.

Cheers

Graham