We, People can't live without stories. We create, believe, change, impose and finally forget different narratives about our world. Thanks to stories we make complex things easy and digistable. Stories allow us domesticate alien concepts. But what story can we tell about Hive?
Hostile takeover? Yeah, this is a great story! But more a founder myth and some background for our future. It's important to keep it afloat but it's far from complete.
Social Media on blockchain? It's SO limiting. Hive is much, much more than that.
Fast, skalable, feeless blockchain? Blah, blah, blah... Boooring!
"-Oh, and this blockchain thing? I heard about it but can't really get it. "
This might be a good story for a dev, but general population has decided by now. It's either this revolutionary thing, disruption etc or this scamy, suspicious, complicated magic Internet money. After recent events even more scamy. This bear market story will haunt the whole crypto world for the following years. Blockchain is going to be not only boring for general population, it's going to be toxic.
Greed peaked already. Crypto goes through a purge stage. A lot of narratives about crypto change to. Rapidly. Hive is a safe place, but safe is not enough to be succesful in the long run. We need our unique story and narration to stand out.
Community? Web 3.0? These are the most inflated terms of the recent years.
Even if we have a great tech, brilliant utility and - in many aspects - the best decentralisation, it means much less if we can't tell what Hive is in few sentences. For a last years I struggle to grasp what Hive actually is. As probably many of you, I can feel this enormous potential, but how to tell about it? I had this idea in mind to just wait, environment needs to get ready for it. Now I can see a window of opportunity.
I believe the first signs are out there. About a month ago I added a post about Balaji Srinivasan talking network states at Lex Fridman podcast. And guess what? This is just a theory by now, there are no network states out there. We have a chance to be the first one!
Recently I found out Balaji openly stated that he wants to support builiding of the first network state!
But how do we fit into his idea of the network state? Without centralised institutions, without a founder and without written rules, I would say we are a very anarchistic network state. I believe though, with such a innovative concept is impossible to set anything in stone. We are actually creating these rules, and The First Network State might be as human friendly as possible.
Let's dive into Balaji's book, to check on his ideas.
A network state in one sentence
A network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.
Even the most basic definition speaks how early it is.
Definitely we are highly aligned online community. Independent censorship-resistant financial system at the base layer. Common goal of growing and expanding fully transparent and decentralized system.
Capacity of collective action. We collectively create great blogging platform and organically growing ecosystem around Hive. We take part in online polls and voting to support $HIVE token. We collectively distribute millions of dollars to people all around the world. We have capacity to support charity projects. Collectively.
This is super early to talk about crowdfunding territory. I can imagin though creating DHF proposal for purchase or rental of physical land. I can imagine collective owning of land with paying the rent with upvotes. I took these idea straight from the hat. Once again, it's super early.
Diplomatic recognition? Easy, easy now. The time might come, or not. Does it really matter? It might be that nation states will create Hive accounts ;)
A network state in one image
A picture helps. The dashboard above shows what a million-person network state looks like on the map. Specifically, it depicts a network state with 1.7 million people, more than 157 billion dollars in annual income, and a 136 million square meter footprint.
The first thing we notice is that a network state isn’t physically centralized like a nation state, nor limited in scale like a city state. It’s geographically decentralized and connected by the internet.
The Network State in One Thousand Words
Here Balaji gives some steps for network states to be built.
- Found a startup society. This is simply an online community with aspirations of something greater. Anyone can found one, just like anyone can found a company or cryptocurrency. And the founder’s legitimacy comes from whether people opt to follow them.
The is no founder of Hive and this is even better, leadership is organic and based on engagement and commitment. Even more important, it's voted and replacable in a democratic fashion.
2.Organize it into a group capable of collective action. Given a sufficiently dedicated online community, the next step is to organize it into a network union. Unlike a social network, a network union has a purpose: it coordinates its members for their mutual benefit. And unlike a traditional union, a network union is not set up solely in opposition to a particular corporation, so it can take a variety of different collective actions. Unionization is a key step because it turns an otherwise ineffective online community into a group of people working together for a common cause.
Thanks to DHF and Proof of Brain we are able to financially incentivize growth of the network state. Also, our own economical and monetary system gives us freedom to be independent from legacy system. This is huge!
- Build trust offline and a cryptoeconomy online. Begin holding in-person meetups in the physical world, of increasing scale and duration, while simultaneously building an internal economy using cryptocurrency.
Checked! There are plenty of local meet-ups, Cuba, Venezuela, Switzerland, Philipines, Ghana, and IRish one planned recently by @demotruk, these are just few I'm aware of. And there is the global meet-up; Hive Fest organised annually.
It's important to note, that Hive at this stage is much more than idea desribed by Balaji. We transcend ossified institutions with use of technology. We can build businesses on Hive. There is no need for any formal confirmations and organisation behind Hive. Underlining technology guarantees our core values and freedoms. This cannot cease to amaze me!
In the next steps Balaji goes further in the future. I'm not sure if all the following steps are going to be necessary, but finally these would give us total independence in a physical world.
4.Crowdfund physical nodes. Once sufficient trust has been built and funds have been accumulated, start crowdfunding apartments, houses, and even towns to bring digital citizens into the physical world within real co-living communities.
5.Digitally connect physical communities. Link these physical nodes together into a network archipelago, a set of digitally connected physical territories distributed around the world. Nodes of the network archipelago range from one-person apartments to in-person communities of arbitrary size. Physical access is granted by holding a web3 cryptopassport, and mixed reality is used to seamlessly link the online and offline worlds.
6.Conduct an on-chain census. As the society scales, run a cryptographically auditable census to demonstrate the growing size of your population, income, and real-estate footprint. This is how a startup society proves traction in the face of skepticism.
7.Gain diplomatic recognition. A startup society with sufficient scale should eventually be able to negotiate for diplomatic recognition from at least one pre-existing government, and from there gradually increased sovereignty, slowly becoming a true network state.
It's super early but I believe such future would be beneficial not only for our community but, even more importandly for the humanity. There is a litte daubts in me, that network states will eventually come into fruition. It would be great to have one such Hive to choose from.
You can read an entire Balaji's book here:
https://thenetworkstate.com/
I don't see a concrete way for our blockchain or indeed any other blockchain to own land, and therefore "crowdfund territory" which is built into the most basic definition proposed by Mr. Srinivasan.
Yet, I've been thinking about something similar, especially in relation to Hive (more from a "What is Hive?" angle than from proposing a new theoretical concept), and I know many on others here are thinking about the same. So while I didn't coin the term and it's perhaps a slightly different idea, I and others here have been thinking about something you could call a "network state". More central to that idea is the ability to function with collective self governance, being able to fund the basic functions of a state, as well as self sovereignty. If a blockchain network would ever be able to own land (and I'm skeptical that will ever be realistic), that would be a later development on something that is already effectively functioning as something that could be called a "network state".
Recently I have been thinking it's more likely that Hive (or something like it) will come to be intertwined with an existing state, or several of such. The more I think about rule of law as it relates to crypto, the more I think that highly functional crypto governance depends upon a rule of law culture just as much as a highly functional traditional state does. A crypto network is unlikely to obtain the legitimacy to rule over a geographic region, especially because the right to not participate in a crypto community is core to the value system of crypto. However, I think that a network like Hive could start to provide the functions of collective spending (such as public education, road maintenance and such), while it also provides funding to an existing but now minimalist state, which in turn helps to protect property rights which is necessary for good governance (crypto or otherwise) within a geographic area. In this dynamic, if the state started to become hostile to crypto/Hive/property rights, then Hive would stop providing support to it. A relationship somewhat like mitochondria in a cell - two pre-existing forms of life coming together and working as a single unit through a dynamic of mutual self interest.
Another related post of mine, where I tried to define Hivers in the format of a poem
As an aside, Srinivasan follows me on Twitter, but I've never seen him ever mention Hive, despite the fact that it does seem like it's closer to the idea he's been pursuing than anything else out there yet.
Thank you for your insights. Food for thoughts.
Imagine deconstructing the very idea of nation-states and corporations, instead seeing society as a web of interwoven communities without any central authority. Now realize we have that on HIVE.
But.... Does Balaji know about Hive?
Even if he heard about Hive, I'm pretty sure not in this context
I think the idea of network states would continue to gain popularity in the coming years and many minds will chip in to build it out. It's innovative, offers sovereignty (something that's highly desired these days) and partially escaping the tyranny of governments/corporations.
Hive has some fundamental parts figured out, building out the rest will take huge collective efforts. Maybe this might seem far fetched, but network states will become an actual reality in the coming decades when humanity starts living in space stations.
Awesome post @deepresearch. It's been included in the latest issue of Cryptocracy.
https://cryptocracy.substack.com/p/web3-wednesday-ledger-launches-hardware
Thank you for an interesting and useful article.
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