In this episode, we sit down with the founders of Inblock.io, Tim Bansemer and Philipp Strauch. During our conversation at RCon3 we discussed a myriad of topics, from scaling social trust to reinventing governance and reorganizing society and the economy.
What is Inblock.io?
Inblock.io is a collective of blockchain enthusiasts who support the development of a scalable, secure, and sustainable infrastructure platform for blockchains. Their mission is to reorganize society and enable the mass collaboration required to face humanity’s “existential crisis.” They plan to execute on their mission by reinventing governance and the economy through incentivization of models founded on values which promote ideas other than maximizing profit.
Tim and Philipp met at a Meetup for Society formed around coordination problems, decentralized governance, and the reinvention of society. Since that time, they have been organizing meetups for RChain; Philipp has been designing a program within the test net to incentivize participation.
RChain: The world’s platform for decentralized governance
If blockchains are to serve as the infrastructure for distributed governance they must be brought to a global scale. To achieve this, a nonsequential and asynchronous way of communicating must be used—analogous to the way nature scales. The fundamental difference between RChain and other blockchain projects is the computational model used, based on the concurrent, asynchronous rho-calculus. As Philipp explains,
If RChain is to be the world’s platform for handling decentralized governance, then it is mission critical and every component will be battle-tested.
Though there currently is no consensus on some aspects of the systems to be developed on the RChain platform (e.g. one person/one vote vs. voting by stake), we are entering new territory in open-source, distributed governance. The stability of the infrastructure is of the utmost importance in supporting these new systems and methods of coordination.
According to Philipp, three core tools for distributed governance exist:
- An identity system
- A way to measure sentiments/opinions
- A voting system
Scaling social trust is necessary when speaking of the governance of distributed global systems. Even in an open-source space trust remains a highly valuable asset. It is a highly nontrivial task to understand all aspects of a technical open-source project in order to make meaningful improvements. Thus, a trust structure is still necessary even in the world of open-source.
Call for diversity and empathy
According to Tim, there is currently a high concentration of white males in the blockchain space. The community urgently needs to become more inclusive to gain access to the best solutions and not unintentionally isolate any group of people. He calls on blockchain enthusiasts to imagine means for building fairer, more sustainable markets and participatory governance models. As he puts it,
To redesign the world, we must start with redesigning the infrastructure. To do that, we must be thoughtful about our approach as to avoid creating economic advantages for some and disadvantages for others.
Tim’s Genesis Talks presentation:
Tim’s RChain Berlin meetup presentation:
Philipp’s RChain Berlin meetup presentation: