Self Guaranteeing Promise

@kepano is a great thinker that I follow and learn from (and CTO of @obsdmd). Some of his ideas are very aligned with the original cyberpunk web3. And yes, there is no blockchain or token involved in them, and I like that. It shows that there are ideas floating around in the blockchain world that go beyond tokens and speculation.

One of my favorite concepts from him is a self-guaranteeing promise:

https://x.com/kepano/status/1955702042749546781

The power of "programmable money", or "code-is-law" is the blockchain equivalent of a self-guaranteeing promise.

A company, say, @coinbase can express an upper bound on its trading fees in a policy, but as said above, it is always subject to change. It is not a self-guaranteeing promise.

A company encoded as an immutable smart contract (or a blockchain) has the opportunity to express self-guaranteeing promises, if the code of the contract/blockchain is crafted as such.

@aave, to the contrary, can code its DEX contract such that the team/protocol can never raise fees more than a certain amount. This is a self-guaranteeing promise, with the same degree of certainty that @ethereum guarantees transfers of the ETH token to be valid.

Nomination Pools commissions in @Polkadot is another example of this. The code allows an operator to express once and for all: I will not EVER increase my commission more than X, or update it no more than Y percent in every Z days.

This is not a policy. It is not a statement, or a "won't-be-evil" promise. It is a self-guaranteeing promise. This is the power of "code-is-law", and one example of why so many crypto leaders promised "we can build a world of less trust and more truth with this technology".

Side-note:

This is also why it is important to remember that the ability of blockchains to act as "law" is mostly applicable to the digital world and their own state, and the real world.

A blockchain can assert that some bits representing my commission within its state remain within the "law". It cannot force me to do something in the real world, though.

In most recent conversations, I share concern around RWA and similar verticals. They use Web3 technologies, but not for "code-as-law", but rather different properties such as publicity and the strict ordering blockchains provide.

https://x.com/kianenigma/status/1827078047830528505

This is also why I find projects around proof-of-personhood immensely important as one of the frontier issues of the web3 space, allowing at least some degree of inspection of the real world for blockchains.

https://x.com/Web3summit/status/1826247880883286157

I digress. Web3 promised a world with more self-guaranteeing promises. Sadly, this promise is often lost in the midst of the turbulent, noisy world of crypto.

I am not sure if the world actually "wants" more self-guaranteeing promises if we go around and as people. Yet, so many new inventions were the outcome of imagination rather of asking people "what do you want today and are willing to pay for it?".

There is a place for both innovation and invention, and they can co-exist.