| This is one of those really tough areas where the problems are so significant and comprehensive that the approach people want to take immediately gets into their worldview and belief system. And no one readily changes their worldview, so its difficult to have productive discussions about such things. Nevertheless I will state my worldview and hopefully mention a few specifics that might be anchor points for an attempted discussion. Technology _alone_ cannot solve our societal problems, but I believe that there is great opportunity to address them by better incorporating the right technologies into society. And I believe that peer-to-peer distributed (and so decentralized) technologies offer quite a lot of promise. Starting with the idea that over-centralization, whether it stems from a more socialist traditional system or a more capitalist traditional system, is one of the main problems, and technologies that are inherently decentralized can address that. Well, maybe I will just start with a few premises. I would like to suggest that we should re-evaluate all of our societal structures in a technological context. I think that we can usefully think of them all as types of (mostly primitive) technologies. For example, I suggest that money is in fact a technology. It is probably the most fundamental technology of society. I think that although an over-reliance on traditional money obviously causes problems, the answer is not to simply de-emphasize its use in society, although that can help in certain contexts. I believe that we should upgrade the technology of money and in doing so we can improve the functioning of society. I also believe that government is another type of fundamental technology for society. It should also have its technology upgraded. Another idea I have is that there is a fundamental interaction between money and government which we normally refer to as "corruption" with the idea that this is an abnormal state for the relationship. However I believe that the close relation between money and government in their present primitive forms is a core structural element, i.e. corruption is structurally guaranteed. I realize that convincing people of these views would require quite extensive prose. But it is unlikely that those with different worldviews would be convinced and I am tired of writing this answer so unfortunately I am not going to try right here. However at least I have explained some of my viewpoint. Anyway, I think that Ethereum and related or similar technologies are moral causes because they allow us the possibility of upgrading core technologies used in society. We can upgrade money with cryptocurrency. We can upgrade government using something like Ethereum-based decentralized autonomous organizations. I think that you need to upgrade money _and_ government at the same time and be sure that your system considers them as closely related so that you can handle "corruption" in a structural way. |