[Moodles]

This reminds me of a previous job. The management—none of which were technical people—just loved the idea of investigating “the blockchain” and “IoT” and “machine learning” and “AI”, but had no clue what it meant. I left after a couple of months.

Has anyone else read this article and had the same experience as me? I genuinely second guess myself when reading it: have I lost the ability to read? Am I stupid? I read all these words on the page yet I have absolutely no comprehension of what was said. What on Earth was written on the “formalising humans on the blockchain” section for example? There sure are a lot of words, but nothing actually got said.

What, exactly do they want to do with a blockchain and why? It’s a simple question.

Oh, they have some cryptocurrency token they want to sell. Gotcha.

[paula_berman]

The why blockchain question is addressed in the first sentence. Of course, it is a short answer - it's not explained further because we have an entire paper just dedicated to that which most of our readers are familiar with: check paper.democracy.earth for that. Happy to answer any specific questions regarding formalizing humans on the blockchain, it is definitely a dense subject, but a key point for expanding the positive impact of crypto (if done right!).

[Moodles]

No it isn't. There's no need for a blockchain here, and you either know it and just want to make some $$$ selling your pointless tokens, or you're clueless about the tradeoffs associated with a blockchain.

You obviously won't talk about anything technical to do with the blockchain: how the consensus algorithm works and why you chose it, who sells the coins and why, why you need coins, what security guarantees it has, why having all nodes of a network sharing a copy of the same ledger and constantly engaging in a protocol to agree on the state of the ledger is at all a good idea, and so on and so on... You just want to argue with me a bit to muddle the waters so people side it's one side against another and the truth lies somewhere inbetween. Fact is, this project makes no sense.

[cypherpundit]

Following the link in the article to the white paper "The Social Smart Contract" there is a detailed explanation of the entire project (paper.democracy.earth) - reading this, I think the answer to "what do they want to do with a blockchain and why" becomes more clear - the project is about building a digital governance platform i.e. tokenize democracy, which enables new forms of digital voter representation and participation. This article is focused on the evolution of the project's token architecture i.e. the how, vs. the what/why.

Regarding the meaning of 'formalizing humans on the blockchain" - I think the point here is, social media and the nation-states (driver's licenses, passports) are the centralized entities that control formal identity - this project is layout out an approach to decentralize the ability for a person to claim a digital ID, which is a keystone challenge to be met for digital governance to not be overrun with bots and sybils like current social media platforms are.

Also if you research the co-founder, he is a college drop out game developer and founder of a political party in Argentina - pretty far from an MBA type.

[buboard]

reminds me of this (no disrespect to the owners) : http://www.demiurge.technology/culture

[drngdds]

I sincerely thought that was promotional material for some religion or cult

[amelius]

Perhaps the text was generated by AI? :)

[Moodles]

AI on the blockchain.

[theyoungwolf]

Yep I closed it immediately. And this is someone who actually reads this stuff.

[Moodles]

The really baffling thing is how this made it to the front page of HN.

[BucketSort]

Apparently this was a Y Combinator startup launched in 2015.

[Moodles]

Wow