Web3 Values System

Discussion

Michael Zargham:

“Investors, Builders, and Early Adopters of web-based cryptographically secured social and economic infrastructure and applications have a wide range of beliefs and values but some key concepts form a common thread: privacy, transparency and agency.

At first blush, privacy and transparency are in direct tension, but this provides a fertile ground for discussing trade-offs. Agency then includes the right of humans to opt-in and out of web3 networks. Furthermore, opting-in does not require an intermediary, provided you are sufficiently technically inclined to manage your own infrastructure and/or private keys.

Another interesting tension arises in the pursuit of agency: in a network, participants are connected, so often one’s right to control their own actions can negatively impact others. At one level, protocols can be said to address this directly by providing an explicit specification of what actions are and are not acceptable within the network. However, at the level of governing these networks the boundaries of these rights are non-obvious.

The Ethereum hard fork after TheDAO hack is an example where the Ethereum Institution (humans) split over differences in values. The Ethereum Classic Community upholding a principle that the “code is law” and that actions taken in bad faith (exploiting a flaw in code to take someone else’s money rather than taking action to see the code secured) were to be upheld because the code itself was the deciding factor. The broader Ethereum community took extreme measures to reverse the malicious activity and initiated an irregular state transition, effectively removing the hackers funds to be redistributed to the affected parties. Neither was right in any absolute sense but the event was a very public exercise of a values judgement on the part of leaders in the Ethereum community.

Reconciling Value Systems

At first glance, these value systems are in conflict. Simply, the authority of a traditional engineer is derived from the power of the nation-state to regulate its territory — most jurisdiction limit engineering activities that could affect public wellbeing to licensed professionals. However, the web3 value system is native to the internet, the social institution is extra-national and openly rejects the authority of the state to regulate it. Adherents to the web3 value system adhere to regulations out of pragmatism rather than in deference to those regulatory authorities.

Let us set aside for a moment the interpretation of the engineering profession as a social institution empowered by sovereign nations to design, build and maintain technological infrastructure. Instead let’s look at the engineering profession as a social institution empowered by the public to safeguard their well-being in the face of technologies so broad and deep that they cannot hope to understand it all, and thus cannot make educated judgements regarding their own individual safety.

Taking this latter perspective, it is possible to undertake the responsibility to safeguard the public good without first submitting to the authority of a sovereign state, and their right to regulate. This reconciles with the agency aspect of the web3 value system; in choosing which systems one opts into it is possible to select for those systems one believes have been created and maintained by persons adhering to a public-wellbeing-first values system. Though it may take time, we believe history tells us that people want to enjoy the benefits of new technology while the underlying complexity is abstracted away from them. This is only practical if their interests are safeguarded through social institutions like the token engineering commons (TEC).”

(https://medium.com/token-engineering-commons/engineering-ethics-in-web3-18d981278018)

More information

For more on Web3 Values and History see: Voshmgir S. Token Economy: How Blockchains and Smart Contracts Revolutionize the Economy. BlockchainHub; 2019. (Now Open Source!)

For thoughtful criticism see Walch A. In Code(rs) We Trust: Software Developers as Fiduciaries in Public Blockchains; 2019.