Well, looks like Mr. Trump will be the next US president. This will be positive for crypto.
Impressive brave face you are putting on there
I'm reasonably certain that most of America doesn't realize what they just invited to dinner.
The election seems to have been driven by the fact that anything has to be better than a Bush or a Clinton -- the two families who have sat atop their respective major parties for the last 3 decades. The electorate may end up being right -- but history doesn't supply us with counterfactuals. We move through it only once and have to learn what we can.
So America has a new president elect -- but it will also have the same party in control of the House, Senate and the Presidency. But at this point, there is no comprehensive set of policies which this new government represents.
This is a difficult day for many Americans. The electorate was very split, on racial and gender lines in a way it hasn't ever been before. Both parties did this. On the left, folks have used the label of "racist" to shut down reasonable arguments from those who aren't minorities and disagreed with them for decades now. I have been on the receiving end of this and it is chilling. On the right now it would appear that the party of Lincoln & Reagan has now embraced something else. So there has been collusion in this collapse of civilized dialog -- but the question is where does it go from here?
Today, the answer is where-ever Trump wants to take it. He won. And he could do great things -- it's just that what he said he would do, in order to get elected, was a some great stuff and some really weird stuff. People don't seem to be worried about that today - but seem dazed.
Now America, like Russia, is lead by a man who would like to help "reclaim our nation's destiny." In America, the use of the word "destiny" tends to refer to manifest destiny:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destinyAnd if this is the playbook, then there is the potential for a new sort of alliance which just emerged which would seem to be linking Washington, London and Moscow.
The role of the media in this will be key. This whole election cycle in the US, with its tenuous link to any empirical reality reminded me of Peter Pomeransev's book on the new Russia,
https://www.amazon.com/Nothing-True-Everything-Possible-Surreal/dp/1610396006All in all -- anyone who talks of destiny is always seeking to manipulate people -- and that is what politicians do. But this event is also a reminder that we live in a world best described by quantum physics, where low probability events happen every day. There is no inevitability or destiny to any of this -- just the hopes and dreams of men confronting a world they don't understand.
My guess is that the answer to all this is less government and more respect for individuals -- not another new person telling people what to think. Within this framework, of respecting individual freedom and human agency in the face of those who seek to manipulate and control (generally most governments -- maybe all, but I don't know all of them, so I will say most), each of us has to ask what we will do.
For my part, I'm working on understanding different solutions to the byzantine general's problem and learning to code, to see if I can help create a distributed, decentralized, trustless platform for computing, contracting and commerce which would serve to preserve the agency of each individual.
The funny thing about Gödel's incompleteness theorem is that it not only tells us we can't know everything -- but it also says that to get anywhere you have to start with an assumption, or a belief. In this way, Godel of all people is implying that something must be "sacred" or beyond question. And then after that you can construct a logically complete system (or that's the cliff notes version).
So the USA will have a new president who would like to be able to tell people what to do, how to live, and how to think. Governments tend to attract these sorts of folks. My "operating assumption" or what I hold "sacred" is that we each need to be able decide what to do for ourselves. HUMAN AGENCY, not anyone's vision of a NATION'S DESTINY must be the anchor for a JUST SOCIETY.
The project of building the infrastructure which could possibly enable a just society seems to be what the crypto community is doing -- whether intentionally or unintentionally. I believe the infrastructure this community is building will be essential at some point - I just don't know when.
Crown's goal is to be a part of this and to add a few of it's own innovations along the way. One of those innovations, might be a SOCIAL CONTRACT of sorts -- instead of a terms of service. It would state the values and beliefs which inform action on the crown network. I would argue that a social contract declaring that HUMAN AGENCY is sacred in some way is essential -- not just for confronting other people who will tell us what to do, but also the increasingly sophisticated machine intelligences which seek to nudge and manage us. If we game things out, the issue in the future will be both bossy and controlling machines as well as bossy and controlling people.
If the project sounds interesting, get in touch with the guys who are developing it. I'm just throwing in my 2 cents on some of the big picture stuff...
.