追求公共福利的规模化

The Common Citadel
共同的城堡

I will attempt here, to disentangle the way I saw Ethereum back when I first stumbled upon it, and how that train of thought drove me to commit. 在这里，我将试图解开，当我第一次偶然发现以太坊的时候，我看到它的方式，以及一系列的思想是如何驱使我对其着迷。

But first, I’ll explain what led me down that particular rabbit hole…
但首先，我要解释是什么让我掉进那个兔子洞…

Mindset 心态

Like most of my generation, I grew up thinking the world is fucked and that the problem is “The System”. A lot of the people placed the blame on the corruption in governance, but yet more blamed “capitalism” - whatever that means.
像我这一代的大多数人一样，我从小就认为这个世界糟透了，问题出在“体制”上。许多人把责任归咎于政府的腐败，但更多的人指责“资本主义”— 不管这是什么意思。
I mean, it seemed all great after the (self)defeat of Communism, but it just didn’t seem to work as well for us and the planet, as it did for the past generations.
我的意思是，苏联解体之后，一切似乎都很棒，但对我们和这个星球来说，似乎不能像前几代人那样，有效运转了。
The competitiveness of the markets gradually killed Good Hearted and Well Intentioned, rewarding the ones maximizing profit; the corporations rose in profits, while the worker wages grew stagnant and benefits deteriorated.
市场的竞争逐渐扼杀了善良和善意，奖励利润最大化的人; 公司利润上升，而工人的工资停滞不前，福利恶化。

  • Not to mention what all of this “ optimized for one metric ” thing is doing to the planet; a never ending, ever growing extraction of natural resources driven by greed & planned obsolescence.
  • 更不用说所有这些为一个指标优化的事情，正在对这个星球产生影响，贪婪和不断升级驱使着对自然资源永无止境的、不断增长的掠夺

    “We’re in a time when the inability of the markets to sensibly price the externalities is literally destroying the world.” - Vinay Gupta “我们正处于市场无法合理地为外部性定价的时期，这种无能正在逐渐摧毁世界。”ー Vinay Gupta

At the time, uneducated and barely out of puberty — I thought the answer was to burn it all down and start from scratch.
那时，我还没有受过教育，刚刚走出青春期ー我以为解决办法就是把这一切都烧掉，从头开始。

Quest 探索

It became my obsession to figure out why exactly the world is the way it is.
弄清楚为什么世界就是这个样子，成了我的困扰。
My journey went from unfounded conspiracy theories to established truths, from Marx‘s critique of capitalism, to James C. Scott examination of failed systems; from Hayek’s critique of socialist thinking back to critiques of _austrian economics_thinking. Point is, I was spending ridiculous amounts of time at examining both propositions & critiques of mainstream as well as alternative economic thinking:
我的旅程从毫无根据的阴谋论到已经确立的真理，从马克思的资本主义批判，到詹姆斯.斯科特对失败制度的检验，从哈耶克对社会主义思想的批判，回到对奥地利经济学思想的批判。重点是，我花了大量的时间来研究主流经济思想和替代经济思想的主张和批评：

  • What makes systems work, 是什么让系统工作,
  • What makes them fail, 是什么让他们失败,
  • How to do better. 如何做得更好

And although I was now leaning to the “free markets” side of the argument, I was still certain that the conclusion “just pursue self interest” and “markets should rein free” — is just not the way to go about organizing societies.
尽管我现在倾向于“自由市场”的观点，但我仍然确信，“只追求个人利益”和“市场应该自由发展”的结论—— 不是组织社会的正确方式。

One thing that really stuck out for me was this concept of a “Resource-Based Economy”;
有一件事真正让我印象深刻，那就是“资源型经济”的概念;

  • Inspired by the Great Depression of 1920s, the term was coined by _Jacques Fresco, _a self-taught economist/sociologist who proceeded to dedicate his life to developing the concept.
  • 受20世纪20年代经济大萧条的启发，这个词是由雅克.弗雷斯科 发明，一位自学成才的经济学家/社会学家，致力于发展这一概念

His thinking went something like:
他的想法是这样的：

“I saw that the factories are all still there, and the people that worked them were also all still there — So what’s the problem?” “我看到工厂都还在那里，在那里工作的人也都还在那里ーー那么问题是什么呢? ”

Later popularized by the Zeitgeist documentaries, Venus Project aimed at presenting to the world a viable alternative to the current “money-based” economic systems.
后来由于时代精神的纪录片而流行起来，金星计划旨在向世界展示一种可行的替代当前“以货币为基础”的经济体系的方法。
In theory, it all sounded very nice — except the “how to actually get there” part was non-existent. Not to mention the illustrations of his Utopia made me anxious; would anyone even want to live in a city that looks like this? 😬
从理论上讲，这一切听起来都很不错——除了“如何实际到达那里”这一部分是不存在的。更不用说他的《乌托邦》的插图让我感到焦虑; 会有人愿意生活在这样一个城市吗？

So I turned my attention back to reality. There actually already exist places that operate on principles presented by Jacques  - and they look nothing like what he imagined.
所以我把注意力转回到现实。实际上已经有一些地方按照雅克提出的原则运作——它们看起来和他想象的完全不一样。
In modernity, they like to tag themselves “off the grid”, “self-sustainable” or “eco-villages” — but they’re nothing new, really. There are probably countless villages operating on similar principles — without using modern labels.
在现代社会，他们喜欢给自己贴上“脱离电网”、“自给自足”或“生态村”的标签ーー但这并不是什么新鲜事，真的。可能有无数的村庄，按照类似的原则运作ーー没有使用现代标签。
Point is, small communities have always been able to organize in “resource-based-economies”. There is no tragedy of the commons, because it’s hard to be an asshole in the village — everyone knows you. It was always the scaling that brought the tragedy and free-riders.
重点是，小型社区总是能够在“资源型经济”中组织起来。这里没有公共资源悲剧，因为在村子里很难做一个混蛋ーー每个人都认识你。总是这种规模的扩大，带来了悲剧和搭便车。

Enter Ethereum 接触以太坊

Then I found Ethereum, and it blew my mind.
然后我发现了以太坊，它让我大吃一惊。

“Holy shit, this is the software infrastructure for scaling those above the Dunbar’s number!” “天啊，这就是用来扩展那些超过邓巴数字的软件基础设施! ”

My mind was immediately 100% occupied by it.
The possibilities of this decentralized, programmable ledger seemed endless.
我的头脑立刻被它占据了100% ，这种分散的、可编程的分类账本的可能性，似乎无穷无尽。
From identity to governance and work/reward distribution systems — anything seemed possible. Uber without the Uber, Airbnb without the Airbnb, companies without bosses, states without the bureaucratic elites..?
从身份认同到治理，再到工作/报酬分配系统，似乎一切皆有可能。没有 Uber 的 Uber，没有 Airbnb 的 Airbnb，没有老板的公司，没有官僚精英的国家…？
Decentralized autonomous organizations, they called them. Instead of companies outsourcing work to free-lancer — DAOs would simply be sourcing it and distributing the stakes of the organization, to the people building it.
他们称之为去中心化的自治组织（DAO）。与其把工作外包给自由职业者，DAOs是把工作外包给组织内的建设者，然后把组织的股份分配给这些人。
Decentralized organizations building & running common resources.
去中心化的组织，建立和管理公共资源。

All of society could run peer to peer — just like it used to. 所有的社会都可以像过去一样进行点对点的运作。

Of course, reality is still far from the ideal we imagined it to be in 2015, but we’re slowly getting there.
当然，现实与我们2015年想象的理想，相去甚远，但我们正在慢慢达到这一目标。

The Fuel 燃料

Tokenized organizations being crowdfunded; in theory results in a perfect alignment of incentives between investors and end-users — merging them into one.
通过加密货币众筹建立了组织。在理论上，投资者和终端用户之间的激励机制，完美地对齐了ーー二者融为一体。
Make the investors & users into a single type of shareholder, and you should at least be able to get rid of the profit-extraction tension coming from traditional investors. No more planned obsolescence and making things only as good as they need to be to sell.
让投资者和用户成为单一类型的股东，你至少应该能够摆脱来自传统投资者的盈利压力。不再需要不断更新，不再需要把东西做到销售所需的那样好。

Spaceship Earth — A Pale Blue Dot

宇宙飞船地球ー一个淡蓝色的小点

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it; everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. - Carl Sagan” “再看看那个点。就是这里。那就是家。那就是我们。你爱的每一个人，你认识的每一个人，你听说过的每一个人，曾经存在过的每一个人，都在那里生活。我们的欢乐和苦难，数以千计的自信的宗教、意识形态和经济学说，每一个猎人和觅食者，每一个英雄和懦夫，每一个文明的创造者和毁灭者，每一个国王和农民，每一对相爱的年轻夫妇，每一对母亲和父亲，每一个充满希望的孩子，发明家和探险家，每一个道德教师，每一个腐败的政治家，每一个“超级明星” ，每一个“最高领袖” ，我们人类历史上的每一个圣人和罪人，都生活在那里——生活在悬浮在阳光下的尘埃中。- 卡尔.萨根

It’s time to stop treating the Earth as a pool for maximum resource extraction, edging us closer ecosystem’ collapse, and start treating it as our only home. To take the meta view, see Earth as a pale blue dot in a vast universe - and stop shitting where we eat.
是时候停止把地球当作最大限度开采资源的池子了，停止让我们的生态系统崩溃，开始把它当作我们唯一的家园。从元观点来看，把地球看作是一个广阔宇宙中的一个淡蓝色的小点——不要在我们吃饭的地方拉屎。