DAC Economy - The Metis Way

If you take a closer look at blockchain systems, they do resemble self-replicating machines³⁵. Blockchain systems such as Bitcoin and Ethereum implement what is called the replicated state machine³⁶ – one of its purposes is to secure fault tolerance³⁷ for blockchain systems as they are built on top of peer-to-peer distributed networks where network nodes are not guaranteed to be fault free³⁸. Fault tolerance is not unique to blockchain networks but such mechanism helps not only robustness (security) but also liveness³⁹ of the underlying distributed network system.

We should take this rigorous notion of liveness of a system and expand it to mean the mechanism to sustain a living organism. The rigorous notion of system liveness is analogous to those nonlinear, nonequilibrium and inanimate self-organizing phenomena in nature described by Ilya Prigogine [13] that we mentioned in the previous section – we should call it primitive liveness. The difference between primitive liveness and a living organism is adaptation – to the surrounding environment.

Blockchain systems of the first generation (Bitcoin and Ethereum, etc.) are limited to the primitive liveness, there is no need for them to have the capability to adapt – their primitive liveness is sustained by rigid, fixed predicates as part of their protocol design, such as Proof-of- Work, famously known as crypto-mining. The problem with first-gen blockchain’s primitive liveness is its weak attraction to peripheral economic activities due to the rigid boundary it must keep to maintain its predicated sustainability. That’s why we made the observation in Part I of this discussion that first-gen blockchains do not have much of an independent, vibrant economy of decentralized on-chain economic activities – despite the size of cryptocurrency “economy” measured by our current centralized economy.

Some in the blockchain community are quite content with the current status quo – they see the astronomical growth in size of the cryptocurrency cottage industry due to our centralized economic overlord’s troubled monetary policies and are experiencing quite a run to the moon (bank). What a scrape of a living that is! The problem with this attitude is that the cryptocurrency cottage industry is not a truly independent and decentralized blockchain economy, and is seen by the centralized economic institutions as parasitic – which means they

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³⁴ This DAC / “dark” horse’s name is “Big bad wizard”.

³⁵ Self-replicating machine.

³⁶ Replication_(computing), and State machine replication.

³⁷ Byzantine Fault.

³⁸ Reaching agreement in the presence of fault.

³⁹ Liveness_(Concurrent Computing).

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can, and will, pull the rug underneath it someday⁴⁰. It is ever urgent for the blockchain community to build a truly vibrant, decentralized and on-chain blockchain economy that can stand on its own feet, unfettered by storms of our concurrent economic woes in the centralized world.

An independent economy is like an ecosystem with many living organisms that could adapt and thrive in the surrounding environments. Unfortunately the first-gen blockchain systems, armed only with primitive liveness, do not live up to be an ecosystem of its own – they lack the ability of adaptation. This is where Metis DAO blockchain system is different.

Metis DAO enables DAC economy – the kind of DNA replication engine that will bring adaptation capability to a new breed of blockchain applications, lift them beyond the limitedness of the first-gen blockchain apps for a truly independent, decentralized on-chain economy. It is called The Metis Way – to adapt and innovate. But first, let’s talk about trinity.