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The main question that Nathan's piece is trying to explore is simple. There is a large body of intellectual work that criticizes a bubble of concepts that they refer to as "economization", "neoliberalism" and similar terms, arguing that they corrode democratic political values and leave many people's needs unmet as a result. The world of cryptocurrency is very economic (lots of tokens flying around everywhere, with lots of functions being assigned to those tokens), very neo (the space is 12 years old!) and very liberal (freedom and voluntary participation are core to the whole thing). Do these critiques also apply to blockchain systems? If so, what conclusions should we draw, and how could blockchain systems be designed to account for these critiques? Nathan's answer: more hybrid approaches combining ideas from both economics and politics. But what will it actually take to achieve that, and will it give the results that we want? My answer: yes, but there's a lot of subtleties involved.
A few important questions to think about in the design of the network (courtesy of Peter Harris)
Who actually owns the platform? Investors and founders? An elusive foundation that has no governance protocol? If legally based in the real-world, what is the entity, where is it based and what is that region’s definition of cooperative?
If you’re voting, what are you voting for? Changing minor features in a service or do you and your colleagues have the ability to steer the ship in a different direction?
If voting via tokens, what is the model? Token-weighted where whales have the ability to override the will of the larger community? (Of note is Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin recently writing about his doubts about the limitations of token based voting systems.)
Does the project encode its values in a manner similar to the 7 Cooperative Principles that have been adopted worldwide?