世界各地的政治也已经走向了一个奇怪的方向，我不断地为许多政治派别的前景感到担忧，一些政客为了他们的一己私利毫不犹豫地放弃了他们应当遵守的基本原则。
Economics has historically focused on "goods" in the form of physical objects: production of food, manufacturing of widgets, buying and selling houses, and the like. Physical objects have some particular properties: they can be transferred, destroyed, bought and sold, but not copied. If one person is using a physical object, it's usually impractical for another person to use it simultaneously. Many objects are only valuable if "consumed" outright. Making ten copies of an object requires something close to ten times the resources that it takes to make one (not quite ten times, but surprisingly close, especially at larger scales). But on the internet, very different rules apply. Copying is cheap. I can write an article or a piece of code once, and it usually takes quite a bit of effort to write it once, but once that work is done, an unlimited number of people can download and enjoy it. Very few things are "consumable"; often products are superseded by better ones, but if that does not happen, something produced today may continue to provide value to people until the end of time.
**On the internet, "public goods" take center stage.**Certainly, private goods exist, particularly in the form of individuals' scarce attention and time and virtual assets that command that attention, but the average interaction is one-to-many, not one-to-one. Confounding the situation even further, the "many" rarely maps easily to our traditional structures for structuring one-to-many interactions, such as companies, cities or countries;. Instead, these public goods are typically public across a widely scattered collection of people all around the world. Many online platforms serving wide groups of people need governance, to decide on features, content moderation policies or other challenges important to their user community, though there too, the user community rarely maps cleanly to anything but itself. How is it fair for the US government to govern Twitter, when Twitter is often a platform for public debates between US politicians and representatives of its geopolitical rivals? But clearly, governance challenges exist - and so we need more creative solutions.
This is not merely of interest to "pure" online services. Though goods in the physical world - food, houses, healthcare, transportation - continue to be as important as ever, improvements in these goods depend even more than before on technology, and technological progress does happen over the internet.
Examples of important public goods in the Ethereum ecosystem that were funded by the recent Gitcoin quadratic funding round. Open source software ecosystems, including blockchains, are hugely dependent on public goods.
But also, economics itself seems to be a less powerful tool in dealing with these issues. Out of all the challenges of 2020, how many can be understood by looking at supply and demand curves? One way to see what is going on here is by looking at the relationship between economics and politics. In the 19th century, the two were frequently viewed as being tied together, a subject called "political economy". In the 20th century, the two are more typically split apart. But in the 21st century, the lines between "private" and "public" are once again rapidly blurring. Governments are behaving more like market actors, and corporations are behaving more like governments.
We see this merge happening in the crypto space as well, as the researchers' eye of attention is increasingly switching focus to the challenge of governance. Five years ago, the main economic topics being considered in the crypto space had to do with consensus theory. This is a tractable economics problem with clear goals, and so we would on several occasions obtain nice clean results like the selfish mining paper. Some points of subjectivity, like quantifying decentralization, exist, but they could be easily encapsulated and treated separately from the formal math of the mechanism design. But in the last few years, we have seen the rise of increasingly complicated financial protocols and DAOs on top of blockchains, and at the same time governance challenges within blockchains. Should Bitcoin Cash redirect 12.5% of its block reward toward paying a developer team? If so, who decides who that developer team is? Should Zcash extend its 20% developer reward for another four years? These problems certainly can be analyzed economically to some extent, but the analysis inevitably gets stuck at concepts like coordination, flipping between equilibria, "Schelling points" and "legitimacy", that are much more difficult to express with numbers. And so, a hybrid discipline, combining formal mathematical reasoning with the softer style of humanistic reasoning, is required.
Civil wars, alliances , blocs, alliances with participants in civil wars, you can all find it in crypto. Though fortunately, the conflict is all virtual and online, without the extremely harmful in-person consequences that often come with such things happening in real life. So what can we learn from all this? One important takeaway is this: if phenomena like this happen in contexts as widely different from each other as conflicts between countries, conflicts between religions and relations within and between purely digital cryptocurrencies, then perhaps what we're looking at is the indelible epiphenomena of human nature - something much more difficult to resolve than by changing what kinds of groups we organize in. So we should expect situations like this to continue to play out in many contexts over the decades to come. And perhaps it's harder than we thought to separate the good that may come out of this from the bad: those same energies that drive us to fight also drive us to contribute.