Reversing the Paradigm: Final Considerations

Part 12 of 12 — Blockchain: Decentralization of Money, Power and the State Originally written as a History BA thesis, academic year 2021–2022. Published online August 2026. Series index → · References & bibliography →

The reversal of the paradigm

The blockchain, thanks to its repository made up of unchangeable transactions, is a practical example of historical materialism. Economic structure is placed, as in the traditional monetary system, at the basis of social, political, religious, etc. superstructures: the blockchain makes this mechanism more evident, allowing the transactions that have taken place on it to be tracked. While it is technology that enables the process of validating these trans-actions, capital remains the discriminating factor for holding power within ecosystems. It has already been seen how Proof of Work and Proof of Stake systems require significant investments. The fork mechanism, i.e., splitting, may provide more competition between different ecosystems, somewhat limiting the vertical and hierarchical power due to capital, but it remains as the fundamental structure of human actions, precisely because the process of decentralized validation is dependent on it. The question that arises is: what if it were possible to overturn the concepts of structure and superstructure? Can technology help in this? Over the past two centuries it has enabled remarkable processes of centralization. Today, information technologies can foster economic and political decentralization, allowing new political and decision-making mechanisms to make their way into society. The economic structure, on which everything is written, could be transformed into a superstructure. The paradigm shift, in which structures are reversed, has to do not with the monetary system used in the ecosystem, but with what is propulsive to the very life of the blockchain, and what makes it unchangeable, namely layer 1, that given by consensus among the nodes. Multiple coins can coexist within an ecosystem, but how are such digital coins minted? What underlies and constitutes the monetary system on bockchain? By what criteria is it valid or invalid? The answer depends on the validation system used, especially the selection or extraction of the 'notary,' that is, the node that will be in charge of validating the block containing the latest transactions.

If it was culture and knowledge that validated transactions; if there was a conceptual and social mechanism that allowed for an integration between blockchain and human beings, would that be enough to reverse the paradigm, changing what is structure?

Blockchain ecosystems equipped with different and innovative validation systems are likely to emerge in the coming years.This technology needs to come out of the cavern of computer engineering and be embraced by social science scholars in all its forms and contaminate itself with culture.

New and different validation systems are needed: ones that are integrated into society, and that lay the foundation for something new and different, not just a currency or social credit system, but that lay the foundation for a new understanding of human actions.

In order to find a solution to the problem of structure and superstructure, and to achieve true decentralization, not only physical but also logical, it may be useful to think about what is not divisible in any way by a human being or a machine: time.

Family

The nuclear family has functioned for so many centuries as a social structure, but in the future it may undergo transformation, just as in other parts of the world other family types have fulfilled the same task. The stabilizing function of the family is quite evident, with the transmission of the name and thus of property. The same structure of society is replicated within the family, where the father is a kind of king/president. If the stabilizing function of the family were to disappear, as technology will enable new forms of social stabilization, even the family as it is known today may have less reason to exist. Taking care of offspring is perhaps the fundamental and foundational goal of every family. It is not certain that the family will still serve at the time when the offspring will have life insurance even in the absence of father and mother. The nuclear family makes organization possible among very few people and, except for the last fifty years, in the West, has almost always seen the man, the male, as dominant within the nucleus.

The stabilizing function of the blockchain lies in distributing authority and securing trust from everyone. Many of the incomprehensible - by today's standards - customs concerning the past include the sexual and family sphere: they, where it is possible to contextualize them, reveal reasons - contestable in the present - but which could have been motivated in a reality that functioned differently.

Libertine conduct, considered immoral, could lead to major social consequences. Children born out of wedlock, who until the French Revolution never had any official recognition, are in the present completely equated with 'legitimate' offspring: today they do not represent a destabilizing element for the social system. What would happen with blockchain ecosystems is the transition between what was destabilizing and what will no longer be destabilizing. Constantly changing partners, in the presence of offspring, is destabilizing for our society: it is so for economic, bureaucratic and emotional reasons. Digital would remove economic and bureaucratic constraints, thus allowing smooth, unhindered partner changes. Added to this would be the securing of old contractual ties

• through smart contracts - such as marriage, which ensures a sharing of the needs given by offspring. These lines are meant to be a quick reflection on what the family could be: as always, cause and effect correlations are not easy to discern, nor does making predictions make too much sense.

The separation of the three coins

Political centralization has sometimes been moderated by separation of powers: in every age, who held power, for how long and in what manner, has always been a problem felt. In ancient Rome, a highly politically developed society, the creation of bodies, or individual figures, who could obstruct the decisions of other bodies by, for example, expressing a veto, was what allowed multiple classes to coexist while avoiding civil war. It is necessary for "power to restrain power"59 , Montesquieu later said: it is precisely from the separation of the three powers he theorized, and which has had such good fortune in today's West, that this reflection arises: what if currency also needed a separation, a division, a balancing act? In the current system, the three powers are balanced through a distribution of prerogatives, making impossible for one body what is possible for another. This mechanism was created with the intention of avoiding coups d'état and ensuring that the leadership of a country is vested in a plurality of people. With the advent of blockchain and digital currency, what is foreshadowed is the advent and use of a multitude of coins, tokens or points; the mechanism of splitting does not allow for uniqueness or monopolies and ensures variety.

Experiments of this kind can be implemented without too much difficulty. Already Bitcoin, in 2012 experimented with colored coins.¹

Using three currencies, on the basis of separation of powers, may seem far-fetched, impractical, or unwise. What we want to emphasize is how it is now possible for human society to organize itself through new political mechanisms, which, thanks to different currencies, can function organically, allowing decisions to be reached in a way that is innovative compared to the past. In the present, the same currency is used both to buy objects and to sell them. The social systems that will be created will not necessarily use the same paradigm, and the ways in which human life can be organized will depend on the creativity of those who contribute to its realization. 'Utopia' is no longer an imaginary island, but a prototype for programming human life. There is a continuity between the imaginary island and the digital island: in both new utopian forms come to life, disrupting tradition.

Final considerations

What emerged while writing this thesis is that blockchains attempt to simulate and add the fourth dimension, namely time, to what is known by the name of computing.61 Specifically, what is being created is a shared time between multiple devices, a kind of historical memory of what has happened. When this is done by authority, thus using a client-server paradigm, devices connected to each other by a hierarchical relationship perform functions of various kinds, but without having a memory of what is happening: the one who holds the memory is only the apex of the pyramid, namely the server.

The name of the technology, namely 'blokchain', is particularly interesting: it means 'blockchain,' thereby emphasizing how the data that is stored on it is held together inseparably. 'Timechain', however, is the original name that, perhaps, best conveys the idea of what has been created.

In the digital world, it is not possible to measure time evenly if there is an absence of authority. The problem of double spending is due to the fact that, in computing, nothing can be moved: to move a file, it is first copied and then deleted; however, for there to be a before and after, there must be a consensus on time. Blockchain is not just money or law; blockchain is a technical abstraction of what is one of the most fascinating things we can study: time.

A good reason for having read these pages, even if you may be skeptical about the topic, is to learn more about a new technology. It does not matter whether it will prove to be truly revolutionary, or whether it will be scuttled instead: it will also depend on how it is used. To choose, or to unconsciously support one solution or the other, it is necessary to have an idea of what one is talking about. The parcelization of knowledge from which today's society suffers does not make it easy to have an understanding of the social dynamics carried out within a technical and specialized context, such as that of information technology. There is an almost absent debate on these topics, in which some exalt and idolize, while others reject and dismiss. 'Bitcoin Is Time | Dergigi.Com' https://dergigi.com/2021/01/14/bitcoin-is-time/ [accessed 19 March 2023].

It may be that enthusiasm for blockchain systems will cool, or new technologies will slow its adoption or even stop it. It is not out of the question that Bitcoin could plunge into the abyss, taking all other cryptocurrencies with it. What is now certain, however, is the process that Bitcoin has set in motion, namely a decentralizing movement, which aims to overturn traditional politics based on the exclusion of the majority of the citizenry from decision-making processes.

For those who still have doubts wondering how there can be laws common to all human beings, laws that can be understood and accepted by all, laws that can lead to the supranational and global law62 desired by so many and which has always failed, know that the foundations for them already exist. What was attempted with the League of Nations-and which failed-and later was done with the United Nations Organizationwhich is failing? - is already an established reality. In fact, Internet protocols, which are used by electronic devices to communicate, must adhere to common rules: a smartphone can only be connected to the Internet if it has a network card, which uses addressesphysical or logical-without which the connection cannot take place. These, although in their infancy, are the laws that, to borrow from Hobbes, cannot be disobeyed: they have high hedges at their edges that guide human actions, they are not made to obstruct the path and it is not possible in any way to cross them.63

 Padoa-Schioppa, p. 718.
 Jean Jacques Chevallier, The great works of political thought: from Machiavelli to the present day /
 Jean Jacques Chevallier, Strumenti (Bologna: Il mulino, 1990), p. 184.

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