The legacy economic system only responds to legitimate parallel competition that treats people better.
This book (and accompanying audiobook) forms a go-to reference for understanding and achieving true decentralisation in social community blockchains and digital Network States. We believe in a model with:
Instead, the community should guide the technology and governance, maintaining the neutrality of the base layer for itself, ensuring freedom and participation for everyone.
We will explore the game theory of network attacks, attack vectors, how to defend against attacks, guiding principles for decentralisation, a realistic vision for the future, and the best technical stacks for censorship resistance and governance. You will find an in-depth discussion of:
Throughout, we emphasize how these decentralised approaches may reshape society. We plan to illustrate our concepts with real-world examples of communities that have implemented them. This is a fully open-source, community-driven work, freely available to anyone who wants to replicate or expand upon these principles.
The community forming what has become the back bone of the Hive Blockchain has endured years of conflict, evolution, and successful defence against multiple takeover attempts yet it remains decentralised. The ability to remain decentralised over almost a decade at the time of publishing, means there is noteworthy knowledge to be gained and lessons to be learned from dissecting how Hive’s community achieved this resilience. In doing this, we reveal the critical requirements and pass on an industry standard for any other community network and Network State hoping to:
Our ultimate aim is to document the “how and why” of proper and principled decentralisation, including the deeper implications for human freedom. In a world often controlled by entrenched power structures hostile to genuine decentralised, and therefore neutral systems, this knowledge is recorded immutably, and preserved under the account 
The next 25 chapters (you are reading Chapter 1) are the product of 20+ months of filming, writing, systematic break down of underlying principles and technology and continuous reflection. Each topic builds on the last, culminating in a holistic framework for decentralised governance and secure digital communities.
For those of you interested in understanding more about how this book was created, go to @networkstate to see the discussions and conversations that went into the creation of this work, as well as see the immutable text version, stored on the blockchain, so that the ideas, essential for digital freedom within cannot be erased from our consciousnesses.
This is a new field of human understanding and so we invite your input. Constructive dialogue helps refine these ideas and is essential to the understanding of the principles required for this burgeoning field which is essential to the maintenance of digital freedom and digital rights into the future. It is long overdue that we share these methods in a digestible, publicly documented way, so others may replicate them and maximize their own decentralisation and digital self-sovreignty.
Decentralisation, at present, is a term widely misunderstood in the crypto industry. Many projects, including Ethereum and most other leading, reputed crypto projects are not actually fully decentralised. Launched with conflicts of interest from ICO's, founder stakes, and pre-mines, amongst many other conflicts, such mechanisms often embed weaknesses that undermine genuine decentralisation in the long run.
We will contrast such pitfalls with a more robust formula for censorship-resistant design. In particular, we show how projects can thrive without centralised corporate structures or seed round investors. By removing these single points of failure, communities can achieve:
This work aims to become both an industry and societal standard on decentralisation for social and Network State type communities. By explaining the precise steps and technologies, we hope everyone can more easily understand and if they choose, build their own censorship-resistant networks, taking many of the foundational, timeless lessons explored in the following paragraphs about true decentralisation and what is required to achieve, maintain, attack, defend, apply, and expand it.
The Hive community has a history of being one of the only blockchain communities which successfully defended itself against centralised takeovers, removed exploitative stake, and fortified governance, and so sets a vital precedent which can be studied and replicated. These successes and the underlying lessons can serve the entire world as it searches for more equitable, secure ways to operate.
We believe there is a specific method for achieving and sustaining decentralisation, an approach offering genuine freedom and a more enlightened path on Earth. In a world where established power structures often oppose truly decentralised systems, it is crucial to document, debate, and preserve the knowledge gleaned from this text storage based blockchain community.
If you found the information in this work valuable, please do consider returning some of your value back to the authors way with some Value4Value.
Value4Value is a monetisation model, a content format, and a way of life. It is about freedom and openness, connection and free speech, sound money and censorship resistance.
Time - Your time & attention are valuable. Spending them is valuable in and of itself.
Talent - It doesn't have to be money. Whatever your skills, there are many ways to give back.
Treasure - Thanks to the Bitcoin Lightning Network, Hive Backed Dollars, and other forms of monetary transfer, value can now be exchanged permissionlessly, instantly without friction and completely outside of the legacy economy.
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for their reviews of this book and for spotting our mistakes!We invite anyone to challenge the ideas in this book at the official blog spot @networkstate We will incorporate your ideas in future editions and mention your username in this contributors part
No single person or company can define “freedom” in a decentralised ecosystem it must emerge from the community itself. These chapters will detail our experiences, analyses, and guidelines to ensure your community can thrive, defend itself, and stay decentralised for generations to come.
In freedom, and in defence of it, let us begin.
2.2.1 Why An Alternative, Parallel Economy?
2.2.2 New Options for Opting Out of Oppressive Economies
2.3.1 The Historical, Town Square Context
2.3.2 Building Digital Sovereignty
2.4.1 Why Sovereign Economies?
2.4.2 Mechanics of a Community Economy
2.5.1 Path to Recognition
2.5.2 Governments Joining New Parallel Economies
3.1.1 Profit vs. Principles
3.1.2 Censorship Resistance is Binary
3.1.3 Counter-intuitive Choices
3.1.4 Freak Events and Serendipity
3.2.1 What Bitcoin Got Right
3.2.2 What Most Proof-of-Stake Chains Got Wrong
3.2.3 Steem and the Emergence of Hive
3.2.4 Why Hive Is a “Freak Event”
3.3.1 The Need for Organic Growth
3.3.2 Value-for-Value Incentives
3.3.3 Voluntary Participation
3.3.4 Hard-to-Replicate Events
3.4.1 Digital Self-Sovereignty
3.4.2 Immutable Speech and Transactions
3.4.3 Beyond the Reach of a Single Country
3.5.1 No Single Control Point
3.5.2 Parametrised Consensus
3.5.3 Distribute Tokens Broadly
3.5.4 Freak Events Often Trigger Real Decentralisation
3.5.5 Censorship Resistance as a Social Phenomenon
4.10.1 Block Producer Rotation and Back-Ups
5.1.1 Requiring Users (or Apps) to Stake
5.1.2 Eliminates Per-Transaction Fees
5.1.3 Deters Spam
5.1.4 Fosters App-Level Staking
5.2.1 Paying Infrastructure Operators from the Protocol
5.2.2 Reputation & Community Voting
5.2.3 Freedom to be Anonymous
5.3.1 High fees cause:
5.4.1 Universal Access
5.4.2 Circular Economies
5.4.3 Strong HODL Incentives for Decentralised Applications
5.4.4 Equitable Distribution for Everyday Users
6.1.1 Offloading Heavier Logic
6.1.2 Front-End Interactions
6.1.3 Data Efficiency
6.2.1 Leverages Layer 1 Accounts
6.2.2 Anchors Critical State
6.2.3 Avoids Duplicating Security on Layer 2
6.3.1 Minimal On-Chain Dependencies
6.3.2 Reduced Attack Surface
6.3.3 Separate Upgrades
6.4.1 Smart Contracts
6.4.2 Heavy Media / Non-Text Storage
6.4.3 Computationally Intensive Operations
6.5.1 Custom Tokens
6.5.2 Instant, Low Cost Swaps and Wrapping
6.5.3 Fee-less DeFi
6.6.1 Lower Fees
6.6.2 Fast, Rich Apps
6.6.3 Protection of the Base Chain
6.7.1 BLS & Escrows
6.7.2 Layer 2 liquidity Pools
7.5.1 Multiple Mechanisms of Distribution to:
7.5.2 Continuous, Controlled New Token Minting:
8.1.1 Social Trust Over Trust in Code
8.1.2 Accountability and Skin in the Game
8.1.3 Support of Nuanced, Complex Social Interactions
8.2.1 On-Chain, Numeric Reputation
8.2.2 Intangible Human-To-Human Reputation
8.3.1 Consistent Value Creation
8.3.2 Stakeholder Validation
8.3.3 Social Presence and Visibility
8.4.1 Account Reputation as an Escrow
8.4.2 Increasing Account Valuation
8.5.1 Why Users Delegate
8.5.2 Scaling Influence
8.5.3 Defence Against Attacks
8.6.1 Communities Rally Around Known Leaders
8.6.2 Long-Term Commitment
11.2.1 Mitigations for Proof of Work Attacks
11.2.2 Longer Term Accumulation Attacks on a PoW Chain
11.2.3 Why We Call PoW "Infrastructure Voting"
11.3.1 Otherwise Known as Un-Parametrised Coin Voting
11.3.2 The Fundamental Idea
11.3.3 Why Un-Parametrised Coin Voting (PoS) Tends to centralise
11.3.4 Mitigations for PoS Attacks
11.3.5 Danger of Centralisation
11.3.6 The Necessity of Guardrails
11.3.7 Why We Call This "Un-Parametrised Coin Voting (UPCV)"
11.4.1 Community Reputation and Named Accounts
11.4.2 Advantages Over Basic PoS
11.4.3 Disadvantages of DPoS
13.1.1 Calculating the Threshold in Practice
13.1.2 Over-the-Counter (OTC) Acquisitions
13.4.1 The Immune Response
13.4.2 Forking: The Ultimate Escape Hatch
13.7.1 The Value of On-Chain Reputation
13.7.2 Reputation Damage
13.7.3 NFTs for Reputation
13.10.1 Benevolent Acts and Resilience
14.1.1 Security and Decentralisation Are the Same Goal
14.1.2 Mixing Computation With Data Availability
14.2.1 lightweight Base Layer for True Layer-2’s
14.2.2 Resource Credits vs. Fee Auctions
14.3.1 Un-Parametrised Proof of Stake vs. Parametrised Coin Voting
15.1.1 Defining a Pre-Mine
15.1.2 Hidden “Regulation Through Pressure”
15.2.1 Coin Voting Without Parameters
15.2.2 Tying into centralised Nodes
20.1.1 Copy and Iterate
20.1.2 No centralised Enforcement
20.2.1 Governance Rights Accumulation as the Business Model
20.2.2 Community Ownership
20.3.1 Abundant Code
20.3.2 Power of The Network Effect
20.4.1 Forking Logos and Names
20.4.2 Brands Aligning with Their Community
20.4.3 Stake for Resources
20.4.4 Intrinsic Utility
20.5.1 Impossible Central Target
20.5.2 Undermining IP Laws
