We live in times of a hidden war between “one person, one vote” and “one dollar, one vote” ideologies. The reason why it is hidden is because we use the same terms for both: democracy, voting, consensus, etc. We govern our governments each having one vote, but in our companies shareholders commonly hold votes proportional to their share. Some people are claiming that the latter is a better approach and everything should be decided through markets and power. I believe that using power (physical or monetary) to make decisions is barbaric and that our civilization progress was to introduce a more true democracy, one person, one vote. But I do not believe even that is the end of our developments in this respect and we should continue developing our collective governance. Moreover, I do not believe that these two positions are necessary the only possibilities, and some combinations might also exist. In some way we might even already have that: using “one person, one vote” to decide the rules under which we operate, but using “one dollar, one vote” to decide how to split the profits.

Anyway, all this could be a topic of some other longer blog post. Here I wanted to explain this existing tension between these two ideologies to present how they have existed in decentralized technologies as well and why Bitcoin’s blockchain is so innovative.

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