The Dutch city of Amsterdam — no stranger to international conferences dedicated to cryptocurrencies, blockchain and decentralization — was recently h
The Dutch city of Amsterdam — no stranger to international conferences dedicated to cryptocurrencies, blockchain and decentralization — was recently host to the Network State Conference, which explored decentralization at an entirely different level.
Conference speakers and attendees gathered to discuss and debate whether a new form of decentralized country is possible.
The conference kicked off with an energetic host directing the crowd to chant and shout the title before Balaji Srinivasan, an entrepreneur, investor and former chief technology officer of Coinbase, entered to make his opening speech. During his initial remarks, Srinivasan asks, “Are new countries even possible?”
In his book The Network State, Srinivasan proposes that new countries are possible via a new type of digital community, where its members utilize blockchain and cryptocurrencies to host their social and economic institutions, and its borders lie at the extremes of the crowdfunded land owned by community nodes.
A node might begin with just a small group of friends, the idea being that this small community self-organizes to raise funds, expand and eventually form a viable network node. When you have several well-aligned community nodes, regardless of their geographical distribution, you have the foundations of a network state.
There are many goals among network state proponents, who mainly wish to construct a parallel social infrastructure as a “competing product” to what they see as the flawed systems of state-level social, political and economic institutions, thereby granting citizens of such nation-states the ability to opt-out should incumbent social structures prove insufficient for their needs and desires.
Ivy Astrix, a member of vibecamp and long-time supporter of Srinivasan, told Cointelegraph that disillusionment with the establishment was a common theme among attendees. “Can society, the U.S.A., these very coherent societies — still function? I think they can’t,” she said.
Amid this growing disenchantment with existing societal structures, Astrix said that network states “can improve ‘normal’ people’s lives […] because they encourage a co-creation approach to life, instead of just slotting yourself into something that’s already here, just because its the ‘best’ or ‘least sucky’ option.”
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The connection between network states and blockchain technology is undeniable, as both rely on autonomous nodes that come together to form a network with an agreed set of rules. For the network state concept, crypto rails are the gold standard of their ethos, especially concerning finance.
Frederik Zwilling of Galactica Network told Cointelegraph about the practicality of this union:
“The users won’t go to the network state for itself unless there are a lot of benefits or things they want to do in this network state that attracts them.”
Zwilling added that crypto-based, decentralized solutions are necessary for the governance of community groups — especially for those requiring analogs of nation-state-level social infrastructure.
The physical implementation of a network state
The infrastructure development underpinning the network state concept is moving in multi-decade timeframes, with projects such as Prospera, Cabin and Praxis focusing on community-building, fundraising efforts and building physical locations (nodes) that might eventually form a real-world network state.
Many of the speakers have opened exploratory dialogues with various governments of existing nation-states regarding land ownership, borders and the formation of special economic zones.
Still, no single community has achieved the level of autonomy from legacy systems espoused by proponents of the network state concept.
Prospera’s flagship startup city, St. John’s Bay, comes close to meeting these criteria but still falls mainly under the jurisdiction of traditional institutions, in this case, the Honduran government.
Establishing parallel societies is a task that will take decades to complete, and to reach the network effects required for a minimum-viable society, the process must begin with the kind of community building witnessed at the conference.
Given the early stage of network states, the quality of physical infrastructure is impressive, and the concept itself appears sound, but to scale beyond wealthy futurists taking over holiday resorts, a great deal more time, money and human infrastructure is required for opting out to become a viable choice.
The democratization of governance through technology, particularly that of blockchain, is a principal pillar of the network state concept and is critical to the real-world infrastructure presented at the conference….
cointelegraph.com