Hi everyone!
I’ve recently found out this project and I am sincerely delighted by its vision.
As a Law student, I appreciate how the Team has clearly understood the implication of this protocol beyond its technical aspect and I appreciate every step done so far.
As I said I’m not a developer, but I’m committed to this subject from an humanistic point of view and I would like to share some thoughts about this colossal vision of a global decentralized social graph with some…ehm…technicians =) .
As far as I understand the project aims to create a way to operate a more open-wide set of instructions over an immutable storage of informations, and I feel it as an huge step up from the simplicity of the Bitcoin system. In fact, while Bitcoin can successfully transfer and keep track of the wallet amount alone, this protocol should support a full social structure, with all the dynamics involved.
I see that you are obviously taking nowadays social media as reference but I would like to point out how your mission should keep in mind centuries of work in social engineering done by our ancestor.
As human beings our history is profoundly shaped by social interaction, even beyond what we call “history” we have well documented proof of at least 30.000 years of social activity.
Most of the work has been done in the last 4000 years with just words, ink and paper and now we are unlocking its full potential thanks to informatics.
So… what I say might sound strange but you would be surprised by the similarities between some of the issues and topics on this website and the topics of my Ancient Roman Law course. The best thing is that the Romans set a lot of clear points on these field so that even an informatic protocol can start from there.
That’s why I can easily compare the roman mancipatio (the oldest formal transfer of propriety) to a Bitcoin transaction (that’s what my studies are doing so far), the Ethereum blockchain to a stipulatio pretoria , and I’m astonished by what you protocol might be under this perspective.
DSNP could be the ultimate evolution of the ius civile, providing the core for a digitalization of the governments.
In fact, once the right conditions are established, for most of the civil law countries is only a matter of literal “translation” from the language of their Constitution and Codes to Solidity (for common law countries it could be less intuitive).
This would literally create a social media public platform, with the the only difference that the “public administration” cannot be fooled, corrupted or mistaken by anyone (eventually solving one of the three biggest issues of the XXI century constitutionalism)
I am pointing at the Romans not only because we like them a lot here in Italy but also because they can really help you out!
Indeed we can consider the Roman concept of res publica really close to the one of blockchain, and see analogically how private behavior spontaneously turned himself from a really small network of farmers into one of the biggest empires in history.
Moreover, using them as reference instead of actual standards, it would avoid a lot of nasty political issues and would let you focus on the very essence of the social structure you aim to build.
I don’t know if some of you has already explored this idea or this topic, but I just feel as if it is imperative to take in consideration the Corpus Iuris Civilis in a project like this.
I just hope you can see all this with this scale of greatness, you are doing an amazing job.
Greetings from Italy,
Guglielmo