Blockchain Governance as an Information System

I just finished reading the essay “Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy.“ To summarize the essay’s interesting points: democratic states are information systems with some properties (e.g. free speech, aka openness); these properties allow enemies of the state to to inspire fear and doubt and confusion in the public about issues by “flooding the airwaves” (aka trolling); these attacks are most detrimental when they cause the public to question what should be “common knowledge” - for example if the voting system is fair. Even simpler: the openness of democracies make them easier to attack in bad ways.

Unfortunately, I think the same argument applies to blockchains as well - possibly even better than it applies to democracies. The properties that make democracies vulnerable to these type of FUD attacks are not only present in blockchain communities - they are much worse. The community is significantly more open and dedicated to a lack of censorship. The information landscape has a significantly larger attack surface.

But at least a well-functioning democracy can hope that the elected officials may be able to implement policies that limit the effect of these attacks. Given that blockchain communities, by design, don’t have such elected officials who can regulate and “censor appropriately,” stopping such attacks (even the low hanging fruit) seems much harder. The platform that these blockchain communities use to coordinate (Twitter, Telegram, Discord, Reddit, etc) probably plays a huge role in how effective governance is. As a silly example, the better moderator tools are on Reddit, the more productive I bet Ethereum governance would be in the case of these attacks.

The one benefit that blockchains have over nation states as of now is that they aren’t being attacked by nation states (I think). Many in the blockchain community see attacks on blockchains by state actors as an inevitable outcome (once these blockchains start to undermine the states themselves, they claim), but I guess I’m not sure this will ever happen.

If nation-states ever actually do decide to attack blockchains with similar attacks that occur on democracies in the wild today, I don’t have much hope for blockchain governance. Mostly because it seems like a hard problem. But hopefully, if this ever starts happening in the future, democracies will have figured out some nice solutions by then.