# Coordination By [Madhav Goyal](https://paragraph.com/@madhavg) · 2022-06-07 --- The biggest inspiration for this note was [Kevin owocki](https://twitter.com/owocki) the founder of Gitcoin and his this talk [![]({{DOMAIN}}/editor/youtube/play.png)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpXPym_m_wA) We want to do a lot of good things as a society and prevent bad things from happening and causing harm but it doesn't seem that we are able to put it into action in the real world. No citizen wanted and wants a Nuclear war or Invasion of another country then why are they still happening and fear of them happening is still there? Money spent researching some existential threats is less than the budget of a single Mcdonald's, are we doing this consciously? countries spend more money on keeping their offices cool than they spend on the development of Ethics and Safe AGI. I probably know that you might agree that we should spend more resources on things that could have a huge impact on us in the future but are we really doing it? if we dig deeper and try to find the single biggest cause of some of the biggest mishappenings and the ways they could be avoided a common answer would be if Humans could have coordinated with some mechanism without getting censored or * Humans used cattle, coins, and shells in the past as a way to communicate the transfer of value. Humans have been competent for resources but have learned to coordinate for a better outcome. We could not have survived if early Humans were not been able to adapt to coordinate and work together on a shared interest. Coordination in small groups has helped us create a clan in which people worked together to frame some rules about trade and marriage and stuck together because they shared the same values. * From Clans, we created tribes which helped us gather a pool of resources and increase the coordination better where we were able to decide on things that were of value and move them around as a form of value. * From tribes, we built cities where there was n influx of different people and their ideas which lead to revolutions in technology, politics, and society. people talk and share their thoughts at places of leisure and work which leads to the development of groups and then organizations. * The introduction of the printing press changed the world upside down which resulted in the price of spreading an idea dropping significantly and helped philosophers and scientist share their discoveries with more masses and influence more people. Coordination became better and more flexible as people had records of what was said before. * Records were being maintained of stuff happening on a bigger scale. * Humans could share and take thoughts not just their own but of other people over long distances. Manifestos and books changed the course of human society by outlining the principles and ideologies. Some resonated with these thoughts and started thinking of making states based on these ideas. Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto became the foundation of Communist countries and John Locke's Two Treatises of Government became the basis of many Democratic and liberal Countries. * The goal is not to show that these people are great but when communication and coordination increase or our ability to put our thoughts to action as a society skyrocketed. Big things don't happen when the idea is isolated but mingles with others. A single person with the thought of making a new country with great principles won't work out well but if that person could share that idea and coordinate with a mass of people they could maybe accomplish the goal. Even though we had created great coordination tools and reduced miscommunication to a great extent why have not been able to align actions with our collective values? We, Humans, still have a long way to go. We still have been capped by Dunbar’s Number which describes the no. of people a single Human can form stable social relationships with and it’s 150. We have achieved a lot of dreams by coordinating with less than that number of people but if we are to become the utopia sci-fi writers dream of, we have to scale the ways we can coordinate with more people and in a better way. But for the first time, it might be possible to coordinate with help of an immutable record that no one can censor and is open. Ethereum and blockchain have the potential to unlock solutions to the problem of trust. Society works on trust. Money is nothing without the trust in the government, we won’t be able to eat anything without trusting our grocer but on large scales where the profits and trade-offs are large anyone can default on the trust, so how do we coordinate? * what if we could verify the interactions and record them a place where they can not be destroyed? This is what Ethereum has given the power to do. Blockchain can help us build a better world by helping us coordinate better on large scales because of its “**Don't trust, verify**” property. Most of the breakthroughs we have accomplished so far have been due to our ability to communicate and share our ideas. Nothing happens in isolation and blockchain just takes it further. There are no boundaries on blockchain cultural or regional. It’s the world computer we can build the next future upon. We can deploy social contracts, program our values into money and make it all transparent and censorship-resistant. blockchain takes our innate human interactions and just scales them to a level never thought of before. Will be talking about the impact of blockchain in the next blog post and about the idea of Impact DAOs which, my friends Ale and Kevin have written a book about and did a podcast together! [https://open.spotify.com/episode/2f4rOheNcexMTbhrK5LfL9?si=RjnPJs5QS\_ySnCGsCqOUiA](https://open.spotify.com/episode/2f4rOheNcexMTbhrK5LfL9?si=RjnPJs5QS_ySnCGsCqOUiA) PS: Thanks for bearing me till the end dear reader. if you wanna show a gesture of appreciation buying me a book is one of the best ways [because books are the places where I get most of my ideas from](https://buymeacoffee.com/madhavgoyal) or airdrop me some crypto at madhavg.eth/sol 😁. --- *Originally published on [Madhav Goyal](https://paragraph.com/@madhavg/coordination)*