Only recently in evolutionary time, we left millions of years of close-knit tribal life to live in societies of strangers.

A tribal animal living in an anthill.

Human history is a sequence of experiments in coordinating under this new condition.

We are still early and still stumbling. Strangers exploit our trust and goodwill. Competition and leader worship narrow our minds.

We are a species under stress, struggling in a social environment we did not evolve for.

Social coordination

The evolution of trust bonds

Tribe Local trust
Trust is personal In small groups, coordination is built memory, kinship, and reputation.

Green bonds show local personal trust. Red bonds show captured institutional trust. Blue bonds show trustless coordination through verifiable promises.

Centralization leads to capture

In a tribe of 100, you knew who to trust. In a society of billions, you have no idea.

Institutions filled the gap. Charismatic leaders, religions, courts, banks, states made mass coordination possible. They built the first cities and nations. They replaced mutual trust with dogma, law, and order.

But humans are not fit to rule, and we do not want to follow.

Every ruler's scepter carries the license to extract. Eventually, some ruler uses it. The injustice breeds frustration and ends in revolution. Then someone new holds the scepter, and the cycle begins again.

We obsess over good vs. bad rulers. The ruler is not the problem. The problem is the scepter.

Rings of power corrupt those who hold them and eventually fall into bad hands. To destroy them is the only option.

Scaling trust without a leader

Humans thrive as pluralists. We want to live among peers, free to explore, neither dominating nor dominated.

But the doors to Eden are shut; we cannot go back to the tribe.

But we can bring back the mutual trust that guided our instincts. Ethereum gives us incorruptible ground on which we can make verifiable promises with strangers.

You can't go halfway

A blockchain you can capture is only a database, another scepter someone can hold. It attracts people who seek power and eventually falls into the wrong hands.

Admin keys, multisigs and bridge committees are only as strong as the weakest link in the groups behind them.

Ethereum is the infinite garden

Ethereum fights capture without compromise. This makes it uniquely valuable to the human project.

On Ethereum we can reclaim our humanity while we learn to be a society.