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RE: Cryptocurrency forks: why do they happen and what happens after?
Taking a historical look on cases of communities splitting (like the Ethereum and Bitcoin examples you mentioned), it seems quite clear that the result is a loss for everyone in the network which used to be a single whole.
While I can see a decent case for making that argument from a logical standpoint, I'm far from convinced it's true.
One of the big weaknesses in that argument, in my opinion, is that the actual size of the cryptocurrency community is small compared to the total population of potential users. This means 1) forking conflicts have often resulted in press articles that introduced more people to the idea of cryptocurrency and 2) forks often emerge as an opportunity for people that didn't initially get into cryptocurrency, to come in later, at less of an economic disadvantage to early holders, which is attractive to some people.
You can see this latter behavior in the large numbers of people that invested in ICOs rather than bitcoin (although ICO investment is often fueled by improved utility arguments as well).
Of course, a potential counter-argument to all the above, is to try to argue that Bitcoin would be worth more if there were no alternative currencies and that it would be worth more than all the other cryptocurrencies combined. I suspect most bitcoin maximalists hold this position.
Personally, however, I'm of the opinion that the utility improvements made by later coins have more value than the splitting effects they've caused.
Also, I'm happy that alternative cryptocurrencies were created regardless of the net effects on current cryptocurrency valuations, because I think the philosophical implications demonstrated by the forking process has more profound longer term consequences for organized human interaction than we've yet seen.
I think you are talking about cryptocurrency software evolution. I quite agree with the sentiment. But only up to a point. Up to which point? The point where human biological evolution stopped being relevant because human cultural evolution outpaced it by many orders of magnitude.
Some elaboration may help make this more clear.
It seems to me that if the cryptocurrency software allows for high flexibility of the governance/economics rules which the community creates for itself, then design iterations of these rules can readily happen within the same community. Yes, the biological evolution of organisms (if we use it as a parallel for the design evolution that I think you're talking about) requires forking out (new species created) and leaving the old species behind. You can't achieve the possibilities/behavior of the new organism while retaining the old biology (old governance/economics rules in our case). But, once you get sufficiently complex, like having a highly complex nervous system, then that allows you to readily change your behavior and achieve novel great things simply through learning (no requirement to change your biology).
So, do you think Steem has sufficient flexibility to allow for a continuous evolution of the rules (organized human interaction) within itself? Or does evolution need to happen some other place?
Some solid ideas there, and let me say how I see those analogies play out in blockchain tech: Forking is still the current way to make radical changes (biological evolution). Smart contracts are the current analogues to the cultural evolution you talk about.
In theory, any improvement implemented via a smart contract can be implemented via a fork, and from a technical perspective (speed, memory efficiency) the forked implementation can be designed to run better.
But smart contracts do have on major advantage, and that's a political one: smart contracts because of the sand-boxed nature in which they execute (assuming no bugs in your smart contract processing code) enable new functionality to be added to a cryptocurrency network without requiring consensus to add the new functionality (only people who want to participate in the smart contract's new rules need to care about it, everyone else using the blockchain can ignore it). And here we see the analogy to cultural evolution when looking at smart contracts: changes can be made on a smart contract system without requiring change to the base platform (the DNA, so to speak). With a smart contract, you "teach" the existing blockchain how to do new things without making a low level change to how it operates.
Steem doesn't have smart contracts of this sort currently, and it would require a hard fork to add them, but it's certainly doable.
There's also another alternative to smart contracts as a means of evolution without requiring full consensus and that's by linking up chains via trustless crosschain transfer. Then users can transfer value between networks with differing rules, enabling them in many cases to obtain the benefits of multiple blockchains. This could be viewed as cultural evolution, or maybe it's more like "emergent behavior" (it's easy to stretch any analogy too far). But in any case, it's a way to enable new behaviors on a blockchain without changing it's DNA.
As a side point, note that "trustless transfer" technology is different from atomic crosschain swaps (although they commonly get conflated with each other), it's a different and more powerful technology, which to my knowledge has not yet been implemented for any pair of chains. But it's definitely theoretically possible and I expect to see someone do the hard work eventually.
But to achieve all the evolution of rules that I think we need to see in consensus technology (a term I'm coining now that is similar to what people call "blockchain technology", but only requires consensus mechanisms and no actual blockchain) I believe the performance advantages of hard-coded rules will be needed for some time to create technology that operates at sufficient speed to solve some important problems.
In a perhaps an ironic twist, my own primary area of interest is looking at ways to use consensus technology to speed up the rate of our human cultural evolution.
Yeah, so the primary thing of concern seems to be how much the consensus technology (seems like a good term) can allow for different groups of people to meet their needs - the political aspect you talk about. One size does not fit all, so people have to be able to create their own rules and arrangements to suit their own needs. As you say, smart contracts allow for this since only people who opt into the smart contract are using it (i.e. we assume everyone else is pretty much unaffected, or they are affected (everything is connected to everything else from a systems science perspective) but to such an indirect and low extent that it's acceptable).
In the case of Steem, it seems that SMTs + Communities would allow for quite a lot of this - different groups making up their own rules without interfering with the other groups. It seems to me like the Steem base layer is allowing for lots of such cultural evolution.
What you say about inter-blockchain trustless transfers also seems quite interesting and I wonder how much it can be implemented with TRON and Steem. Any thoughts?
With regards to the evolution of design, I guess my overall point was that the Steem community can make progressive hardforks, as it has done many times, but the community remains as a single whole. There doesn't have to be a split in the community since the entire community accepts the evolution. It seems that this evolution of the base layer through hardforks is about smart ways of increasing flexibility so as to allow for cultural evolution to happen and groups to come up with their own tailor-made cultural rules.
traditional sovereign money such as US dollars and Zimbabwe dollars..? Can we just call it a fiat currency , forceD by the government Money?.
Traditional economists call it sovereign currencies, cryptocurrency and gold money advocates usually call it fiat currency. I often flip back and forth between the terms, they both make valid statements about the nature of government money.
Not to mention the fact that the administrators and the moderators of the communities can ignore/mute anyone without any given reason. Like they done it with me in the @dcooperation community. I did not do anything bad. I only expressed my opinion about various topics. I asked them multiple times why they ignored/muted me, but no one explained anything so far. This is pure censorship. Communities are gateways to censorship.