Credible Neutrality As A Guiding Principle

In one of the inaugural posts for Nakamoto, Vitalik Buterin introduces this idea of "credible neutrality" meaning that a system with a high-stakes outcome, whether that be a government policy, social media platform or cryptonetwork, does not discriminate or favor any specific group of people. Not only do they have to be neutral in this sense, but readily apparent that it is neutral so any new onlooker can see that no biases exist. The four primary rules of a credibly neutral system are:

1. Don’t write specific people or specific outcomes into the mechanism
2. Open source and publicly verifiable execution
3. Keep it simple
4. Don’t change it too often

Why it matters

• Cryptonetworks are inherently new means of incentivizing human behavior. This is demonstrated by the fact that there are thousands of people across the world who are effectively paid by an autonomous protocol for providing validation work (mining). These systems also allow rules to be encoded that can compensate people for doing other types of work such as Zcash's founder's reward or Decred's decentralized treasury. In order for these experiments to be successful, they need to maintain a sense of credible neutrality such that it is explicit no groups are being unfairly targeted, otherwise they risk suffering from the same problems that plague the systems crypto hopes to replace.