Crypto Co-ops and Game Theory: Why the Internet Must Learn to Collaborate to Survive

Perhaps over the next 10 years the internet will go through one more phase of reckless adolescence before arriving at the plateau of middle age and all of the wisdom, maturity and better judgment that comes with it.

At any given time on the internet, more than four billion people have the ability to collaborate or compete with one another.

On the internet, we create, play and share new games that have never before existed.

These games are helpful frameworks to model out the tension between selfish incentives and community benefits.

Informally, a zero-sum game is a competition where one player's gain is the other player's loss.

In contrast, a positive sum game is generally thought of as a win-win situation.

"Platform cooperativism," coined in 2014 by New School Professor Trebor Scholz, establishes a framework for digital platforms that are cooperatively owned and governed by their users.

What makes these systems cooperative is that projects can update rules and redefine the game so long as they reach consensus among their members.

Is platform cooperativism the way to turn a zero-sum game into a value-add system? It's probably part of the solution but you can't just shill some tokens and expect the community to follow.

In his latest post on Coordination, Buterin describes an unsettling feature about cooperative games, "We can prove that there are large classes of games that do not have any stable outcome In such games, whatever the current state of affairs is, there is always some coalition that can profitably deviate from it."