Jill Carlson
Experiments in Crypto’s Governance Lab
Two hundred and thirty-three years ago, a group gathered in Philadelphia. Fifty-five men entered the red brick Pennsylvania state house, shuttered the windows and embarked upon a rare sort of work: defining how they would govern and be governed. For 100 days they debated, compromised, drafted, edited, and debated some more. In the end, on Sept. 17, 1787, they emerged with the United States Constitution.
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It is worth noting this was not the first attempt. The gathering in 1787 was first initiated with the intention of revising the Articles of Confederation, America’s first constitution that had been ratified six years prior. That constitution, however, was proving weak and lacking the teeth necessary for enforcement. As the Constitutional Convention kicked off, the conversation quickly turned from revising the old articles to scrapping them and starting over.
This post is part of CoinDesk's 2020 Year in Review – a collection of op-eds, essays and interviews about the year in crypto and beyond. Jill Carlson, a CoinDesk columnist, is co-founder of the Open Money Initiative, a non-profit research organization working to guarantee the right to a free and open financial system. She is also an investor in early-stage startups with Slow Ventures.
It is difficult to overstate how painstaking this process was. Discussions turned into arguments and threatened to derail the work. Contention and fierce debate surrounded wide-ranging issues: the formation of the branches of government, what rights states would retain, how many delegates would represent each state, the legality of slavery and whether slaves would be represented, with whom veto power would lie, how monetary policy would be decided, who would have power over the treasury. The pressure was on to get to a constitution that all could agree to and that would work and endure for the centuries to come.
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As the delegates in attendance were working on the final product, the oldest statesman there stood and gave a speech: “For when you assemble a Number of Men to have the Advantage of their joint Wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those Men all their Prejudices, their Passions, their Errors of Opinion, their local Interests, and their selfish Views. From such an Assembly can a perfect Production be expected?”
Benjamin Franklin, here, acknowledges the document’s imperfections and notes the fallibility of its framers. He captures the impossible difficulty of the task they have undertaken. Yet, he turns this perspective to optimism, ultimately supporting the Constitution and saying it is as close to perfect as anyone could achieve.
If you can keep it
Franklin, upon walking out of Independence Hall following the convention, is said to have uttered another truth about the outcome of the delegates’ work.