> Cryptocurrencies is about divorcing money and state. Seems pretty clear to me.
No, they don't. There is no technological or cryptographic answer to the state's monopoly on legitimate force, its duty to execute the law, or any of its other functions that create and maintain the business environment.
It occurs to me that much of what crypto-lovers want is actually radically undemocratic. Vestigial states that can't do the bidding of the electorate because they're unable to hold companies to account and so on. People of this inclination are the death throes of the globalist dream: it is a fine thing indeed that the nation state looks to be reasserting itself in the face of one of California's more embarrassing wet dreams.
>It occurs to me that much of what crypto-lovers want is actually radically undemocratic.
It's just the latest iteration of the libertarian fallacy, embodied in code - that a market can exist without a governing body to make sure it doesn't get sold.
Basically whenever you create a vacuum of power, it gets filled eventually by a few individual actors - i.e. Bitcoin miners being predominantly Chinese at this point.
Exactly. I used to work for financial traders, so I got to see some highly effective markets up close. Those markets were heavily regulated. Not just by governments, who were from my perspective almost irrelevant, but by the exchanges themselves.
I think markets are amazing, and have a lot of sympathy for the more thoughtful sort of libertarian and their concerns about state power. But there's what I think of as fundamentalist libertarians, who seem to worship an abstract idea of "market" that has very little to do with my real-life experience of markets, financial or otherwise.
For anyone interested in this extremely important point (that markets need a lot more than just enforcing contracts to work), two book recommendations:
* Rob Reich, _Saving Capitalism_ [1]
* Steven K Vogel, _Marketcraft_ [2]
What kinds of contracts can be enforced? How much personal liability people should have? Is bankruptcy allowed? and so on. All trade-offs between different groups, and there’s no one “free market” answer to any of them.
Because proponents have never demonstrated a viable path to linking those. It always comes back to depending on the state (e.g. courts, police) or reinventing banks, with huge hand-waves about how the details could possibly work for a non-trivial scale.
> Cryptocurrencies is about divorcing money and state.
Is it though? I used to think that, but over the past couple years I've seen plenty of politics around governance of the future of cryptocurrency. Seems like everyone tried divorcing the two and ended up just creating a new state.
"Cryptocurrencies is about divorcing money and state."
How so?
Despite the misleading term cryptocurrency is a type of commodity, not money. A heavily speculated one. It's really quite terrible at being a money substitute. With the exception of some very fringe use cases.
Just thinking that a success in that might be more likely if the plan did not include giving seigniorage from the state (i.e. people) to a bunch of cryptonerds. Also, a monetary policy not from medieval times might help.
Not really. It's a difference between necessary and sufficient. Decentralization might be necessary component, but what is lacking is proof or argument that it is also sufficient for this change to happen.
The original statement: “Why would the latter enable the former” sounds like it’s arguing against necessary as well. If the original post contained “imply” instead of “enable,” this line of reasoning would be sound.
Cryptocurrencies is about divorcing money and state. Seems pretty clear to me.