Governments in the west are quite accountable, voted for and with a system of checks and balances that has evolved over time, through wars and revolutions.
Some random benevolents overlords (white-hat hackers) that save you just because they are magnanimous was the only option only in the most primive societies.
Thankfully we moved on from those times, don't you agree?
Your Whig history of an ever progressing political system is not accurate in my opinion.
I've written this comment before, and I'll repeat it as it's relevant to your comment:
Societies have gradually grown more unfair as the political system has strained under their growing complexity. According to political scientists, the average voter has an extremely limited understanding of what their government is doing. The typical person's understanding of economics is similarly extremely limited.
This opens the door to manipulation by demagogues and special interests. The growing control that government exerts over society, seen in everything from the emergence of a mass-surveillance system of unprecedented scope, to the number of regulations on the books, to the percentage of GDP made up of government spending, is not healthy, and needs a counter balance in privacy technology that empowers the individual and limits the Kafkaesque tendencies of collective society.
>Societies have gradually grown more unfair as the political system has strained under their growing complexity.
Since when? Since the 60's? Perhaps. Since the rest of history? No. Every argument you make in the rest of your comment other than pure scope of surveillance doesn't apply if you aren't comparing in the short term, i.e. 1-2 generations.
In 1903, the average voter didn't know what the government was doing. Their understanding of economics was extremely limited, as well. I wouldn't argue that US society is much more unfair than it was in 1903 - would you?
> In 1903, the average voter didn't know what the government was doing.
In "Amusing Ourselves to Death," Neil Postman argued the opposite: In the 1800s, people would watch hours-long political debates for amusement and were much more politically literate (the book is more about the negative effects of telecommunication - most people know it as the inspiration for the famous Orwell vs. Huxley infographic).
As I recall, he was actually talking about the 1700's, not the 1800's, and said that by the mid 1800's, that had already changed, if in fact it was ever as rosy as he painted it to be (I doubt that, as I studied political discourse during the period of 1779-1860 fairly extensively).
In that same book, he also argued that the telegraph enabled news without context. That hit most of the US market by the 1850's. Yellow journalism and the general sensationalist nature of news writing in the late 19th and early 20th century also don't support his argument about the written word's innate superiority to oral argument and television.
You may be right in this instance but there are plenty salient examples to illustrate his point. Current governments are much better than the mixed bag of monarchic/feudal societies that were in place for much longer than current systems.
> Since the 60's? Perhaps. Since the rest of history? No.
The thing he's experiencing which makes him say that we are growing more and more unfair, that's exactly what you're experiencing when you say that we've grown more unfair than 60's.
But let's really see how things are today, in the 60s, there was no Internet, so majority of the opinions were dominated by what was in the mass media, so that served as a Schelling point of opinions. Today because of free exchange of ideas on the Internet, people are just holding more precise and wider set of opinions.
Back in the day for a conservative to say that we should shut down the Dept of Education, would have met by resistance by most people around them and this opinion would be shut down. But now, you can just find people who believe exactly like you on the Internet. You can find a blogger who would talk about how eliminating DoE would work, and nurture this idea in your head, and once you have enough people, you can get politicians (who are playing a game of prisoner's dilemma) who are willing to represent your opinion in order to get an edge on their opponent.
Similarly, it would and should be unimaginable and unfeasible for someone in the 60s to hold an opinion like an average Tumblr SJW holds, but today it's perfectly feasible. But is society really more unfair than 1960s? What about 1980s? What about 1990s? When you look from the perspective of minorities, it clearly isn't.
However, a lot of young people have economic conditions in mind (which people on the left describe as 'rising economic inequality' and people on the right describe as "America losing it's place in the world"), but both these things are essentially the effect of increased globalization, observed differently, which has resulted in immense amount of prosperity for the poor people in the rest of the world. Now since the gates are open, an average American has to compete with a Chinese worker or an Indian software engineer, the true place of an American is being realized. Being the largest business in America is definitely worse than being the largest business in the world. If Facebook wasn't able to operate all over the world, then clearly Zuckerberg would be less richer than now.
But at the end of the day, the world is moving towards a more fair place. Is China more fair now? Yes, but if you believe that the role of Chinese party is to facilitate the arrival of Communism via maintenance of Socialism then you would obviously think that China is growing more unfair.
>Back in the day for a conservative to say that we should shut down the Dept of Education, would have met by resistance by most people around them and this opinion would be shut down. But now, you can just find people who believe exactly like you on the Internet.
The federal Department of Education was created in 1980, so there was no DoE to eliminate in 1960. The growing centralization of education policy in the hands of ever-higher levels of government and ever more monopolistic public sectors has not worked.
I've seen no evidence of that. Pretty much the entire advanced world has seen its rate of progress slow since the late 1960s, in concurrence with growing public sectors.
I'd argue that you'd have to come up with a VERY suspect definition of "progress" to make that stick. Especially as almost all the major innovation in that time started with tech developed from public funding.
NASA, DARPA, and CERN would like a word with you.
Also most of the private sector innovation was due to public funding and tax code incentives (Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, etc).
So basically technology, science, medicine, and social programs must either not count as progress for your hypothesis to hold... or it's bunk.
Pretty much the entire advanced world has seen its rate of progress slow since the late 1960s, in concurrence with growing public sectors
How are you measuring progress there? If you mean economic growth then now might be a good time to point out that correlation does now imply causation. Otherwise perhaps increasing life expectancy also causes a larger public sector? ;)
Correlation can be an indication of a causative association. I believe in that case of the growth in the public sector and the slowdown in GDP growth, it is.
I believe in that case of the growth in the public sector and the slowdown in GDP growth, it is.
Do you have any evidence of that at all? Because I have evidence showing the opposite: eg China has an estimated public sector value of between 29% and 50%[1] and it is generally regarded as a high-growth economy (6.5%+ growth(, while somewhere like Greece (22% public sector, 0% growth) isn't.
In-fact, eyeballing that table doesn't show much apparent correlation at all. There are high-growth, high-public sector countries, high-growth, low public sector countries, low public sector, low growth AND low public sector high growth countries.
Share of employees working in the public sector is a more narrow statistic than the total role of government in the economy. The share of GDP consisting of government spending is a better measure of that. The correlation between the size of government, as percentage of GDP, and GDP growth, is strong. [1]
China has substantially lower levels of social welfare spending. Its healthcare spending as a percentage of GDP is 5.5% for example [2].
Labour regulations are also much less onerous. You can use IQ tests to filter candidates for example, which would be extremely illegal in the West.
Societies have gradually grown more unfair as the political system has strained under their growing complexity.
Is this not a revisionist view of history? Modern republics are pretty new things. There were serfs (and absolute autocracy) in Russia as of 1860, slaves in the US until the 1860s, voting tied to gender until the 1920s, colonial empires without fair representation until 1950, laws against interracial and homosexual marriage until the 1980s and 2014 respectively, state-sponsored inquisitions and pogroms until recently, etc.
People have so much more power than they had as little as decades ago in almost every single society and that seems to me hard to argue. Try being a Spartan helot (you can't because slavery is the exception rather than the rule) and tell me your life is better than any US citizen today. The issues you state - ignorant citizens and special interests have always existed, at least today even the worst governments try and educate their people.
Things can and should get better but to deny progress doesn't seem fair to history. Or is there something else you are seeing?
You're absolutely right. I should clarify that I mean that the societies in the advanced world have grown more unfair over the last 120 years.
>laws against interracial and homosexual marriage until the 1980s and 2014 respectively, state-sponsored inquisitions and pogroms until recently, etc.
Laws against interracial marriage in the US were struck down by the Supreme Court in 1967. There are no laws against homosexual marriage. Such marriages are simply not legally recognized in some jurisdictions. With anti-miscegenation laws, entering into such marriages was actually a felony. But to your point, there were laws against homosexual activity up until the 1960s, which have been repealed.
On the other hand, new laws have been created that force individuals to pay for the costs of other people's personal choices. If a person engages in rampant promiscuity for instance, and contracts a sexually transmitted disease, others are forced, at pain of imprisonment, to pay the costs of their medical care.
Just as laws prohibiting homosexuality were once popular, laws mandating that individuals pay the costs of others' medical care are very popular today. Popularity is not a measure of justice.
Occupational licensing is another area that has grown increasingly unjust. In 1950, only 5 percent of occupations required a license. Today it's over 25 percent. The growing restrictions on economic participation have harmed millions of people and exacerbated income inequality. [1]
Government spending meanwhile is increasingly creating a set of haves and have-nots. The majority of the wealthiest counties in the US are now suburbs of Washington DC. [2] The average Congressperson in the US makes well over ten times more once they become a lobbyist than they did while they were in office. [3] The pay gap between federal employees and workers in general continues to increase. [4]
The power of public servants continues to increase thanks to unionization and collective bargaining, resulting in this class of workers extracting more economic rent, while the quality of the public services suffers. [5]
And then we have privacy rights. The Snowden revelations showed us that society has never before been subject to such extensive surveillance of its private activities and interactions. This is an extreme systemic danger, and very likely has numerous malignant effects that are unknown, e.g. contributes to the centralisation of economic power, as a result of the information asymmetry it creates.
> There are no laws against homosexual marriage. Such marriages are simply not legally recognized in some jurisdictions. With anti-miscegenation laws, entering into such marriages was actually a felony.
The bans in question are on the state itself, recognizing such marriages. Unlike anti-miscegenation laws, there is no criminal sanction for those who enter a relationship that they consider marriage.
>No, they were struck down by the Supreme Court, and only in 2003!
Strictly speaking, that's a law against sodomy, not homosexuality. But I can agree that such laws can be construed as anti-homosexual, given that any sex practice between individuals of the same sex could fall under the sodomy category.
You're attempting some pretty fine hair splitting here.
Some, but not all anti-miscegenation laws banned interracial cohabitation and sex. In some states only attempting to get married was punishable. The same was true for same-sex marriage, which would've required lying on a form and thus perjury (which some states specifically made a felony: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/07/10/indian...).
As for sodomy laws, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodomy_laws_in_the_United_Stat... states "Three states specifically target their statutes at same-sex relations only: Kansas, Kentucky, and Texas" - and the ones that didn't certainly saw selective application preferentially targeting same-sex acts.
>Some, but not all anti-miscegenation laws banned interracial cohabitation and sex. In some states only attempting to get married was punishable. The same was true for same-sex marriage, which would've required lying on a form and thus perjury
There are no state laws that say 'homosexual marriage is a felony', while there were laws that said so with respect to interracial marriage. The criminalisation that you allege is happening, on the basis that there are laws against perjury combined with non-recognition of same-sex marriage, is not the same as the direct criminalisation of interracial marriage.
I fully agree with your analysis. But cryptocurrencies are just the latest tool that will serve well the interests of the demagogues. Technocracy will not improve affairs that we don't resolve as a society in the first place. More powerful tools means just more power to those who can afford the longest lever. Any other interpretation is just a blatant neglect on the history of technology.
Cryptocurrencies, growing pains aside, will arrest the trend toward economic centralization. They are not just more powerful tools. They are tools that shift the control over money from large trusted third parties to individuals. They literally allow an individual to be their own bank.
They are a counter-force against the trend toward eliminating cash, and with it, financial privacy [1]:
>Any future cashless bank-payments society will be the outcome of a deliberate war on cash waged by an alliance of three elite groups with deep interests in seeing it emerge.
These statements from an executive at MasterCard are a great window into the company's designs on cash and its electronic corollaries:
>There's huge interest in cryptocurrencies and what perhaps they can create in the market place. Now we at MasterCard are not completely comfortable with the idea of cryptocurrencies largely because they go against the whole principle that we've established our business on which is really moving to a world beyond cash and ensuring greater transparency.. If you think about it, cash is a problem for a number of countries. Cash really facilitates anonymity, it facilitates illegal activity, it facilitates tax avoidance and a range of other things that aren't going to drive efficiency in an economy
> They are tools that shift the control over money from large trusted third parties to individuals. They literally allow an individual to be their own bank.
You're not thinking big enough. All I need to be a bank is some money to lend, or safe to put deposits in.
Cryptocurrencies let people be their own nation state.
Saying that bitcoin allows users to act as their own banks is like saying a mattress with your cash under it is your own bank. It's not meaningful in anyway. Debt is the meaningful differentiator.
No, ability to issue a controlled lot of physical currency is the meaningful differentiator, which is why the relation to banks is irrelevant.
I can buy $1 worth of Bitcoin, declare it ErikCoin, acceptable only in my stores at a 1/1,000,000 denomination, and I instantly "minted" $1,000,000 in cryptocurrency, using only the Bitcoin blockchain.
Bitcoin doesn't let people be banks, it let's people be the mint.
If we create a UBI then people will have the time to be better educated, to be healthier, to raise healthier, happier, and more productive families. We're almost there, automation will strongly facilitate this.
Because a new technology seems exciting - and gains adoption because early adoption means potential for an individual to turn $1000s of into $1,000,000s with very little individual effort of working towards mass adoption; along with the ecosystem of VCs pumping $100s of millions into creating platforms to support this speculation - doesn't mean we give up on the existing system.
If you don't think the same demagogues, special interest groups, or simply evil/bad actors won't attempt to takeover - then you're already proven wrong by this blackhat 'abuse' of sending themselves money. And it can get much worse than that.
The value of the blockchain is the public ledger IMHO, and the way $100 can because $70 million just because demand is higher, that has too strongly incentivized it and has and will attract very bad people - even if there are good people involved in the ecosystem.
If we get a UBI, I'm quitting my developer job and just going to coast the rest of my life. I don't care how many corners I have to cut, lol. Gonna milk that cow as hard as I can.
My dad used to ask to be laid off jobs (blue collar) so he could collect unemployment for a few months. He did that off and on for years.
Of course they don't - and that's fine. All throughout our evolution we would of had children and elders who would have had limited productivity. Now with automation, how many less people do we actually require to work? It will be very few - it will definitely be more people than the minimum required.
That article covers what happens before the apocalypse. What happens after it, i.e. after the point where AI and robots can not only do our current jobs better than we can, but also all of the ones we could possibly retrain to?
Unless AI and robots become effectively humans, they will not be able to do our jobs better than we can. And they do become effectively humans, we will have much bigger things to worry about than unemployment.
You might. I wouldn't. I'd be willing to wager that most people here wouldn't. They might take more vacations, but they'd probably also be starting more companies.
Hopefully you're a good person or the environment around you will help you grow in positive ways. Would you have a family?
And why are you unhappy at your developer job? Is it more stress than you'd like? It seems like your dad had a strong influence on you.
>If we create a UBI then people will have the time to be better educated, to be healthier, to raise healthier, happier, and more productive families. We're almost there, automation will strongly facilitate this.
Compulsory redistribution programs like UBI pervert incentives, leading to less individual responsibility over time. They're clumsy cookie cutter solutions, which with a stroke a pen, impose the same formula to tens/hundreds of millions of people. On one end, the people lose out, and on the other, they win out in the short term. The only determinant of which side a person is on is the amount of currency that they report to the government that they received for that year.
This is an overly simplistic formula that not only adversely affects incentives, but also becomes increasingly better gamed over time, leading to competitive energies being diverted to economically wasteful activities like tax avoidance (which is an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars per year now).
These kinds of programs do not take into account the unique circumstances found in the vast population they affect. In other words, they ignore the vast majority of the knowledge of society, which is in the form of localized knowledge diffused across millions of people. So in place of spontaneously formed economic relationships based on the rich localized knowledge of millions of individuals, they create simplistic economic relationships based on categories created by legislators.
They are pure economic destruction. And we have evidence of this from the last 40 years. UBI is just the doubling down of an economic model that has been failing for over 40 years.
Social welfare increased 4.8 percent per year on average, between 1972 and 2011 [1]. This represents a massive shift to the social democratic economic model.
And it's not just the US. Almost all advanced economies underwent this transition over the last 40 years, and it has been associated with stagnating wage growth and less economic dynamism.
The key to accelerating gains in quality of life is not more centralization and dependence on government. It is to remove all artificial barriers to access to capital. As it is, only large financial institutions can access global capital markets directly. Regulatory agencies have created very onerous compliance requirements that one has to meet to engage in a wide array of financial transactions. This in turn means that in practice, the majority of the population must pay economic rent to very rich and powerful groups to participate in all aspects of the economy.
Distributed blockchain technology promises to democratize access to global capital markets, so that small businesses and ordinary individuals can trade equity for capital directly with each other, with no 'tax' being paid to rent-seeking institutions and professionals, playing the role of middle-man thanks to special government-granted privileges.
To further elaborate:
I believe everyone should be part of the ownership class. The average person should own microshares in thousands of companies big and small, and be assessing enterprises everyday to determine which ones to purchase a tiny amount of shares in, with zero friction and next-to-zero fixed costs that would otherwise make small purchases uneconomical (if each trade has a $10 trading fee like it does now, you can't economically buy $1 worth of shares, so that's why trading fees have to approach zero to make this kind of dynamic economy possible). These shares in turn would earn people passive income, so that they don't have to work all the time.
If distributed blockchains and cryptocurrency become the main economic institutions in the world, I believe this vision will become possible, and we will experience a renaissance in economic and technological progress like never before seen.
> Compulsory redistribution programs like UBI pervert incentives, leading to less individual responsibility over time.
OK yes, but you can't think about incentives like that.
It's not just a matter of GOOD INCENTIVE/BAD INCENTIVE, because the incentives all influence each other. You can't just make a giant list of GOOD INCENTIVEs and then do them all.
In fact, you really can't play very many incentives all at once together, because the more incentive schemes you have the more likely you are to create strange situations that exploit unanticipated interactions between what really are GOOD INCENTIVEs when considered independently.
So, your lionizing of THE SPECTRE OF UTTER POVERTY as an incentive for people taking responsibility for something in their life... I agree with you. That spectre does in fact incent quite a lot of people to take responsibility.
But the problem is, if you accept THE SPECTRE OF UTTER POVERTY into your incentive package, then you also incent INTERGENERATIONAL POVERTY, where children are born into homes of people who, despite all those helpful incentives, just sucked at not being poor.
And the problem is INTERGENERATIONAL POVERTY is actually a horrible, horrible incentive when it comes to taking responsibility. Because those kids have very little resources and crime, even though it really pays off like a piddly little amount of money compared to a good job, if kids have like no resources even crime starts to make financial sense.
So you created this world where you have this super strong YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE, THERE IS NO NANNY STATE culture, then what really makes sense for that kid to do is say you know what, I am going to take matters into my own hands. I am responsible for my destiny. I am going to drive these kids over to this house and get a lot of money.
And that's what you incented. You incented people taking responsibility for taking care of their own.
Personally, I'd rather incent that kid to sit in an apartment and play Xbox after school until he's 18. And incent his mom to hang out and smoke as much weed as she wants and use food stamps to buy Frosted Flakes and stay the fuck out of trouble until he does turn 18.
As far as I know that kid could be fucking Elon Musk. For what? 12k218 = $432,000 of tax revenue?
You're saying his moral compass will be so eroded by the presence of his free apartment and lack of consequences for his slacker-ass mom that he will be unable to take responsibility for himself? I doubt it. He'll have plenty of other role models in his life besides his mom. Like Elon Musk and Prince or whoever.
>But the problem is, if you accept THE SPECTRE OF UTTER POVERTY into your incentive package, then you also incent INTERGENERATIONAL POVERTY, where children are born into homes of people who, despite all those helpful incentives, just sucked at not being poor.
This idea that the free market doesn't address intergenerational poverty is unfounded in my opinion. Poverty declines precipitously anywhere in the world that adopts a market economy [1].
In the US, poverty was declining decade over decade, until the War on Poverty began, at which point it remained steady, despite spending on subsidies for the poor increasing decade after decade. While UBI doesn't have incentives that are as harmful as those of traditional welfare, it still reduces the need to be self-sufficient, and thus teaches the wrong behaviours.
>So you created this world where you have this super strong YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE, THERE IS NO NANNY STATE culture, then what really makes sense for that kid to do is say you know what, I am going to take matters into my own hands. I am responsible for my destiny. I am going to drive these kids over to this house and get a lot of money.
It's important to remember that the role of a financial market is to provide capital to individuals and enterprises that can make good use of it. If this kid is the next Elon Musk, as you suggest he could be, then it's in the interest of profit-motivated investors to identify him, and provide him with a substantial student loan, in exchange for the future interest payments he will easily be able to pay off once he's finished school and started his Tesla.
> I believe everyone should be part of the ownership class.
No classes for me no thank you. But hey, maybe different personality types need to have different ways of life. Perhaps you would thrive in a class based society, where as others would thrive in something else.
Strongly disagree. This feels like the academic style analysis that assumes computing costs are free. $10 trading costs suck. But so does the time energy and effort spent on researching stocks. Owning tiny micro shares isn’t worth the research costs.
Individuals have private knowledge about their local environment that can inform purchases of these micro shares. Combined with automated analysis tools, it can allow quick effective decision-making on small purchases to build one's personal portfolio.
As this point you've already lost everyone who doesn't already ready the same pamphlets you read and agree. Either because they have read those pamphlets and eye-roll, or because they haven't and figure you're a rambling extremist. It's literally equivalent to communists beginning propaganda pieces with "Attention all Comrades!"
That said, I disagree with you, so feel free to keep talking this way.
> ever progressing political system
Literally no one claims politics is monotonically improving. Unless Clinton has been singing Trump's praises recently, you're attacking a straw-man.
> the average voter has an extremely limited understanding of what their government is doing
Appealing to this fact in a thread about cryptocurrency is beyond ironic.
Seriously, even most early adopters don't understand what their crypto currency is doing. And certainly don't have any hope of understanding even a mildly complex contract. Code comprehension is difficult for trained software engineers!.
All of the serious proposals in this thread call for some sort of formal verification, which even most trained software engineers aren't currently capable of using.
And hell, if we learned anything form this, it's that even the ostensible experts don't have an air-tight understanding!
So, what? Instead of teaching every citizen how to read and interpret legislation and regulation, we'll just train them all as professional software engineers with formal methods expertise?!?! And even that's no silver bullet. Contracts can and will grow just as complex as e.g., current tax law. Because the underlying humans won't have changed!
In the long run, you're merely adding complexity. Now I have to understand software and also tax policy. Things get strictly worse.
> This opens the door to manipulation by demagogues and special interests
As opposed to manipulation by "whichever guy finds a bug in the cryptocurrency". You can argue that these are equivalently bad things (I'd disagree), but you'll be hard-pressed to convince most rational folks that "rando dude" is better. Stick to the devils you know and all that.
> limits the Kafkaesque tendencies of collective society.
I'll end my comment in the same way I started it: you're preaching to the choir.
Besides which, what're you going to do when it turns out the majority of people still don't agree with you about how society should be, and still control all the guns and natural resources? Because that's what will happen.
Political power will flow from the arrangement of bits only when the arrangement of bits determines who controls overwhelming military force. And not a moment before.
>As this point you've already lost everyone who doesn't already ready the same pamphlets you read and agree.
Usage of the term "Whig history" is not confined adherents of a particular ideology, and does not require one to have/not-have any particular set of beliefs to use it (other than believing that the history of some institution is not a story of progress)..
In other words, it's not comparable to "comrade".
>Appealing to this fact in a thread about cryptocurrency is beyond ironic.
There's a subtext that you're missing here, which is that the political system doesn't work when voters don't understand the system, which is unlike most domains, which manage complexity effectively.
For example, most people don't understand how microprocessors work. But this is addressed through an effective and spontaneous process of delegating responsibility.
The political process differs in this respect. The delegation process is baked in, as a result of built-in mechanisms that actively resist change. This prevents the kind of readjustment that occurs in other institutions. Meanwhile, those affected by policy are a captive audience, which eliminates a major feedback mechanism that exists in market-based systems.
These two factors result in the system as a whole not evolving toward greater efficacy. On the contrary, it has the potential to evolve toward greater exploitation.
>Political power will flow from the arrangement of bits only when the arrangement of bits determines who controls overwhelming military force. And not a moment before.
> Usage of the term "Whig history" is not confined adherents of a particular ideology, and does not require one to have/not-have any particular set of beliefs to use it
While this is true, outside of some specialized historical critique fields the most common usages of this term are in forums/literature of the libertarian and free market anarchist bent.
In those places its a short hand for the idea that government as currently practiced in the west is clearly bloated and corrupt beyond repair, and the only reason every doesn't agree is that they are bamboozled by some Polly-Anna version of history.
That statement is not clear and needs further backing up to many of us, who do not subscribe to the "Whig History" model but also don't think governments are objectively bad in all instances.
Whether you knew that subtext or not, you used the term in the same way, to argue a similar philosophy, so it's not at all surprising that someone called you on it.
>While this is true, outside of some specialized historical critique fields the most common usages of this term are in forums/literature of the libertarian and free market anarchist bent.
I didn't know that. I haven't seen this term associated with libertarian thought.
I am referring to the state-backed political process, not the general variety of politics one sees in private institutions. The former is qualitatively different from other institutions in our society.
If you cannot implement people's political preferences in your contract language, then your contract language will not be used for anything of substantive governmental or political importance unless you have the guns needed to impose your crypto-dictatorship.
If you can implement people's political preferences in your contract language, and your contract language is used for political or governmental purposes, then people's political preferences will be codified -- as far as possible -- in your contract language.
Which means that in order to participate in governance, people will have to understand both their preferences and also the contract programming language and its underlying runtime. Being an active citizen becomes strictly more difficult. To be very clear about it, people's preferences will not have changed. Consensus will remain a messy, complicated web of compromises that are difficult to reason about and implement via judge, let along codify for a computer.
And all of this won't even achieve your political motives, unless you're planning on building some sort of anti-Whig-ideology static analysis into your contract language, I guess.
(Which, frankly, I hope you do, because that would be kind of funny and cool.)
>If you cannot implement people's political preferences in your contract language, then your contract language will not be used for anything of substantive governmental or political importance unless you have the guns needed to impose your crypto-dictatorship.
Can you elaborate on this? I don't understand the reasoning behind this. Why do smart contracts have to implement political ideologies in order to have a substantive impact on the world? Why can't they have an impact by raising the cost of legal enforcement of over-reaching tax mandates and regulatory restrictions, and of mass-surveillance, and thus shifting the balance of power between the individual and the state, toward the individual?
> Why do smart contracts have to implement political ideologies in order to have a substantive impact on the world?
They don't. The can -- and almost certainly will -- remain primarily a speculative investment vehicle for technophile speculators and occasional currency for black markets. Maybe, even probably, crypto-currencies will turn out to be useful technological tool for some non-speculative businesses as well.
However, you claimed:
>>> Societies have gradually grown more unfair as the political system has strained under their growing complexity... This opens the door to manipulation by demagogues and special interests
I'm simply responding to that claim.
> Why can't they have an impact by raising the cost of legal enforcement of over-reaching tax mandates and regulatory restrictions
Because -- believe it or not -- some people actually approve of some or all of those mandates and regulations.
This idea that regulation and taxation is an objective negative result of a broken process is impressive self-delusion.
Not everyone shares you political preferences or beliefs. Your political beliefs are not objective moral truth.
So. Why in god's name would people who disagree with you agree to use a system that actively undermines their genuine political preferences?
>Because -- believe it or not -- some people actually approve of some or all of those mandates and regulations.
How does people approving of these mandates/regulations (which I dispute, but let's go with it) invalidate my claim?
If the cost of enforcement increases, regardless of the popularity of the law in question, it stands to reason such laws would become less common and/or less effective.
>So. Why in god's name would people who disagree with you agree to use a system that actively undermines their genuine political preferences?
Just to clarify: you're suggesting people will actively avoid adopting cryptocurrency in order to ensure the laws and taxes they support remain effective? If that's your opinion, we should agree to disagree. Time will tell who is right.
Seriously? You realize that's delusional, right? Most people -- even most right wing folks! -- aren't libertarians.
The set of people who think that blockchain is the right way to organize society is astonishingly small, and they're basically all speculators.
People may not agree on which regulations they want (environmental regulations? drug regulations?)
Or what taxes should be spend on (education? infrastructure? protectionist tariffs? military?)
Or how taxes should be leveraged (regressive? progressive? on capital or income earners?).
But for each regulation, each tax, and each thing taxes are spent on, you can find many people -- in many cases, even a majority of people -- who support that regulation or tax.
People like to talk about how they don't like regulation or taxation. And maybe their empty rhetoric has you confused. But in fact, people are self-interested. They will crucify you for doing what they say they want if you stop paying their teachers, or let their roads erode, or take away their social security, or close the military base their best friend's local economy revolves around, or build a sewage treatment plant in their backyard.
Once you get past empty rhetoric and into specific contracts, building consensus is enormously difficult. Much of the complexity in modern laws and taxation policy is essential, not accidental, and arises from millions of varying opinions and priorities and emotional investments.
My neighbor was a hard core anarcho-libertarian. Hated the police state and thought all taxation was theft. But he also called the police to have them write tickets every time we parked in the street even a minute past the time when street cleaning started. People aren't rational; they're self-interested. Everyday comforts always dominate broad ideological "beliefs". "The state is evil, but I hate dirty streets".
If you want to use computer-implemented contracts for law, you'll need to be able to describe this essential complexity. IMO that's going to be difficult or impossible, and laws will change often enough that the overhead will become enormously expensive. Orders of magnitude more expensive.
> Just to clarify: you're suggesting people will actively avoid adopting cryptocurrency in order to ensure the laws and taxes they support remain effective?
Well, vacuously.
I don't think that we'll ever have occasion to even test this claim, because no sovereign state in its right mind would ever adopt a legal or financial system in which a computer bug or Chinese supercomputer could result in constitutional crisis.
You really think the average American would be OK with throwing out the constitution for some computer program they don't understand? Or ditto for any other country? To be blunt, you're completely out of touch.
What I'm actually claiming is that your claim -- that piling complex (and apparently buggy!) software on top of contractual law somehow reduces the complexity of the legal system -- is terribly ignorant of the essential complexity that laws codify. Sorry to blunt. 99.9999% of people really don't give a fuck about what your gpu says.
(The fact that contract languages can't even come close to expressing many of the common private sector agreements and financial transactions that aren't so addled with political concerns should be more than enough evidence that this approach won't skill to the level of nation-states.)
> Time will tell who is right.
Several millennia of time already has.
We've had contracts and ledgers for ages. When a majority of people find themselves in a situation they don't like, they rarely shrug it off and say "oh well, that's the contract". They go to ballot boxes or, more commonly in the arc of history, start shooting people.
What makes you think people would resign themselves to subjugation to objectionable instructions from your GPUs when they're clearly unwilling to subjugate themselves to objectionable instructions from other people's graphite and pulp?
If anything, crpytocurrencies have negative rhetorical appeal for the vast majority of the population. And when the largest examples are hacky javascript interfaces to speculators' bank accounts, I can't really blame them.
Comments of this nature aren't constructive. It's better to restrain the urge to tell your correspondent that their belief is delusional, and simply explain why you disagree with it.
>Most people -- even most right wing folks! -- aren't libertarians.
I think most people don't think deeply about the policies they support, and the implications of those policies. Most people don't think much about the nature of the law, for example. [1]
The complexity of the political system results in people supporting policies that if they had the time to closely examine, they would not. Our political system is geared toward decision making based on shallow assessments and emotional gut-reactions, because it does not give the average person the ability to meaningful analyze the issues that they base their vote on.
But in any case, I already said that for the sake our debate, let's accept your claim as correct. There's no need to try to expand this debate more than is necessary.
>I don't think that we'll ever have occasion to even test this claim, because no sovereign state in its right mind would ever adopt a legal or financial system in which a computer bug or Chinese supercomputer could result in constitutional crisis.
I have no idea where this suggestion that a sovereign state would replace its Constitution with a smart contract came from. Can you please go back to my comment and re-read what I suggested would happen?
How are bitcoin or ethereum not highly resistant to change.
Explain to me how you would go about changing either of those protocols?
And yes there are lots of altcoins but ethereum very quickly is going to replace a good chunk of how things are transacted. And a non-profit without some kind of policy for baked in leadership change sounds a lot like a dictatorship to me.
By design, they enshrine the rights of the individual participant to freely interact in a free market, by preventing the majority from creating any rules to limit access to the platform. So they don't have the same need to adapt as an interventionist government, that imposes itself on the economy through majority dictate, does.
In the case of Ethereum, the Turing Completeness also makes it so that each contract is like a government in and of itself, which any party is free to design to meet their own preferences.
I don't believe such hard forks will be practical when the ecosystem is larger and more diverse. The DAO happened in a unique point in Ethereum's history, when the community was very small (and thus cohesive) and activity on the network was very little.
In block chain, 51% of the network can decide to modify the ledger to do things that aren't true. That's all it takes to completely change how much money is in my account in a "distributed" bank. I don't own it, and it's certainly not robust against demagogues.
Demagogues are by definition political opportunists who play on populism to advance their politics. If democratic elections have a vulnerability to them, so certainly do "distributed systems" where a simple majority has enough power to control "history"
>In block chain, 51% of the network can decide to modify the ledger to do things that aren't true.
51% is not enough to modify the ledger. A hard fork requires an overwhelming majority to support it. Otherwise, the cost of fragmentation would be immense, and outweigh any benefit those effecting the hard fork could hope to gain from the hard fork.
So if a majority of participants (50% + 1 of the network) wanted to say, "rob" the wealthy top 1% of wallets and redistribute wealth by rewriting the history of the blockchain, nothing could stop them?
Technically the unit of measurement is hashing power, rather than % of nodes or participants, but there is an underlying 51% problem with blockchain.
The attack surface is similarly limited; they couldn't really "rob" the wealthiest wallets, but they could prevent their transactions from ever happening. They could also spend cryptocurrency they don't really have. Here's an intro:
You can't just transfer money however you like, even if you had complete control of the blockchain. Transactions still need to be signed by the private key of the wallet involved. You could put a transaction with an invalid signature into the blockchain, but then the chain would be rejected by clients because of the invalid transaction.
The clients could be rewritten to accept the "invalid" block. That would cause a fork between the modified and unmodified clients. Like fiat currency, the only thing maintaining the definition of a legal block is the software the majority of the network choose to run.
They could indeed, but which users and companies would switch to that forked chain knowing that it's worthless? Having a lot of hashing power doesn't let you control the software that other people are running.
I know it's popular in America to be cynical about politics, but maybe it is worth realizing other countries have their shit together and maybe just maybe it is the American cynicism that is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
No, I'm cynical about all developed countries. Almost none of them have shit together. The cost disease affects the entire developed world, and I suggest it's due to the government playing an increasingly dysfunctional role in society.
Do you think mass-surveillance is a uniquely American phenomenon?
Under growing complexity, average understanding will decrease and tend to become centralized. How many people really understand the dynamics of Bitcoin's current scaling debate? In that scenario, you have a return to manipulation by special interests (in this case, "important" nodes like miners, exchanges, and wallets).
> Governments in the west are quite accountable, voted for and with a system of checks and balances that has evolved over time, through wars and revolutions.
I think this is where you're losing people. For the most part, it isn't true, and the trend seems to be shaped as a downward slope.
The "government" of the US still imprisons 2 million people, mostly because it has a list of plants and chemicals it doesn't like and won't negotiate on. That's just one example of its ongoing dysfunction.
It's completely reasonable, in a mature and thoughtful society, to try doing things in a completely different way. I'm not sure that cryptocurrencies are a good answer, but they're at least a good question.
History is not a linear progression, as far as societal and political developments are concerned. Our current government system is not the pinnacle of development so far, let alone the ultimate, final system.
And even by that view, as you say yourself the current system, if satisfactory, took hundreds of years to develop. Crypto currencies were invented 7 years ago.
Again, the question is who you trust, and that remains a moral choice, not an objective, empirical choice. Some people don't trust a government elected by only half the population, for example. Some others may prefer to trust an elite of "enlightened hackers" than hordes of plebs.
You might be right that governments are more evolved and have more history but that doesn't make them universally better.
Again, the question is who you trust, and that remains a moral choice, not an objective, empirical choice.
Oh come on. It absolutely is an empirical choice. Crypto-currencies have a very short history and that history is CHOCK FULL of people losing their money due to various forms of incompetence and graft.
Storing your money in a bank in a western democracy has centuries of history with extremely rare losses.
>Storing your money in a bank in a western democracy has centuries of history with extremely rare losses.
While I agree with your overall point, I think you're glossing over the historical instabilities in the banking system. Bank runs, failures, and physical robberies were pretty common until comparatively recently (in the US, at least - the 19th century was chock full of them).
Cryptocurrencies offer the opportinity to test the waters with new models. If we go by the thinking "keep what works", society would have never changed. I agree that they have big failures to show, but i think it's still early to tell.
Governments in the west are quite accountable, voted for and with a system of checks and balances that has evolved over time, through wars and revolutions.
Some random benevolents overlords (white-hat hackers) that save you just because they are magnanimous was the only option only in the most primive societies.
Thankfully we moved on from those times, don't you agree?