When I first read the Satoshi white paper the immediate response I had as somebody who has studied political economics is that “this will never work because governments will never allow for disintermediation of their currency because it’s one of, if not THE, primary sources of control over a population”
The promise of crypto fundamentally misunderstands how humans work, relate, exchange, and negotiate energy and power.
Contracts are just an extension of politics, digital contracts are no different
So, has trump coin and world liberty financial proven your friend wrong? What about El salvador or the cayman islands?
It seems that it was you who misunderstood human nature. Greed always wins.
What do these prove? some people dodge taxes?
El Salvador's experiment was generally a failure for various reasons, and they agreed to start rolling back the policies as part of an agreement with the IMF for another loan.
These projects happened because, yes, greed wins and destroys everything in its wake.
El Salvador did not roll back their policies... they have been a continual buyer, they just rolled back their "Required by law to be accepted", they added a bunch of special cases where you don't have to accept it, but alot of tourist destinations like el zonte still accept it (or atleast they did when i was there in late 2024).
No:
1. That's not being implemented as a permanent replacement for typical currency, that's cryptocurrency as a specialized temporary vehicle for accepting bribes and fleecing the gullible.
2. Even if #1 were not true, it's rather hard for a democratic government to react when key positions in that government have (temporarily, I trust) been taken over by a cult that profits from the scheme.
> It seems that it was you who misunderstood human nature. Greed always wins.
That's an inaccurately nihilistic view of what "human nature" encompasses. If greed always won, nobody would have pets, charities would not exist, parents would enslave their children, life-insurance would just be an invitation to filicide, etc.
What would actually convince you this line of reasoning is wrong?
I think the first step is to narrow what role/purpose of "crypto" we're trying to consider, that a government would or wouldn't permit to "live".
For example, imagine there's a 100% government-run system with only "official" transaction signing nodes and everyone's public key is on-file along with their real identity. That would be "cryptocurrency" in a technological sense, but clearly not the political change some people are interested in.
Next there's the economic distinctions like the unit of account [0] versus medium of exchange [1] versus store of value [2], which are all different roles. For example, gift-cards might be a medium of exchange in some sketchy places, but the unit of account is the dollar-amount on them. Which roles would cryptocurrency be actually taking?
> All i see are more and more govs and entities like blackrock being co-opted.
The way I see it, the optimistic utopian dreams of cryptocurrency are going nowhere. Meanwhile, big banks banks--or by upstarts trying to replace them in the same basic game--are trying to use "crypto" to grow while dodging normal laws and regulations.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_of_account
Legal contracts are similar. They 100% are reliant on social and institutional forces for enforcement and meaning. But I think smart contracts are different because they are self-enforcing. It would be very difficult to use a smart contracts as a replacement for legal contracts in most circumstances. But when the contract relates to state and digital assets on the network then it's a great tool. And if you end up with a network that hosts a lot of these important contracts, then the native crypto asset (which is used as gas to power said contracts) has value as a commodity. And if that commodity also shares all the properties of good money (fungibility, durability, portability, etc.) then all of a sudden you have money.
Isn't this similar to saying "democracy will never work because kings will never allow it"?
I'm not saying it's exactly the same, just the fact that some existing power structures do not like the change does not guarantee they will manage to stop it. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.
not deterministic outcomes
The ruled choose their rulers as much as rulers choose who they rule
These are nothing more than going to weird conferences for an extended time at best, and the setup of a cult compound at worst.
Consider basic things like "How do we get food, water, sewage, trash taken care of". No way these little societies aren't simply fudging when it comes to those problems.
But is that really the property of every successful community? I imagine that, like a tree, the majority of us are the trunk, the phloem that conducts the resources through, so that there are leaves and fruit and so on. I have no problem being the trunk of such a community, but I don't think I can be the fruit.
I don't mean in a non-participatory sense. I mean that if the leaders are the High Priests, then the rest of these people are the rest of the clergymen, but they have no laymen at the sermon yet.
This is the issue I've seen in new communities. Although my framing is from seeing mixed digital nomad and local communities. But ones that have the ambition to start a tribe or even a hub, if we’re going by Vitalik's terminology.
If you allow in more “non-believers”, just anyone that can join a group chat and physically go to a Google Map pin, more often that not most people will be non-participatory after their first contact. This makes it harder for a core team to get things off the ground if they have bigger ambitions than just a weekly meetup.
I think the crypto community took that to heart in particular due to DAOs having very few successful examples, and many of these new crypto-adjacent societies are using a different model that’s more similar to building a startup.
I've done it on a shoe string in the past, but I don't have the space to do it currently. Getting off the ground is the hardest part. Considerably harder than software unless certain resources align.
Most people don't have the experience of seeing one person turn into 200+ in a geographically co-located place.
My family has probably planted more churches than any living group, they range from <100 people to >10,000.
There are transitional stages at every growth milestone, the hardest part is the first 15 people and you need capitalization to get over early humps, that's why missionary organizations exist.
Eventually you can hit break even or even being able to start a rainy day fund, but people aren't willing to capitalize communities the way they capitalize companies even though in the end they have way more socio-political power.
As a fellow SWE engineers and tech people really underestimate the writing, training and empiricism for polity and growth that non-coercion community building entails.
Even people who are vaguely exposed to missionary work are typically exposed to force-coercion oriented groups.
TimorousBestie•1mo ago
Scott (redacted)’s original fictional instantiation of this theory worked around this problem, as I recall, by pretending no pre-existing sovereign power was around.
wizardforhire•1mo ago