I agree. This is the most interesting part of the problem. I'm thinking about it hard. If you have good resources on this, I'll take them. I don't find much on the topic
I agree. This is the most interesting part of the problem. I'm thinking about it hard. If you have good resources on this, I'll take them. I don't find much on the topic
The means for mass coercion already exist, and the power will be held by some entity (it seems unlikely that humankind would universally give up its arsenals altruistically). Now, traditional nation states evolved with geography drawing primary membranes, and power structures evolved around shifting borders and squabbles over ports and harbors and such. And those real assets will always matter more than BTC. We will know when the paradigm has truly shifted: the morning that CNN covers the drone strikes and commando raids tasked with taking down a crypto miner or thief. Because the guns haven’t been drawn yet over BTC shows us that it’s not serious yet, that that entire universe is still <0.0001% of the pie that the cruise missiles fly over…
Perhaps the future of the nation state is less geographical and more a distributed network of commercial or military (or both) nodes, and contiguous borders may become obsolete. But to imagine the people throwing off every yoke, first watch some Apache gunsight video, and ask yourself honestly - what could you really do against that?
You can't do anything against that ... with blockchain. What will truly affect it is the fact that the military needs ... money!
Funding, salaries, shopping, a good retirement, new toys, all of that needs the same money that the nation state is increasingly unable to pay. When new non-nationstate actors steps in to claim a portion of the military's upkeep ... now we have a problem.
Who pays them ... owns them. This is also what happened centuries ago.
Money, in all of its forms, was invented as a convenient means of subdividing ownership of a tangible thing (a goat? a sheep?) without having to kill it first. Funny to think, after everything that's happened since, that money facilitates bloodless transactions in real goods. But keeping the blood in the pipes is a convenience, not a requirement. A rogue military with sufficient power will continue to transact in real goods - starved of money, it will simply sieze the entire goat.
I’m not sure I understand how a drone strike or commando raid could threaten BTC. Doesn’t the fact that it doesn’t reside anywhere -and everywhere- make it an impossible target? Sure, a mining operation could get clobbered, but that wouldn’t affect the millions of decentralized computers around the world holding the BTC ledger. Not being disrespectful; I’m just trying to understand. Cheers, J
BTC is a medium of exchange because it is being tolerated (so far). If the Peoples Central Committee or US Treasury started to seriously enforce their jealousy over the creation and administration of money by outlawing BTC and imposing sanctions on anyone or thing that accepted it, BTC would cease to be in very short order. Printing of money is a perk associated with power; the ultimate lever for contract enforcement is a Trident missile. While blockchain is an interesting alternative method for exchange and storage, it has no power of its own.
Blantons, I agree with nearly everything you said except for this point.
If you kill one piece of the BTC network, the rest survives. The perfect example is China. BTC might have disappeared from China (except for the wealth these ppl are storing outside of China, and the potential they can use it back again with Starlink), but not from the rest of the world. And the more liberal a country is, the harder it is to justify a cancellation
There are about a gabillion steps in the process of rewriting the entire social contract and decentralization of nation-state power; the focus of my rebuttal was the final step - the storming of the Bastille, modern edition. The forces of decentralization must clear the tallest hurdle then, when the powers-that-be fear of being lynched remove all inhibitions. And if the levers of physical power simply change hands, the nation-states live on under new management.
I agree with your initiative. All the people I've read who speculate about the future jump steps.
As a person who worked in tech companies for 10 years making them grow, I wholeheartedly agree with the importance of planning for growth at every step.
I'd argue that the Bastille was closer to the middle than to the end. You had before all the enlightenment, with ideas like those of Rousseau or Voltaire. You had later the Terreur, Napoleon, conscription, war across Europe, the spread of ideas of human rights and nations...
But your overarching point is still valid: We need to pay close attention to the future of violence if we want to understand what future states will be like.
If nation states start to feel threatened by BTC, I am concerned they will increasingly attempt to regulate/control it. It has already gone from a non-entity in their minds (FBI: "Someone stole your bitcoin? There's nothing we can do about it because it doesn't really exist."), into a legitimate asset (IRS: "Please list any cryptocurrency you sold in the previous tax period, and the amount of profit you realized.").
In other words, if they're starting to truly realize the potential of BTC (or Ether or Ripple, etc.), and they can't kill something that is universally spread across all borders, how will they respond? Will they ban it like China? The nation states won't surrender power without a fight. I'm less concerned about a Trident missile than a media campaign of misleading propaganda. (Of course, so far seems to be shrugging off dire warnings from the likes of Jamie Dimon). But I'm expecting something far worse. But what?
At ~$2.5T, I think that moment has passed. Not enough govs can fight it now to destroy it. I esp can't see the US banning it given their liberal mindset, and since it's the country that carries the most of its value, it's unlikely it will disappear
Considering that China has banned BTC -at least within their borders- I guess we’ll have to see how that works out for them. I’m not tech savvy enough to know if a Chinese citizen could still buy/hold/sell crypto via an offshore e-mail address and the use of a VPN.
Chinese citizens can still hold/own cryptocurrency, but its clearly discouraged. Its all commercial crypto enterprises that are banned.
And this validates the article's point, a single nation-state, does not have the capability to ban crypto, hence to avoid embarrassment, it can only ban commerical enterprises from engaging in cryptocurrency.
If an autocracy like China couldn't truly ban crypto, then US has even less capability to do so. Its not that they don't want to, its that they literally ... can't. The Internet as it is currently, not under the control of a single planetary authority, is not built to enable that.
I agree. This is the most interesting part of the problem. I'm thinking about it hard. If you have good resources on this, I'll take them. I don't find much on the topic
The means for mass coercion already exist, and the power will be held by some entity (it seems unlikely that humankind would universally give up its arsenals altruistically). Now, traditional nation states evolved with geography drawing primary membranes, and power structures evolved around shifting borders and squabbles over ports and harbors and such. And those real assets will always matter more than BTC. We will know when the paradigm has truly shifted: the morning that CNN covers the drone strikes and commando raids tasked with taking down a crypto miner or thief. Because the guns haven’t been drawn yet over BTC shows us that it’s not serious yet, that that entire universe is still <0.0001% of the pie that the cruise missiles fly over…
Perhaps the future of the nation state is less geographical and more a distributed network of commercial or military (or both) nodes, and contiguous borders may become obsolete. But to imagine the people throwing off every yoke, first watch some Apache gunsight video, and ask yourself honestly - what could you really do against that?
1. You can have new states with geo footprint but that aren't nation-states.
2. The technology of violence is changing rapidly. So much so, that you might be able to project physical defense at a distance
You can't do anything against that ... with blockchain. What will truly affect it is the fact that the military needs ... money!
Funding, salaries, shopping, a good retirement, new toys, all of that needs the same money that the nation state is increasingly unable to pay. When new non-nationstate actors steps in to claim a portion of the military's upkeep ... now we have a problem.
Who pays them ... owns them. This is also what happened centuries ago.
Money, in all of its forms, was invented as a convenient means of subdividing ownership of a tangible thing (a goat? a sheep?) without having to kill it first. Funny to think, after everything that's happened since, that money facilitates bloodless transactions in real goods. But keeping the blood in the pipes is a convenience, not a requirement. A rogue military with sufficient power will continue to transact in real goods - starved of money, it will simply sieze the entire goat.
You should read Debt: The First 5,000 years
I’m not sure I understand how a drone strike or commando raid could threaten BTC. Doesn’t the fact that it doesn’t reside anywhere -and everywhere- make it an impossible target? Sure, a mining operation could get clobbered, but that wouldn’t affect the millions of decentralized computers around the world holding the BTC ledger. Not being disrespectful; I’m just trying to understand. Cheers, J
BTC is a medium of exchange because it is being tolerated (so far). If the Peoples Central Committee or US Treasury started to seriously enforce their jealousy over the creation and administration of money by outlawing BTC and imposing sanctions on anyone or thing that accepted it, BTC would cease to be in very short order. Printing of money is a perk associated with power; the ultimate lever for contract enforcement is a Trident missile. While blockchain is an interesting alternative method for exchange and storage, it has no power of its own.
Blantons, I agree with nearly everything you said except for this point.
If you kill one piece of the BTC network, the rest survives. The perfect example is China. BTC might have disappeared from China (except for the wealth these ppl are storing outside of China, and the potential they can use it back again with Starlink), but not from the rest of the world. And the more liberal a country is, the harder it is to justify a cancellation
There are about a gabillion steps in the process of rewriting the entire social contract and decentralization of nation-state power; the focus of my rebuttal was the final step - the storming of the Bastille, modern edition. The forces of decentralization must clear the tallest hurdle then, when the powers-that-be fear of being lynched remove all inhibitions. And if the levers of physical power simply change hands, the nation-states live on under new management.
I agree with your initiative. All the people I've read who speculate about the future jump steps.
As a person who worked in tech companies for 10 years making them grow, I wholeheartedly agree with the importance of planning for growth at every step.
I'd argue that the Bastille was closer to the middle than to the end. You had before all the enlightenment, with ideas like those of Rousseau or Voltaire. You had later the Terreur, Napoleon, conscription, war across Europe, the spread of ideas of human rights and nations...
But your overarching point is still valid: We need to pay close attention to the future of violence if we want to understand what future states will be like.
If nation states start to feel threatened by BTC, I am concerned they will increasingly attempt to regulate/control it. It has already gone from a non-entity in their minds (FBI: "Someone stole your bitcoin? There's nothing we can do about it because it doesn't really exist."), into a legitimate asset (IRS: "Please list any cryptocurrency you sold in the previous tax period, and the amount of profit you realized.").
In other words, if they're starting to truly realize the potential of BTC (or Ether or Ripple, etc.), and they can't kill something that is universally spread across all borders, how will they respond? Will they ban it like China? The nation states won't surrender power without a fight. I'm less concerned about a Trident missile than a media campaign of misleading propaganda. (Of course, so far seems to be shrugging off dire warnings from the likes of Jamie Dimon). But I'm expecting something far worse. But what?
At ~$2.5T, I think that moment has passed. Not enough govs can fight it now to destroy it. I esp can't see the US banning it given their liberal mindset, and since it's the country that carries the most of its value, it's unlikely it will disappear
Considering that China has banned BTC -at least within their borders- I guess we’ll have to see how that works out for them. I’m not tech savvy enough to know if a Chinese citizen could still buy/hold/sell crypto via an offshore e-mail address and the use of a VPN.
Chinese citizens can still hold/own cryptocurrency, but its clearly discouraged. Its all commercial crypto enterprises that are banned.
And this validates the article's point, a single nation-state, does not have the capability to ban crypto, hence to avoid embarrassment, it can only ban commerical enterprises from engaging in cryptocurrency.
If an autocracy like China couldn't truly ban crypto, then US has even less capability to do so. Its not that they don't want to, its that they literally ... can't. The Internet as it is currently, not under the control of a single planetary authority, is not built to enable that.