Right, but the government is not just some unaccountable third party that sits between you and the rest of society. It is meant to embody the society, and, in a democracy, represent its interests effectively.
Yes in theory. In practice, justice is expensive to procure even when you're in the right, and sometimes even then you can lose just by being out-monied.
This leads to a more nuanced view of web3 and smart contracts: a way to acquire law-like order in business dealings at a vastly lower cost. Or put yet another way, if lawyers and the government got their act together and used technology to reduce the cost of their services (and actually passed on those savings) then smart contracts would never have been a thing.
So like, if you don't deliver those shipping containers of hot sauce, I just click the "I was scammed" checkbox on my smart contract dashboard?
Where exactly does the leverage of smart contracts come into play?
The biggest reason libertarianism is a nonstarter is that it outright rejects the state monopoly on violence. Without a lone arbiter, societies fragment due to intragroup competition and violence. As a society fragments, the size of the monolithic projects it can engage in become smaller and smaller.
International trade is already so fragile that a stuck tanker threatens swaths of the entire thing. Now picture how infinitely improbable a system like that is if there's no physical enforcement mechanisms backing contracts up.
Your comment gave me a neat idea that maybe smart contracts could be used for calculating blame and penalties in long supply chains. Vendor A promises to deliver the widget to Shipping Company B on a certain date who promises to deliver it on another date - but only if Vendor A receives the parts from Vendor X - but only if Vendor X receives the raw materials from Vendor Y - etc. That kind of transparency could be really interesting
I think you hit the nail on the head. In my experience, if both parties are happy payment isn't really a problem anyway. Trouble always comes up when there is disagreement e.g. buyer claims that the hot sauce is not spicy enough and the seller says it's exactly as spicy as ordered. Now what?
You take the issue to a crypto court which controls the escrowed funds.
If the crypto court makes an unfair ruling, you tell everyone to never trust their judgement. Now they’ve lost credibility and nobody will want to escrow funds with them in the future.
Whichever court provides the most consistent fair rulings attains the best reputation and becomes the most utilized.
By contrast, if government courts make an unfair ruling, they’re still going to be in business tomorrow and there’s nobody that can stop their monopoly on broken justice.
Some people might argue that their western country has a fair justice system and that everyone should be glad to be subject to that system.
That argument would be overly generous to even the most fair countries, and completely falls flat in the many countries where corruption is rampant.
This sounds awfully naive. I have a very small company that sometimes deals with large corporations. Large corporations already want to push a jurisdiction onto you in their contracts. Usually the jurisdiction of where they are headquartered, which makes sense because they have lawyers that are allowed to work at those courts and know how to deal with that specific jurisdiction. So now you want them to be able to choose some big-corp-friendly-private-crypto-court? Sorry, no thank you. In a world where everyone has exactly the same power this scheme might work, but I would hate to have to negotiate with big clients which crypto court to choose.
It's hard to imagine any system that would solve 100% of disputes accurately, but at least having a free market of reputation-based dispute resolution providers gives you more options and attempts to weed out corrupt justice.
The thing I don't understand about all of the cryptocurrency negativity on HN is nobody's forcing anyone to use decentralized products, but the naysayers seem to insist that everyone needs to continue use existing centralized solutions even if they're not happy with them. What's so bad about letting the nerds LARP amongst themselves even if you don't want to participate?
Imagine a court that consistently rules in favour of a richer party. Imagine that the richer party is not THAT interested in doing business with you, so they can tell you to take it or leave it. How do you think it will work?
Next steps would be that they create another decentralized smart legal judiciary system to enforce and handle breach of smart contracts. And a supreme chain with Elon & Chamath on the bench.
To clarify, from my understanding, in a libertarian society, individuals and groups would be able to hire armed mercenary groups a la private security forces, but with presumably less regulation. That's what I mean by "monopoly on violence", eg only the ruling government has the right to use violence to enforce contracts.
It represents the lowest common denominator of what everyone can agree on. Democracies have problems when that denominator gets really low, but are relatively great when it is high
Yeah. I’m not saying it’s perfect, there may actually be some limited use for blockchain technology, but casting it as an alternative to the modern liberal state beggars belief.
I don't think many people are suggesting that the blockchain can replace all of the functions of the nation-state. I think the most common sentiment among blockchain advocates is actually closer to your views, of it having utiltiy in specific use-cases.
The government, and all of its institutions, are indeed a third party.
The government is not some representative of the collective will. Thomas Sowell provides his experience at the Department of Labor in 1960 as a poignant demonstration of the fallacy of that notion: https://youtu.be/v6PDpCnMvvw?t=38
Another example would be the latest $1.5 trillion infrastructure bill. It was 1,500 pages long and no legislator read even an appreciable fraction of it. There were provisions in it that the public was discovering a week before it was voted on, like one threatening to classify cryptocurrency nodes as brokers with KYC requirements for any transaction they processed.
The difficulty of parsing a 1500 page infrastructure bill isn't exactly reduceed by expressing each of its provisions and exceptions in a Turing complete programming language though...
1500 pages to govern 330 million people. Was there ever a time in history when an individual understood all the laws of a country?
The fact that the provision you mentioned was discovered is an argument FOR this system. The fourth and fifth estates need to play precisely this role, of parsing and communicating the actions of government and business.
Living up to the unfortunate pun, cryptocurrencies make crypto-fascists giddy. No accountability. No transparency. No arbiters of justice. Every segment of society decouples from accountability to any other: individuals hide from governments, governments hide from the press, business hides from government...
What exactly is the argument that you think would make that a worthwhile future to pursue?
One government should not be governing at such a micro-level for 330 million people. It's absurd and in practice becomes totally corrupt and undemocratic.
>>The fact that the provision you mentioned was discovered is an argument FOR this system
Being discovered a week before the vote meant that there was no time for all those affected to study its effects, let alone to negotiate an amendment for it, and furthermore, that it came within a hair's breadth of NOT being discovered.
Other very worrying provisions were only discovered after the law's passing.
>>Living up to the unfortunate pun, cryptocurrencies make crypto-fascists giddy. No accountability. No transparency. No arbiters of justice.
Crypto systems are opt in. The government mandates are violently enforced on those who would prefer to opt out. This sophomoric socialist argument that private enterprise is fascist is totally shallow.
