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I was convinced government doesn't work and indeed that is the only reason I am interested in blockchain applications. Watching first hand how badly the entire

I was convinced government doesn't work and indeed that is the only reason I am interested in blockchain applications. Watching first hand how badly the entire affair has gone has been very useful into getting insight into why government doesn't work, which I still firmly believe. However I am no longer under the illusion doing away with it and replacing it with a blockchain based substitute is either cheap or easy, and if we skipped a hundred years into the future and it turned out that the end result looked almost indistinguishable from what is presently described as government I would not be altogether shocked. I would however consider that amongst the worst possible outcomes. It may well be that there is a necessary deadweight economic loss to pay based on the nature of human social interaction at scale and this loss cannot be avoided entirely, only minimised to a certain extent.

HWR_14 4y ago
So, at no point did you consider that you were wrong in your base assumption and government does in fact work? Because it looks like you examined anarchistic alternatives to government, found them all worse than government, and then didn't do the (to me) obvious thing if updating your "government can be good" possibility.
- etherael 4y ago
  > So, at no point did you consider that you were wrong in your base assumption and government does in fact work? Of course, many dozens of thousands of times throughout my life, desperately wished for that to be the case. Unfortunately there is no evidence for this and immense amounts of evidence for the contrary. > Because it looks like you examined anarchistic alternatives to government, found them all worse than government I didn't say I found them worse than government at all, I said the first hand experience was very useful for seeing directly why government is as broken as it is, because all the same "incentive of last resort" mechanisms are typically in play in blockchains. It still turns out to be much better so far if measured by deadweight economic loss for economic coordination between a given transaction volume. This is also why I said I would not be too surprised if it just becomes the next iteration of government. People who think that the government is desirable and its political structures are useful, parliamentary democracy, voting, departments that run projects and are accountable to elected officials, all of that kind of thing. You could clone it with a blockchain much more reliably and with much more auditability than you have with the multi-century old variations thereof running on some variant of "trust me" that we have currently. Thus you could at least say "Yeah sure this is bad, but at least we can prove that everybody is following the rules on all elections, transactions, etc, and we have all the signed blocks to prove that from genesis" rather than the current trust-free alternative of an endless propaganda machine spinning whatever it wants people to believe at any given point in time with zero proof whatsoever.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    I believe audits and transparency are amongst the tools that can and do improve 'government' / 'democracy'. I can see ways that crypto (in it's old generic sense) can help but I don't particularly see any way that blockchain tech can help though?
    - etherael 4y ago
      Probably much the same way you can see that crypto in its old generic sense could do these things, with the additional security of the applications running on a blockchain, and the assurances about transaction integrity, censorship resistance, availability etc. You can have a cryptographically secure platform for whatever governance platform you like, but if it's running on a traditional centralised server infrastructure within a political jurisdiction, it's completely vulnerable to tampering of government agencies within that political jurisdiction. This is a well acknowledged issue referred to as "data sovereignty" with the limitation that the way to ensure it's handled is to pick a reliable jurisdiction. If we acknowledge that no jurisdiction is reliable, however, blockchains are the only choice.
      - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
        That seems a bit of an unwarranted leap and very hand-wavy. Why would blockchain be better than a decentralized, non-blockchain tech, hosted in multiple jurisdictions for transaction integrity, censorship resistance, availability and so on? And why is a blockchain a better alternative? If the blockchain assumptions fall (51% control) then it's game over. Even the founding fathers were a step ahead of that and trying to prevent tyranny of the majority (probably code for "the rich staying rich", but that makes it an even better analogy) It all feels a bit like wishful thinking to me.
        etherael 4y ago
        No matter where FAANG host their infrastructure, if a particular set of states want to tamper with, censor, or surveil that infrastructure, they will be able to do it. The legal structures and the ability to identify ultimate beneficiaries guarantees this for pretty much any legal corporate structure organised under a state. The only chance this has of not being true is a blockchain, the ultimate beneficiaries can't be identified, the infrastructure is not linked to a particular legal structure. There is no guarantee the state can identify the appropriate necks to apply the appropriate boots to. If an organisational unit is to exist that will destroy the state, at the moment the only candidate for its infrastructure is blockchain.
- jeegsy 4y ago
  I dont think its much of a selling point in favor of government that the considered so far "anarchistic alternatives" are worse. That is by no means a recommendation
  - D13Fd 4y ago
    “I don’t think something is good just because every alternative is worse.”
    - endominus 4y ago
      "What is a lose-lose situation?" Seriously, the idea that every option available is a bad one is not that difficult. Hell, even voting in the US is sometimes described as picking the lesser of two evils by those who don't feel well represented by the de facto realistic candidates.
Spooky23 4y ago
That’s the marketing pitch. The nihilist position that e everything is broken, except for a highly volatile system of digital signatures that require massive “fiat” capital investments to function.
netsharc 4y ago
Government is formed as a way to manage a society/community of people, if blockchain/crypto gets big enough to have hundreds of thousands of adherents, you'll also need a way to manage that "society". Some people think "the algorithm rules all", but as we've seen the algorithm is messy and has bugs and allow for thefts where you lose everything in a split second. It'd be like joining a society where muggers are free to roam and mug you, and to mug them back you have to find a cleverer exploit as your knife. A blogger I read once laughed that an exchange/crypto-coin who suffered such a hack decided, to get their money back, they would contact... the police/FBI. Yeah, so much for that "We can't trust the government!" mentality.

HWR_14 4y ago

So, at no point did you consider that you were wrong in your base assumption and government does in fact work? Because it looks like you examined anarchistic alternatives to government, found them all worse than government, and then didn't do the (to me) obvious thing if updating your "government can be good" possibility.

etherael 4y ago
> So, at no point did you consider that you were wrong in your base assumption and government does in fact work? Of course, many dozens of thousands of times throughout my life, desperately wished for that to be the case. Unfortunately there is no evidence for this and immense amounts of evidence for the contrary. > Because it looks like you examined anarchistic alternatives to government, found them all worse than government I didn't say I found them worse than government at all, I said the first hand experience was very useful for seeing directly why government is as broken as it is, because all the same "incentive of last resort" mechanisms are typically in play in blockchains. It still turns out to be much better so far if measured by deadweight economic loss for economic coordination between a given transaction volume. This is also why I said I would not be too surprised if it just becomes the next iteration of government. People who think that the government is desirable and its political structures are useful, parliamentary democracy, voting, departments that run projects and are accountable to elected officials, all of that kind of thing. You could clone it with a blockchain much more reliably and with much more auditability than you have with the multi-century old variations thereof running on some variant of "trust me" that we have currently. Thus you could at least say "Yeah sure this is bad, but at least we can prove that everybody is following the rules on all elections, transactions, etc, and we have all the signed blocks to prove that from genesis" rather than the current trust-free alternative of an endless propaganda machine spinning whatever it wants people to believe at any given point in time with zero proof whatsoever.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  I believe audits and transparency are amongst the tools that can and do improve 'government' / 'democracy'. I can see ways that crypto (in it's old generic sense) can help but I don't particularly see any way that blockchain tech can help though?
  - etherael 4y ago
    Probably much the same way you can see that crypto in its old generic sense could do these things, with the additional security of the applications running on a blockchain, and the assurances about transaction integrity, censorship resistance, availability etc. You can have a cryptographically secure platform for whatever governance platform you like, but if it's running on a traditional centralised server infrastructure within a political jurisdiction, it's completely vulnerable to tampering of government agencies within that political jurisdiction. This is a well acknowledged issue referred to as "data sovereignty" with the limitation that the way to ensure it's handled is to pick a reliable jurisdiction. If we acknowledge that no jurisdiction is reliable, however, blockchains are the only choice.
    - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
      That seems a bit of an unwarranted leap and very hand-wavy. Why would blockchain be better than a decentralized, non-blockchain tech, hosted in multiple jurisdictions for transaction integrity, censorship resistance, availability and so on? And why is a blockchain a better alternative? If the blockchain assumptions fall (51% control) then it's game over. Even the founding fathers were a step ahead of that and trying to prevent tyranny of the majority (probably code for "the rich staying rich", but that makes it an even better analogy) It all feels a bit like wishful thinking to me.
      - etherael 4y ago
        No matter where FAANG host their infrastructure, if a particular set of states want to tamper with, censor, or surveil that infrastructure, they will be able to do it. The legal structures and the ability to identify ultimate beneficiaries guarantees this for pretty much any legal corporate structure organised under a state. The only chance this has of not being true is a blockchain, the ultimate beneficiaries can't be identified, the infrastructure is not linked to a particular legal structure. There is no guarantee the state can identify the appropriate necks to apply the appropriate boots to. If an organisational unit is to exist that will destroy the state, at the moment the only candidate for its infrastructure is blockchain.
jeegsy 4y ago
I dont think its much of a selling point in favor of government that the considered so far "anarchistic alternatives" are worse. That is by no means a recommendation
- D13Fd 4y ago
  “I don’t think something is good just because every alternative is worse.”
  - endominus 4y ago
    "What is a lose-lose situation?" Seriously, the idea that every option available is a bad one is not that difficult. Hell, even voting in the US is sometimes described as picking the lesser of two evils by those who don't feel well represented by the de facto realistic candidates.

Spooky23 4y ago

That’s the marketing pitch. The nihilist position that e everything is broken, except for a highly volatile system of digital signatures that require massive “fiat” capital investments to function.

netsharc 4y ago

Government is formed as a way to manage a society/community of people, if blockchain/crypto gets big enough to have hundreds of thousands of adherents, you'll also need a way to manage that "society". Some people think "the algorithm rules all", but as we've seen the algorithm is messy and has bugs and allow for thefts where you lose everything in a split second. It'd be like joining a society where muggers are free to roam and mug you, and to mug them back you have to find a cleverer exploit as your knife. A blogger I read once laughed that an exchange/crypto-coin who suffered such a hack decided, to get their money back, they would contact... the police/FBI. Yeah, so much for that "We can't trust the government!" mentality.