3 ms·

I'm not sure you can code your way into having a monopoly on violence.

by post-it 4mo ago

Gigachad 4mo ago
That was the obvious issue with all the blockchain smart contract stuff that was getting pushed previously. Any time it interacts with the physical world the blockchain goes out the window the moment on someone on the ground decides they don’t agree with it. Your cryptographically signed deed means nothing and can’t evict someone off the land.
- jeremyjh 4mo ago
  There is little room for a property or money transfer system that leaves no avenue for legal recourse. And the DAO fork made it crystal clear why it was always just window dressing on the same social consensus game.
  - pocksuppet 4mo ago
    Sure there is, it's the one for people who are trying to avoid unjust legal recourse.
    - jeremyjh 4mo ago
      I said little room, not no room. For most entities using crypto where legal recourse is a more realistic threat model than scammers/hackers it isn't the unjust kind they are so worried about.
      - pocksuppet 4mo ago
        If you're selling shoes you have little legal threat. If you're doing anything unusual, you need protection from the government because the government hates anything out of the norm unless you bribe it.
- inigyou 4mo ago
  The "violence" in that case is taking someone's money away so they might lose their home or starve.
- cucumber3732842 4mo ago
  This comment ignores the cost of deploying government violence. In most of the world the government cannot "just" rubber hose every petty criminal on the basis that "he might have some crypto he's not telling us about". The people would not stand for it.
  - JuniperMesos 4mo ago
    Even if the people did stand for it, it still costs money and human effort for the government to pay its police employees to do the rubber-hosing - and there are principle-agent problems like government agents being susceptible to bribes (perhaps in cryptocurrency!), being too lazy to enforce the written laws, or having personal scruples about cryptocurrency use.
  - Gigachad 4mo ago
    I think you misunderstood my comment. The scenario I was thinking of is something like a blockchain contract that declares you own a block of land. If a hacker stole the NFT land contract, the government and society would still agree it belongs to the real owner and thus the blockchain out of sync with reality. A smart contract can't physically secure ownership of land.
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
dredmorbius 4mo ago
NB: Weber's definition of government (which your quote misstates, so to speak, as is often the case), is that the state is that entity which has the monopoly on the legitimate claim to violence. It's legitimacy, not violence, which is key. For the longer explanation, see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37366751 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37366751>. That said, legitimacy is a political property, and one which cannot be attained through purely technical means. To that extent I agree with your critique.
- cucumber3732842 4mo ago
  Which itself is kind of a BS indoctrinated definition. Wind the clock back a few hundred years and there was plenty of legitimate non-government violence. The government didn't care if the well to do dueled, the townsfolk brawled in the bar, a serial fraudster got what was coming to them, etc, etc. Sure the government could choose to care and construe it's written rules to that effect if it chose but other than exceptional situations it largely didn't and everyone alive then considered this fine. Wind the clock back further to medieval times and it gets even messier.
  - dredmorbius 4mo ago
    My argument isn't that Weber's definition is correct or accurate; that's a whole 'nother discussion. It's that, to the level of a thought-stopping cliche, the definition is misstated with the emphasis on violence rather than legitimacy, which misses the whole point. But Weber's claim is also nuanced: - Non-government violence, if tolerated by the government, is then sanctioned by the government, and hence, government retains its monopoly on legitimacy. Again, the relevant monopoly is legitimacy. Not on who is acting with violence, but who finds that violence legitimate or illegitimate. - Governmental violence, if deemed illegitimate by the population, means that the government no longer has legitimacy itself, and hence by Weber's definition is no longer a government (at least by his terms). - If some other entity holds legitimacy over violence within a given area (say, a neighboring state, a local warlord, Great Power, partisan or resistance movement, corporate or commercial entity such as, say, the British East India Company), then that entity is effectively the government, again, by Weber's definition. As an example, Mohandas Gandhi's ahimsa movement successfully challenged British imperial rule not by claiming violence for itself, but by successfully claiming the principle of nonviolence. The Empire was delegitimated in the process. - And finally, if no one institution can successfully claim legitimacy of violence within a region, then there is no government. The region is effectively stateless. There may well be other constructs, situations may be fluid (changing with time or over space), effective control units may be small (city-states, tribes), etc.., but you can generally find a Weberian projection in such cases. Again, I've raised this point numerous times on HN, largely due to the widespread misrepresentation of Weber. Often, I suspect, by people who have no idea that they're employing a corrupted version of his definition in the first place. I encourage you to look through my earlier discussions to see if your further objections aren't already addressed there: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adredmorbius%20weber%20violence&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>. Prior discussion points to where the misleading restatement seems to have originated, more on the elements of Weber's definition as applied to various situations, Weber's original work, and translation into English which didn't occur until the 1950s, followed shortly by the bastardised variant taking hold. I also strongly recommend British political historian David Runciman's own views on this definition, which I'd first encountered well after forming my own. They're expressed in this episode of his podcast Talking Politics: <https://play.acast.com/s/history-of-ideas/weberonleadership https://play.acast.com/s/history-of-ideas/weberonleadership> (at about 15 minutes).
econ 4mo ago
To state the obvious: If anyone can code his way out of something it is someone who codes. If enough people want something badly enough, when existing governing structures will bow is a question of how many people. You should pretend your code isn't good enough. That way you can own the problem. You will get plenty of help from those making things worse. Empires crumble eventually.
- dredmorbius 4mo ago
  This and your earlier comment presume that code is a way out. Much of the push-back here is that evidence is strongly suggesting that 1) it is not and 2) code tends in general to be a power-amplifier for those already in power. Put another way: your reform-minded hacker is not the only coder, and the opposition (or more accurately, the establishment) likely has far vaster resources. The problem in your initial proposal comes in the first step: "Create a government from scratch". That is a political process at best; at worst, one predicated on violence (rebellion, insurrection, coercion). Again, the solution is inherently political, not technical. There might be technical elements to such a political process, but those follow from rather than lead to. This represents a significant shift in my own views over the past 20 years or so. In the 1990s I would have tended to agree with you. I no longer do.
  - econ 4mo ago
    > This and your earlier comment presume that code is a way out. For you yes. If you were a song writer I would suggest you write something like El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido in stead of a new shaking my ass song. You do what you know. It's much less of a waste of time if it progresses your skills. A baker in 1683 created the croissant to symbolize eating the ottoman empire. Did he make a relevant contribution? I honestly don't know.
    - dredmorbius 4mo ago
      Just to be clear, I agree in part: people should assist as they can. The examples you cite (protest songs, protest food) work as part of the battle for hearts and minds, and can be quite effective. They're working at the political level, within epistemic space, itself a significant element of political dynamics. When epistemic systems change, so do political ones, and we've seen this repeatedly through history. I do have a technical background, I write code. I've also been spending much of the past decade or two coming up to speed on things I'd paid less attention to in my near six decades on this rock: political theory, philosophy, and history. David Runciman, mentioned elsewhere in this thread, has been a significant part of that. There is a code associated with governance, and that is law, along with regulation, constitution, and court practice (which may or may not include case law / common law, depending on the political tradition). Coming up with ways of making law itself clearer and in particular changes to it more apparent (as with revision control) could help in some regards, though my experience from the world of software is that complexity-management constrains complexity, and that the inevitable consequence of more capable complexity management is greater levels of complexity. Beware what you (or others) ask for. I suspect that there are changes necessary at a more fundamental level, though even deciding on what the aims of that change should be is an open question: is liberal democracy a proper goal, or should we be looking at effective governance based on a changing set of conditions, constraints, and capabilities? There are numerous suggestions for electoral reforms (reduced voting age, increased voter restrictions, ranked-choice, and a whole host of others, see: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_reform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_reform>). I'm particularly taken by the notion of sortition and how it might be applied. "If you can't choose wisely, choose randomly" has topped my list of most interesting reads for nearly two decades now: <https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-randomly https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-ran...>. Other reforms would include finance (personal, business, government, political); economics; technology; social welfare; education; property rights and restrictions; informational autonomy (combining speech, privacy, and choice in numerous manners), etc., etc., etc. I fear you're prematurely optimising based on misconceptions and ignorance. I'm not claiming total knowledge, by a long shot. But I do believe my scope of consideration exceeds yours.

I'm not sure you can code your way into having a monopoly on violence.

by post-it 4mo ago

I'm not sure you can code your way into having a monopoly on violence.

That was the obvious issue with all the blockchain smart contract stuff that was getting pushed previously. Any time it interacts with the physical world the blockchain goes out the window the moment on someone on the ground decides they don’t agree with it. Your cryptographically signed deed means nothing and can’t evict someone off the land.

jeremyjh 4mo ago
There is little room for a property or money transfer system that leaves no avenue for legal recourse. And the DAO fork made it crystal clear why it was always just window dressing on the same social consensus game.
- pocksuppet 4mo ago
  Sure there is, it's the one for people who are trying to avoid unjust legal recourse.
  - jeremyjh 4mo ago
    I said little room, not no room. For most entities using crypto where legal recourse is a more realistic threat model than scammers/hackers it isn't the unjust kind they are so worried about.
    - pocksuppet 4mo ago
      If you're selling shoes you have little legal threat. If you're doing anything unusual, you need protection from the government because the government hates anything out of the norm unless you bribe it.
inigyou 4mo ago
The "violence" in that case is taking someone's money away so they might lose their home or starve.
cucumber3732842 4mo ago
This comment ignores the cost of deploying government violence. In most of the world the government cannot "just" rubber hose every petty criminal on the basis that "he might have some crypto he's not telling us about". The people would not stand for it.
- JuniperMesos 4mo ago
  Even if the people did stand for it, it still costs money and human effort for the government to pay its police employees to do the rubber-hosing - and there are principle-agent problems like government agents being susceptible to bribes (perhaps in cryptocurrency!), being too lazy to enforce the written laws, or having personal scruples about cryptocurrency use.
- Gigachad 4mo ago
  I think you misunderstood my comment. The scenario I was thinking of is something like a blockchain contract that declares you own a block of land. If a hacker stole the NFT land contract, the government and society would still agree it belongs to the real owner and thus the blockchain out of sync with reality. A smart contract can't physically secure ownership of land.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]

dredmorbius 4mo ago

NB: Weber's definition of government (which your quote misstates, so to speak, as is often the case), is that the state is that entity which has the monopoly on the legitimate claim to violence. It's legitimacy, not violence, which is key. For the longer explanation, see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37366751 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37366751>. That said, legitimacy is a political property, and one which cannot be attained through purely technical means. To that extent I agree with your critique.

cucumber3732842 4mo ago
Which itself is kind of a BS indoctrinated definition. Wind the clock back a few hundred years and there was plenty of legitimate non-government violence. The government didn't care if the well to do dueled, the townsfolk brawled in the bar, a serial fraudster got what was coming to them, etc, etc. Sure the government could choose to care and construe it's written rules to that effect if it chose but other than exceptional situations it largely didn't and everyone alive then considered this fine. Wind the clock back further to medieval times and it gets even messier.
- dredmorbius 4mo ago
  My argument isn't that Weber's definition is correct or accurate; that's a whole 'nother discussion. It's that, to the level of a thought-stopping cliche, the definition is misstated with the emphasis on violence rather than legitimacy, which misses the whole point. But Weber's claim is also nuanced: - Non-government violence, if tolerated by the government, is then sanctioned by the government, and hence, government retains its monopoly on legitimacy. Again, the relevant monopoly is legitimacy. Not on who is acting with violence, but who finds that violence legitimate or illegitimate. - Governmental violence, if deemed illegitimate by the population, means that the government no longer has legitimacy itself, and hence by Weber's definition is no longer a government (at least by his terms). - If some other entity holds legitimacy over violence within a given area (say, a neighboring state, a local warlord, Great Power, partisan or resistance movement, corporate or commercial entity such as, say, the British East India Company), then that entity is effectively the government, again, by Weber's definition. As an example, Mohandas Gandhi's ahimsa movement successfully challenged British imperial rule not by claiming violence for itself, but by successfully claiming the principle of nonviolence. The Empire was delegitimated in the process. - And finally, if no one institution can successfully claim legitimacy of violence within a region, then there is no government. The region is effectively stateless. There may well be other constructs, situations may be fluid (changing with time or over space), effective control units may be small (city-states, tribes), etc.., but you can generally find a Weberian projection in such cases. Again, I've raised this point numerous times on HN, largely due to the widespread misrepresentation of Weber. Often, I suspect, by people who have no idea that they're employing a corrupted version of his definition in the first place. I encourage you to look through my earlier discussions to see if your further objections aren't already addressed there: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adredmorbius%20weber%20violence&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>. Prior discussion points to where the misleading restatement seems to have originated, more on the elements of Weber's definition as applied to various situations, Weber's original work, and translation into English which didn't occur until the 1950s, followed shortly by the bastardised variant taking hold. I also strongly recommend British political historian David Runciman's own views on this definition, which I'd first encountered well after forming my own. They're expressed in this episode of his podcast Talking Politics: <https://play.acast.com/s/history-of-ideas/weberonleadership https://play.acast.com/s/history-of-ideas/weberonleadership> (at about 15 minutes).

econ 4mo ago

To state the obvious: If anyone can code his way out of something it is someone who codes. If enough people want something badly enough, when existing governing structures will bow is a question of how many people. You should pretend your code isn't good enough. That way you can own the problem. You will get plenty of help from those making things worse. Empires crumble eventually.

dredmorbius 4mo ago
This and your earlier comment presume that code is a way out. Much of the push-back here is that evidence is strongly suggesting that 1) it is not and 2) code tends in general to be a power-amplifier for those already in power. Put another way: your reform-minded hacker is not the only coder, and the opposition (or more accurately, the establishment) likely has far vaster resources. The problem in your initial proposal comes in the first step: "Create a government from scratch". That is a political process at best; at worst, one predicated on violence (rebellion, insurrection, coercion). Again, the solution is inherently political, not technical. There might be technical elements to such a political process, but those follow from rather than lead to. This represents a significant shift in my own views over the past 20 years or so. In the 1990s I would have tended to agree with you. I no longer do.
- econ 4mo ago
  > This and your earlier comment presume that code is a way out. For you yes. If you were a song writer I would suggest you write something like El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido in stead of a new shaking my ass song. You do what you know. It's much less of a waste of time if it progresses your skills. A baker in 1683 created the croissant to symbolize eating the ottoman empire. Did he make a relevant contribution? I honestly don't know.
  - dredmorbius 4mo ago
    Just to be clear, I agree in part: people should assist as they can. The examples you cite (protest songs, protest food) work as part of the battle for hearts and minds, and can be quite effective. They're working at the political level, within epistemic space, itself a significant element of political dynamics. When epistemic systems change, so do political ones, and we've seen this repeatedly through history. I do have a technical background, I write code. I've also been spending much of the past decade or two coming up to speed on things I'd paid less attention to in my near six decades on this rock: political theory, philosophy, and history. David Runciman, mentioned elsewhere in this thread, has been a significant part of that. There is a code associated with governance, and that is law, along with regulation, constitution, and court practice (which may or may not include case law / common law, depending on the political tradition). Coming up with ways of making law itself clearer and in particular changes to it more apparent (as with revision control) could help in some regards, though my experience from the world of software is that complexity-management constrains complexity, and that the inevitable consequence of more capable complexity management is greater levels of complexity. Beware what you (or others) ask for. I suspect that there are changes necessary at a more fundamental level, though even deciding on what the aims of that change should be is an open question: is liberal democracy a proper goal, or should we be looking at effective governance based on a changing set of conditions, constraints, and capabilities? There are numerous suggestions for electoral reforms (reduced voting age, increased voter restrictions, ranked-choice, and a whole host of others, see: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_reform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_reform>). I'm particularly taken by the notion of sortition and how it might be applied. "If you can't choose wisely, choose randomly" has topped my list of most interesting reads for nearly two decades now: <https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-randomly https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-ran...>. Other reforms would include finance (personal, business, government, political); economics; technology; social welfare; education; property rights and restrictions; informational autonomy (combining speech, privacy, and choice in numerous manners), etc., etc., etc. I fear you're prematurely optimising based on misconceptions and ignorance. I'm not claiming total knowledge, by a long shot. But I do believe my scope of consideration exceeds yours.