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> "Would you rather trust a government or a mathematical algorithm?" The government, obviously. They have the guns and can simply use those guns to annex the n
by pdkl95 13y ago
> "Would you rather trust a government or a mathematical algorithm?"
The government, obviously. They have the guns and can simply use those guns to annex the necessary mathematicians, should the need arise.
Far too often, people seem to forget that governments are the one that has the monopoly on use of force. Thinks like "logic" and "rhetoric" and "math" don't mean a damn thing when the conflict has been reduced down to basic natural selection.
We, as a species, are incredibly talented at postponing that conflict. We pile on more and more layers of indirection - such as "politics", "police", "lawyers" - hoping to avoid the violent battle that lies at the core of any real disagreement.
Unfortunately, geeks tend to fall prey to the "just-world fallacy" in these cases. We're used to the rigor and determinism of math and logic, and often assume that such concepts are universal.
- macavity23 13y agoThey have the guns and can simply use those guns to annex the necessary mathematicians You clearly have a definition of 'trust' that differs significantly from my own :)
- vijucat 13y ago> The government, obviously. They have the guns... Guess what is common to the guerrilla soldiers in Vietnam, terrorists spread across the world, the hackers group Anonymous, and other trouble-makers whom the big bad government seems to fight and never win against : they're decentralized. Also, there's not much use pointing a gun at a mathematician a) after they've published the result and b) who can successfully publish his stuff anonymously (Satoshi) > Unfortunately, geeks tend to fall prey to the "just-world fallacy" in these cases. We're used to the rigor and determinism of math and logic, and often assume that such concepts are universal. Not at all. Diffie-Helman key exchange, for example, solves the problem of exchanging a secret key on an untrusted connection. It is exactly this kind of "there WILL be bad people; how do we make it work nevertheless" thinking that gave birth so many interesting results in cryptography that is going into the creation of new currencies, too. Centralized government has had so much history of working well + there are not that many non-centralized protocols at work in real life yet (p2p, bittorrent, distributed consensus protocols like Plaxo, Raft, etc; are the only ones I know, for example) so you may be finding it difficult to believe in a decentralized protocol, that's all?