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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

Deciding everything in advance like that (e.g. banning cash, which could turn out to break everything) is actually the big co way of doing things, not the startup way.

A real startup country would start out with few rules and a bunch of early adopter inhabitants, and they'd figure out what they should do incrementally in response to the inhabitants' needs. A lot like the early US in other words.

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Probably a lot of these "legacy systems" are an inherent result of trying to govern a large number of people with competing interests, perhaps analogous to the cultural difference between a 10k person company and a 3 person startup.

Even if you could start from a clean slate, you'd need to do that again periodically to avoid creating more "legacy systems".

Well, they certainly achieved the "make something people want" part.

a lot like what they did in "Atlas Shrugged"

Unfortunately, that only worked because Galt personally selected a small and virtuous population (recall that Dagny actively tried not to become the beneficiary of govt subsidies early in the book). In the real world, I don't think it would be possible to keep rent seekers out.

In the real world, virtuous vs rent-seeking is most often a matter of timing: circumstances change, people change with them.

Any society based on constant philosophical adherence across the range of human circumstances can only work in fiction.

I agree, but unlike the early US, a startup country would stop once a while to see what has organically grown and proliferated, then unify the hodge-podge that results by refactoring. This would lay a proper foundation for further incremental growth.

Sounds more like Germany or Japan. Though the stops haven't been voluntarily.

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