You could never have crypto in an anarchist vacuum.
It's not the government vs. a bunch of fringe individuals at this point.
But I'm saying that crypto is built on the stability and infrastructure that was created by fairly well-run and well-intentioned centralized govs etc.
That's a trivially true statement for anything that exists at all.
200 years ago you could have said "democracy is built on the infrastructure that was created by monarchies". Ok. So what? That doesn't ipso facto delegitimize the potential of democracy as a viable alternative to monarchy, and history would have proven you wrong.
Democracy is self-sustaining. Crypto is not self-sustaining, it requires institutions to be able to exist and provide the stability and infrastructure for it to exist.
Crypto detracts from gov/institutions because it enables individual actors to hold on to "their" wealth more easily and evade paying back into the system that allows the wealth to thrive in the beginning.
Your simplistic argument is ignoring the negatives of purely "individual actors"
Let's give a concrete example. Say it takes $10M to house the homeless in SF. One marc benioff (or, better yet, a few + tens of thousands of individuals, but not necessarily all) can step up and cover the cost and the rest of the greedy billionaires in SF can do what they want. Whereas if only the city takes care of it, then you could be hosed.
By its very nature if you want robust social services, you should build a voluntary system because that's not going to have a single point of failure.
Indeed your statement belies a serious level of projection: you're ignoring the negatives of a state run solution.
Bad times makes things reach a point they cannot be contained anymore, it doesn’t matter how big your backing seemed to be during the good times.
This seems like a strawman to me? You can be for replacing the world's monetary system with cryptocurrency, and still believe in having a government with police, roads, and schools.
Those people discount just how much underlying social stability matters, and how meaningless an executable contract would be in a violent environment.
>Those people discount just how much underlying social stability matters, and how meaningless an executable contract would be in a violent environment.
How did we go from "let's use smart contracts to enforce business contracts, rather than the courts", to "abolish the entire justice system"?
No one is incentivized to grease the gears of a democratic society. Nobody wants to pay taxes. But they are necessary to establish an environment of innovation, etc (to a point).
There's a reason the dark ages were called the dark ages.
That being said, I'd be curious to here pro-crypto arguments from someone “believ[ing] in having a government with police, roads, and schools”. This is especially interesting to me, because “school” appears in this list.
[1] which cannot really be qualified as anarchists IMHO, but that's another topic.
Is there something inherently contradictory between "a government should collect taxes and provide police, roads, and schools", and "the government shouldn't be entrusted with the ability to print money and/or dictate monetary policy"?
BTW, in most if not all developed economies, the government don't control the monetary policies, the central banks do (and they are independent from governments, by design because people against government intervention made it this way).
If you are rich and have 1000 BTC in various wallets, able to avoid capital controls, etc... why would you pay the 45% biden cap gains? Thus society loses out and rich whales get to hodl
Tax evasion, in the individual style you describe, can be detected in lifestyle choices and consumer habits. Generally, the burden is on you to explain how you've been able to spend more than your official tax records report.
Thus it will increase the problem of people benefitting from society but not paying back into society. Taking resources that would never be able to grow in a vacuum.
It's also unknown what the future holds in regard to effective tracing capabilities, retroactively, by law enforcement and agencies.
My view is based on crypto and society ‘as is’ today. I would have to imagine a different society, with a radical adoption of crypto, to support your argument. But I would if that was the case.
How do they build/maintain power/network lines between villages, cities, satellite connections, underwater fiber routes?
Thus if everybody locks in their "wealth" with crypto, none of it would go to the commmons - these commons are used to run the crypto network.
Also, crypto wealth isn't 'Locked'. I can buy synthetic assets with my crypto with a guarantee that an equal amount of stock has been purchased. I can bond or trade my tokens for different cryptos to be developed that may have fecundity in supply chain, banking, pay for compute time, store, read and write to files, etc. None of that seems 'Locked' and if you think none of that goes to the commons than AWS, all the world banks, financial software, google and pretty much every other tech companies are 'locking wealth away'.
This seems a little non-obvious to me. Can you expand a bit on why?