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Comment by pjkundert | Hacker News Reader

This article is profoundly insightful.

I have been searching for patterns and insights in this field for 25 years. What apenwarr concludes is true:

    All we need is to build distributed systems that work. That means decentralized bulk activity, hierarchical regulation.

The problem is, everyone wants distributed systems that require everyone else to agree (global consensus), which is literally impossible (see: CAP theory, and what happens when Partition occurs). There's another word for "require everyone else to agree": Tyranny.

Fortunately, the entire universe and everything in it works without global consensus, just fine (for various definitions of "fine").

There is also methods for building computational distributed systems that work "fine" in the face of CAP failure:

https://holo.host

This is a serious breakthrough. And we really, really need this, NOW.

Just to whet your appetite, here's some high-level observations on how these breakthroughs may affect our lives, in the area of Money: https://perry.kundert.ca/range/finance/holochain-consistency...

View on HN

Incredible.

> There is of course the most obvious horrifically misguided recently-popular "decentralized" system, whose name shall not be spoken in this essay. Instead let's back up to something older and better understood: markets.

My reading was the author was referring here to cryptocurrencies and you read the article, claim it's profound, and then spruik an ERC-20 token.

I was like "This cannot be the top comment on HN". It is. Sigh.

I usually agree with you, regarding top posts on HN.

Usually I wonder how it is that uninteresting first-order effects dominate.

This is a chance for us all to consider something perhaps more profound.

The project was funded through an ICO a couple years ago; these will be exchangeable for the in-system HoloFuel cryptocurrency, when the project goes live.

Of course, the project isn’t associated with Ethereum in any way.

Look, I'm a fan of this, and thanks for sharing - hadn't heard of this project until today.

However claiming it's not associated with ethereum in any way, really? There's mention of an erc-20 token on the home page. Come on, man.

You know how ICOs are used to fund non-Ethereum projects, right?

> Tyranny

No. What he's saying is that there are 'distributed' aspects like two people deciding on a price for something. Not everyone has to agree on that price and that's fine! That's how markets work.

But we do need rules like if I give you money for something and then you tell me to get lost... that I have some recourse. Everyone needs to roughly agree to those rules.

It's a matter of how much we all have to agree to.

Agreeing to contract law is fine, for example.

It's possible to go too far. If you're going to use force to get people to do things they don't want to, you might be going too far. Naturally, there are such things that aren't tyranny: taxes for example. Even with taxes there are levels of taxation that are tyrannical. For example, a 100% property tax would be tyrannical.

People are going to disagree about where the boundary between tyranny and not-tyranny lies. If you have a very sizeable minority saying "this is tyranny", well, it probably is (but doesn't have to be).

The notion of "using force" to get someone to agree is interesting.

If someone wants to pay me $X for Y. Then you think there's force involved there somewhere? If is X is too large, is that force? If I'm very poor and will accept a really low X, is that force?

As long as you're free to say no, and as long as your poor circumstances aren't caused by the person or entity offering you $X for Y, then no, that's not force.

> But we do need rules like if I give you money for something and then you tell me to get lost...

That would be "larceny", and there are lots of rules prohibiting it & court systems to recoup damages. Credit card companies (for example) are just a more-rapid arbitration mechanism.

That's part of the point of the article. Those rules are not some kind of distributed system. They are centralized.

Larceny (small- or industrial-scale) can only exist if counterparties are kept ignorant of previous larceny on the part of the bad actor.

It takes centralized systems to keep people ignorant.

In good, decentralized systems which demand long-term public track records of agent behaviour, with decentralized memory of these records, malevolent behaviour by an agent would rapidly make that agent incapable of future larceny.

Much of the disappointment with government and their three-letter agencies, is the growing belief (and mounting evidence) of long-term, wide-spread larceny, mischief and even evil on the part of government agents -- with the knowledge, support and protection of the government.

It is critical to use systems that make bad behaviour impossible to hide.

This requires centralized RULES (ie. widely agreed-upon standards of behaviour), but decentralized KNOWLEDGE (large numbers of random actors, confirming that behaviours meet the standards).

> malevolent behaviour by an agent would rapidly make that agent incapable of future larceny.

This is a naïve claim which is disproved by all available evidence.

Markets without central regulation are always exploited by participants with more knowledge. Regulations are required to keep the playing field level.

> This requires centralized RULES (ie. widely agreed-upon standards of behaviour)

yes, or even clearer: the rules for any holochain app are visible/public.

whereas today we meet in Zuck's living room and he dictates what we can speak/do, using the holochain framework (an end-to-end, open source, P2P app framework) everyone holds a copy of the rules themselves and everyone does their own computing and storage. no more black-boxing of the rules/functions. no more straightjacketed client-server relationships.

wanna set up an app with your friends where you can tweet with 500 characters instead of 240? holochain has you covered. the magic of holochain is it's inbuilt forking functionality which makes repurposing and remixing (evolving) any kind of networked app super easy.

one more example to drive this home:

"What I want is to see Uber’s technology become a protocol. Same with Airbnb, same with Postmates, same with other companies in the gig and sharing economies. Same with lots of other important technology companies, while we’re at it. Obviously this can’t happen overnight, but if the technology is useful enough to provide real value, then it’s too useful to be subjugated to the whims of profit forever. I would love to see these technology platforms either fully decentralised, or centralised in such a way that the entity running it is not-for-profit and, ideally, accountable to all stakeholders. The actual mechanisms for making this work are beyond the scope of this post, but I want to throw this idea out there and get people thinking about it, because it’s the only way of making the future work for all of us.

I suspect — and feel free to call me naive, but I don’t think I’m wrong— that the majority of people working on Uber’s technology would prefer to build a system whose social impact they could be proud of. Based on my admittedly limited sample size of people I know in the tech industry, I feel like lots of people working at companies like Uber are there because they want to solve interesting technical challenges and deploy useful innovations in the world. I believe that if given the choice, most would prefer to build a system that makes the world a fairer and more equitable place. The problem is that this choice is, for the most part, withheld from them, and whatever individual intentions they may have are inevitably co-opted by the [current economic structure] in which they make their living. By working together to counteract these prevailing systematic forces, though, they may be able to open up a space in which to envision alternatives."

-- Wendy Liu, https://medium.com/@dellsystem/dont-put-your-faith-in-uber-7...

> people working on Uber’s technology would prefer to build a system whose social impact they could be proud of

the author omitted the part where those people would prefer to also keep the compensation they receive currently. And it is this constraint that prevents people from "building systems with great (positive) social impact that they can be proud of".

> the author omitted the part where those people would prefer to also keep the compensation they receive currently.

well yes, that's what happens when the means of production are privately owned: workers have to sell their labor.

Although in reality enforcement can be selective and vary by jurisdiction so it’s also decentralised in implementation.

True, but it doesn't make sense to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

From what I've seen being argued about proponents of defi (or smart contracts) is they operate on the premise that the centralized authority is the bad actor.

While this is true in some cases, it's not all cases, and despite it's flaws there is still a need for centralized authorities to arbitrate.

The issue with centralized authorities that has to be mitigated somehow is that, once they appear, they tend to accummulate more and more power, and inevitably become a bad actor eventually, even if originally they weren't intending to.

A decentralized approach to this is to have the hierarchy of authority organized bottom-up rather than top-down. The hierarchy can then be toppled by "pulling the rug" at the bottom-most layer when it becomes abusive. OTOH centralized hierarchies tend to fight this by promoting principles such as "democratic centralism" (where all decision making has to flow up before it flows back down, allowing to control it at the top).

> The issue with centralized authorities that has to be mitigated somehow is that, once they appear, they tend to accumulate more and more power, and inevitably become a bad actor eventually, even if originally they weren't intending to.

Which is why we have a democracy so that rulers don't have to worry about getting killed in a rebellion and people can choose a new ruler when corruption gets bad enough.

This of course means that corruption tends towards the highest people can tolerate. So if you see corrupt politicians it is because people tolerate it, if they wanted they could vote them out but people as a group don't care enough to actually do the work necessary to do so. However if corruption grew large enough as you fear then people would start caring and things would change rather quickly.

What we actually have is representative democracy, where the choice is often nominal, and leaders generally come from the same class in practice (and represent the interests of that class). So the fact that people don't "vote them out" is not an indication that they don't care enough - they might care but not have the choice that would reflect it.

It is also susceptible to "don't let the other guy win!" type of propaganda, especially in FPTP electoral systems like the American one. So long as you can find enough emotional wedge issues to ensure that your base will never even contemplate voting for "the other", you can basically do whatever the hell you want.

They can't do whatever they want. They can do more than you'd want them to be able to do, but they can't just take billions of dollars and put them in their own pockets. Company bribes makes every American politician a multi millionaire, sure, but if they could do what they wanted they would be multi billionaires like the rulers of Russia and China.

that's half true.

every actor in the system has its own ledger and they reconcile transactions at a given point in time.

you don't need to know what others are doing or who they are.

your bank authorize your transactions and then some other bank receives the order to deposit the money on another account they control.

in this sense banking is more decentralized than "one true ledger to rule them all"

I was referring to 'larceny' in my comment as being a centralized rule.

One person can hit another person over the head without any centralized authority being involved. So I don't think your claim is correct at all. Assuming if somebody breaks an agreement, you just hit them over the head with a stick.

Right but that gets into scaling problems and arguments... for a hundred people sticks might work, for a thousand it gets dicey, by 10,000 things start to break down as factionalism spontaneously emerges: within our tribe we handle things via social cohesion and weak displays of symbolic force, outside our tribe we handle things via stronger displays of retribution

Point is that "hit with a stick" happens to also centralize power, albeit dynamically, at scale.

If you're really looking for a counterexample to centralized institutions, a better metaphor is probably "ecosystem." No centralized authority tells the lions to be kings and queens of the savannah, their status as apex predators comes dynamically from some transform {biosphere} -> {biosphere} finding a natural fixed point which has stability simply from the abstract mathematics of fixed points. A similar dynamic stability exists in the US in the balance of power between Republicans and Democrats, no central authority says that there have to be only two parties, but rather the rules of the game state "we divide everything into districts and every race is run as winner-take-all" which naturally induces this 50/50 two-party split that will destroy the country eventually

I guess you could argue the set of laws is the central authority that produces a two-party system, even though it may not have been intentional. Presumably you could adjust the laws so that other constellations would emerge.

Also why do people have to live in societies of millions of individuals? Perhaps smaller units would be better. To some degree that is already what happens, as for example villages can decide some things for themselves. The question is just who should get to decide what.

>Assuming if somebody breaks an agreement, you just hit them over the head with a stick.

If this is possible, then it is equally possible to just hit anyone you please with stick so that they are forced to do what you want.

Which means, the most violent eager person gets to rule. Which is what people who prefer court system don't want.

If you just hit people with sticks, they are bound to hit back. I don't understand your example.

I know several people that it would be VERY unwise for almost anyone to attempt to hit them with sticks. Do they get to do larceny as much as they want in this system?

No, because in this perfectly rational world a bunch of weaker humans would inevitably band together to overcome the stronger stick man.

This is exactly how things would go, which is why in human history warlords have never been a thing, and violent, oppressive men have never built empires.

> inevitably band together to overcome the stronger stick man.

and produce the court-based system we see today, with enforcement of the stick centralized to an authority that everyone agreed to (implicitly).

Except there are still warlords, and drug cartels. And police beating black fellows more often than the average.

https://www.thesouthafrican.com/news/africas-top-10-dictator...

You need commanders for war.

Weaker humans usually sit through decimation until the guards come for them. Then they squeal for help. It is also rational. Consider that if you stand agaisnt the stronger enemy, the enemy might come back later with reinforcements and kill you.

Edit: I remembered what the Bible says happened to jews. The egyptians killed the jew children to keep the population in check, before exodus. And shortly after Jesus was born, Herod probably did the same.

> Assuming if somebody breaks an agreement, you just hit them over the head with a stick.

But that's not a society any of us want to live in.

I didn't say you should run society like that. I only provided an example to prove that centralized control is not necessary to enforce rules.

Typically people form groups that enforce certain rules. You can have bigger and smaller groups. Some big countries are very centralized, others less so - I think federalization in the US serves to counteract centralization? Ideally people have some degree of freedom to switch to groups whose rules align with their own preferences.

It is not an all or nothing, there can be degrees of centralization and decentralization.

Of course we can not escape the laws of nature in the end.

Centralized authority is definitely necessary to enforce rules in any practical sense.

> https://holo.host

> HoloToken (HOT) is an ERC-20 token

I'm not sure a hierarchy in which the Ethereum Foundation, who gave themselves the absolute majority of Ether currency, is at the top, is the answer to the struggles/issues postulated in the essay.

I'm pretty sure anything running on the mainnet these days will be 10x more expensive than a classic centralized option just with gas fees and is as such completely useless.

Yep there is so much overhead to making things decentralized. Take a look at filecoin sealing. Its a super cool system with a bunch of fun cryptography and math, but generating the proofs requires a lot of time and compute power and adds a whole bunch of restrictions to how you can upload data.

If you really, really, want to say your storage is decentralized, use it, but S3 is a 1000x simpler.

https://spec.filecoin.io/systems/filecoin_mining/sector/seal... https://docs.filecoin.io/mine/hardware-requirements/

Also:

- Economy of scale means this won't be "AirBnB for hosting". I can't negotiate power costs or get as much efficiency out of my operations as someone with a real datacenter. Not even close. [EDIT: see also, Bitcoin mining, which started out "anyone can do it!" but wasn't anymore as soon as real money got involved. Just buy an expensive rack of ASICs that aren't good for anything else, and find some place to arbitrage power costs. Yeah, real accessible to the masses, that is.]

- All these "decentralize everything down to the end user" efforts neglect that most personal computing devices run on battery and sleep most of the time, these days, and that trend does not seem likely to reverse. See also: IPFS. Most folks don't have an always-on desktop- or server-class computer for this sort of thing, at all, and would have to buy one to participate. That's not super appealing. Also, decentralization tends to come at costs for routing and lookup, which often end up eating cycles (so, power, so, battery) on the end user's machine, compared with centralized options. See again: IPFS. So they end up adding centralized access points that are what most users actually interact with (see, yet again...) or their entire audience is computer nerds. If they have any real, viable use case, it ends up being as part of a centralized system, to help make it more resilient or cheaper to operate.

Just to make a point, it's fine if something's audience is entirely composed of computer nerds or academics at first. After refinement it can gradually make its way into consumer world; e.g., the internet, the most successful distributed system.

What makes you think Ethereum Foundation gave themselves the majority of Ether? I'm pretty sure it was 15% but I might be wrong

https://etherscan.io/stat/supply

72 million Ether were premined

Out of which 12 millions went to the Ethereum foundation. The other 60 millions were given to people who crowdfunded the project (and they did it using BTC). The ETH supply has more or less doubled since now. The Ethereum foundation holds today about 10% of all Ethereum and as far as I know they are "locked" in a smart contract.

One can criticize Ethereum and crypto as much as he wants, Vitalik Buterin (the creator of Ethereum) seems someone to be driven by something he believes in and not by money. If you read his blog posts / Twitter feed / comments on issues / EIP etc. the dude is relentless.

The EF only received 3.5 million ETH initially:

https://i.ibb.co/54sS0NY/FFi-K9m-CVg-AETZNA-format-png-name-...

It holds 350K ETH at this point, or 0.3% of the ETH supply:

https://etherscan.io/address/0xde0b295669a9fd93d5f28d9ec85e4...

Ethereum Foundation had at most 6 percent of tokens, and today has less than 0.3 percent, because it liquidated the vast majority to fund various software projects that made the Ethereum network possible.

Nope, Holo / Holochain has nothing to do with Ethereum; HOT is just the place-holder token (issued during the ICO used to fund the project, initially, a couple of years ago).

When the project goes live, it will be exchangeable for the initial HoloFuel cryptocurrency.

> This article is profoundly insightful.

How about adding a "not" to that and trying it on for size? Is it really profound?

> There is also methods for building computational distributed systems that work "fine" in the face of CAP failure: https://holo.host -This is a serious breakthrough. And we really, really need this, NOW.

Umm.. do we? Is this .. OK, forgive me, I've been penalty boxed for the first time in the last week, and should word this carefully, but.. my skeptical meter is on stun. Is this 'shilling' which is regrettably common in cryptocurrency conversations?

Well, if "excited" and "shilling" are synonyms, then maybe! ;)

But seriously, I spent significant effort over 25 years trying to solve some of the cooperation and communications problems in distributed systems. I'd deployed a cryptocurrency before Bitcoin came out in 2009; foolishly, I downloaded the system and found it hadn't solved these problems, so didn't run it (:/)

So, when I ran into Holochain a few years back, and began to understand what they had accomplished (in theory, at the time), I dropped everything I was doing and went full time on the project. Built the first 2 prototypes of HoloFuel.

Building planetary-scale (or even inter-planetary) distributed systems that can maintain consistency in the face of partitioning or massive latency while maintaining aggregate transaction rates almost linear with node count is now possible.

So, ya -- I think these insights and their successful implementation is "profound". Like, never been done before, and everyone thought it was impossible "profound".

You may have a much higher level of expectation. To me, that would be a lot like watching Free Solo while sucking on a soda, and saying "ya, that's not that impressive".

Enthusiasm is good. CAP isn't going away.

> everyone wants distributed systems that require everyone else to agree (global consensus)

Not really, Secure Scuttlebutt is highly subjective and has been in use for a while. ( https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/ )

Some spinoffs adopt that explicit subjectivity of each user.

"There's another word for "require everyone else to agree": Tyranny."

I think this is often thrown out there to push back on liberals and socialism but this is the wrong point. We as a global society _need_ to agree to be productive. We need to work together to find the best solutions for as many people as possible.

Everyone needs to agree that starting a nuclear war is bad. You would likely want to stop China from shooting nuclear missiles at San Francisco. Yet I doubt that when you insist on this narrative, you would think of yourself as being tyrannical.

One of the best observations about why people in urban areas are more liberal, and rural areas are more conservative, has to do with the idea that when you are around more people, you need more rules to guide how to interact with one another. When you live on your own 200 acre farm, you don't want someone to come in and tell you what to do with your tree. When you live in a 200 person apartment complex, you do care when your neighbors are being loud at 2am.

With technology, we are living closer and closer with each other. I don't know how you are going to be productive without consensus.

> Everyone needs to agree that starting a nuclear war is bad. You would likely want to stop China from shooting nuclear missiles at San Francisco. Yet I doubt that when you insist on this narrative, you would think of yourself as being tyrannical.

Extreme examples work, because you can actually count on the people reading your comment to agree with you. But you can't extrapolate towards less universally held examples that you happen to believe in; someone who requires everyone to agree about what's done with trees on your own property could well be considered tyrranical.

> One of the best observations about why people in urban areas are more liberal, and rural areas are more conservative, has to do with the idea that when you are around more people, you need more rules to guide how to interact with one another.

That's a cool observation that I'll keep in mind. However, in my experience, it's not been the primary reason. Rather, it has seemed to me that rural folks live closer to nature than urban folks, and have often had firsthand experience that mother nature tends to be nasty and brutish (or just check out r/natureismetal). That's an experience which tends to create what they would consider (IMHO) a much more pragmatic idea of what it takes to survive in the world.

> Rather, it has seemed to me that rural folks live closer to nature than urban folks, and have often had firsthand experience that mother nature tends to be nasty and brutish.

That's an interesting interpretation. To me, what's more nasty and brutish than a fellow man? I always thought the divide was explained by how in the country everyone knows everyone and have repeated interactions with the same people. It's prisoners dilemma, but the game doesn't end. Who needs rules when you can all punish somebody for an offense (like being gay)?

> Who needs rules when you can all punish somebody for an offense (like being gay)?

That's a...fairly prejudiced generalization you've made there.

Yeah, well...

1) At least they didn't choose that very word for their user id.

2) Old proverb about echoes: "As you call into the woods, so they answer back". All you've written so far sums up to pretty much exactly that generalisation.

>That's a cool observation that I'll keep in mind. However, in my experience, it's not been the primary reason. Rather, it has seemed to me that rural folks live closer to nature than urban folks, and have often had firsthand experience that mother nature tends to be nasty and brutish (or just check out r/natureismetal). That's an experience which tends to create what they would consider (IMHO) a much more pragmatic idea of what it takes to survive in the world.

My experience, having come from Appalachian stock and escaping to New York City, is that urbanites are more open to new experiences and ideas, they see different people and slices of their culture all the time. They are more likely to go to college, further increasing their experience of new ideas.

Rural folk are insulated from the world outside the area they live in. They're mired in conservatism and the past. They suffer from brain drain because most people, once they've been exposed to fresh ideas and people via college, tend to become more "worldly" and don't necessarily want to return to their one stop sign town with its extremely limited social life, culture, and job prospects. They often never master their fear of the other, because they see everyone who is not them AS the other.

I see it more as idealism vs pragmatism. We need both. I think older people tend to be conservative because they've become jaded by idealists and/or politics in general. To many, conservatism is that government and politics screw everything up, so we need less of it.

"someone who requires everyone to agree about what's done with trees on your own property could well be considered tyrranical."

100% agree with the example of someone's tree on their 200 acre farm. However, if I have a dying tree that's a risk to falling on my neighbor's house, it would far less tyrannical for the neighbor to force me to remove the tree through the government. Proximity to others plays a big role.

> it would far less tyrannical for the neighbor to force me to remove the tree through the government

The neighbor wouldn't be the tyrannical one. And, there's better solutions - put the liability for the tree on the person whose property it's on. That's a fair assignment of responsibility. I do think it would be tyrannical for the government to declare that all trees must be removed if they meet certain criteria.

Liability is a good deterrent in many situations but is far inferior to cooperation. Let's take an extreme example: the death of a child by a irresponsible corporation. Even with generous compensation, the family will not be made whole with the loss of a child's life.

Going back to the tree example, if a tree were to fall on the house, even if all the repairs were paid for by the tree owner, the loss in time and inconvenience will not be offset. There is also the chance that something personal is damaged and no amount of money can replace it. It is better if the tree never falls on the house in the first place.

Why is liability -- which can only kick in after some damage has been done, possibly displacing someone from their home -- a better solution than a process by which dying/dead trees can be compelled to be removed?

This sounds like the usual libertarian answer to things like "eliminate government food safety inspection"; the idea being that the market would eventually reflect that some restaurants regularly sicken people and would then go out of business. Why is it better to let people be sickened, even if they can later sue, than put some stops up on risky behavior in the first place?

For both tree hazards and food safety, it's not a surprise when something is risky, even if you can't predict exactly when someone will have their house smashed by a falling tree. Why wait for the damage to be done?

> Why is it better to let people be sickened, even if they can later sue, than put some stops up on risky behavior in the first place?

Consequentialist reason: you don't put barriers and friction in front of (e.g.) biotech and drug innovation. See the pandemic for this (FDA has killed approximately a million people alone by preventing covid vaccines from being available in the market sooner).

Deontological reason: you don't have the right to tell people what they can and can't do with their own bodies (w.r.t. products they want to consume, at their own risk, etc).

There's also regulatory capture, which reliably and predictably occurs in mixed economies (see e.g. public choice economics).

> FDA has killed approximately a million people alone by preventing covid vaccines from being available in the market sooner

This does not seem like a reasonable conclusion.

In a counter-factual where (presumably) the FDA doesn’t regulate much, we don’t have any idea how many harmful drugs consumers would have been exposed to and the damage this would result in.

Nor do we know how many folks would have died of Covid after believing they were protected by whatever ineffective drugs or vaccines.

Nor do we know how many more people would refuse to take effective vaccines due to lack of confidence in them, which is a huge problem even with the current level of vetting.

Who "puts liability on" someone and who enforces the ownership of property in your example, without being the same tyranny you are trying to avoid?

Tree falls on house, tree owner doesn't want to pay their liability, what happens?

> Rather, it has seemed to me that rural folks live closer to nature than urban folks, and have often had firsthand experience that mother nature tends to be nasty and brutish

WTF does that have to do with anything? The vast majority of humanity doesn't, as you so astutely observed, live anywhere near nature. So nature being "nasty and brutish" is absolutely irrelevant to most people. This deep insight you seem to think rural people have is not so much insight as delusion.

> That's an experience which tends to create what they would consider (IMHO) a much more pragmatic idea of what it takes to survive in the world.

Sure, if you're a Real Outdoorsman™ you have a better chance of surviving being plonked down naked and alone in the middle of the jungle. But who lives in a world where that's relevant in any way? (A: Conservatives, in their fantasy world.)

I disagree with the premise here. China doesn't need to agree that shooting nukes at San Fran is bad, they just need to agree that shooting nukes at San Fran is going to cost them Shanghai. That's more like markets and prices than it is appealing to a centralized hierarchy.

This might be true, but if you look at the state of LA, San Fran, Chicago's South Side, Detroit and Baltimore, it's tough to say all those extra rules have kept them stable and prosperous. I'm not saying the answer is necessarily "tear it all down and go DeFi", but it's pretty clear that on a long enough timeline, the regulation fails to punish the bad actors and actually restricts the good actors from fixing problems independently.

"That's more like markets and prices than it is appealing to a centralized hierarchy."

My thought process is more like a well regulated market than it is a king of the world. A market requires consensus. With your point about Shanghai, the consensus here is that nuclear war will ensure mutual destruction.

"it's pretty clear that on a long enough timeline, the regulation fails to punish the bad actors and actually restricts the good actors from fixing problems independently. "

Large cities have existed throughout history under all sorts of governance and regulations and they continue to thrive. The downfall of a city is more correlated with economic perils than lawlessness. Even with all the crime and homelessness in San Francisco, I'm willing to bet anyone that for 2021, San Francisco will have one of the highest GDPs per capita in the world. Urban centers will continue to require consensus through governance to be productive.

> I don't know how you are going to be productive without consensus.

At the risk of pedantry (but in this case I think warranted): consensus literally means every single person agrees.

This is as opposed to something like democratic rule, where rules can be made and enforced even if not every single person involved agrees.

I think OP is using the precise (non-colloquial) definition of "consensus" and rightly points out how unworkable that is as a governing principle. You can't get a small room of people to agree on what's good for lunch, much less matters of actual controversy.

In a precisely-consensus-driven system you'd never be able to shut your neighbor up at 2am, since definitionally at least one person involved thinks the behavior is ok.

Where do you get this definition? Wiktionary just talks about widespread agreement, not unanimous agreement: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/consensus

To be fair, I've heard it used (presumably) the same way, but I understood this to be a type of consensus that relies on an agreement by all.

From the wikipedia definition on consensus-based decision-making:

> The focus on establishing agreement of the supermajority and avoiding unproductive opinion, differentiates consensus from unanimity, which requires all participants to support a decision.

There are differing definitions but maybe the wiggle room is in the use of "agreement" vs "acceptance".

As I see it, for humans usually consensus on a topic is:

majority agree

minority disagree...

but in lieu of anything better being accepted by the group, they accept a perceived suboptimal outcome for the sake of getting a beneficial outcome at all. IE it's not great, but it's good enough.

In order to prevent a nuclear war, you need consensus. Anything less than 100% buy-in is insufficient.

Going back to the neighbor example, someone being loud at 2am is a lack of consensus. In order to be productive as a group, you need consensus to be quiet when people are sleeping.

You can certainly get a small room of people to agree on what's good for lunch, if the premise is that there's no lunch at all until they agree on what to have. There will be some compromising involved, so not everybody might get the dish that is their first choice, but the more important thing is that nobody gets something that they hate.

That aside, consensus always has a particular domain of applicability, and by decentralizing, you make that domain smaller - and thus make consensus easier. Federation can be used to replicate this process on as many layers as needed for decentralized organization of larger societies.

A solution is cultural:

Invite people to abandon their preferences and then organize those people so they show the world how many more needs it meets than not doing it. In particular, abandoning preferences allows the need for not to get met more easily.

> more important thing is that nobody gets something that they hate.

but what if there's only a limited set of choices, and at least one person in the group would hate one of the available choices? What then?

Then you split the group.

I studied physics and the agreement I think we need is that we are literally a super-organism about to ensure its own destruction. I hate to use the term mass consciousness or whatever but it's really irresponsible to me how people are still arguing between flavors of ideologies that push us towards being more individualistic.

Reminds me of this: http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconsci...

Woah cool! Thanks for sharing, this actually reminds me of this quote:

The essence of money is … the mediating activity or movement, the human, social act by which man’s products mutually complement one another, is estranged from man and becomes the attribute of money, a material thing outside man. Since man alienates this mediating activity itself, he is active here only as a man who has lost himself and is dehumanised; the relation itself between things, man’s operation with them, becomes the operation of an entity outside man and above man. Owing to this alien mediator – instead of man himself being the mediator for man – man regards his will, his activity and his relation to other men as a power independent of him and them. His slavery, therefore, reaches its peak. It is clear that this mediator now becomes a real God, for the mediator is the real power over what it mediates to me. Its cult becomes an end in itself. - Karl Marx

I would argue that pretty much the opposite is true: I don't know how we can be productive without breaking consensus.

All innovation comes from individuals or small groups going against the accepted dogma, and risking their own resources and reputation to do something almost everyone else thinks is stupid.

I've never seen anyone else define conservative vs liberals like that. Conservatives aren't against rules, they are against changing rules.

Why are conservatives against abortion, gay marriage and drug legalisation if they don't want to be told what they can do on their "own 200 acre farm". All those issues are about enforcing a worldview on others.

This is the general perspective on conservatives and I agree with the sentiment. If you extrapolate this out, people who live happily in rural areas do not want someone (government) to tell them about new changes. Small government and less regulation is a big part of their ethos.

"All those issues are about enforcing a worldview on others."

This seems to apply to everyone involved. Liberals want to impose their worldview on others just as much as conservatives. I think that's ok. We all want to pursue what is best.

> Conservatives aren't against rules, they are against changing rules.

That doesn’t ring true to me. Both liberals and conservatives want to change and preserve rules according to their viewpoints.

Conservatives want to change rules to get back to their view of what was good about the past. Liberals want to change the rules according to their view of what should be good about the future.

"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect"

https://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/12/frank-wilhoit-the-tr...

This seems like a bizarre definition. As someone who would accept a label of "conservative", and growing up and living in a world of mostly "conservative" people, I struggle to think of a single such person who wouldn't be appalled to find out they they were living under a single such law, let alone many such laws.

Could you be so kind as to identify even a single instance of such a law?

It's possible to craft laws that don't explicitly fail to bind one group, but do in practice. Other times, it's more explicit.

A recent example of the former would be some of the voting security laws that have been popular lately. A recent example of the latter would be disparities in crack vs. cocaine sentencing (I think this is no longer the case? God, I hope not. But was not that long ago) and that's just the de jure part—in all cases, the de facto enforcement is what matters.

Historical examples abound, obviously.

[EDIT] another example is mentioned by someone else in this thread, as abortion laws, but it's worth noting why those are an example: the rich never have trouble obtaining abortions, and there's a history of pro-life advocates doing so when they "need" to, for themselves or for family members (I'm sure their case is different, of course eyeroll). In fact a major factor in the Republican legislature of New York passing early abortion rights laws was precisely this disparity, which was that anti-abortion laws in effect only existed for the poor.

Nearly any instance of a cop interacting with a black man compared to interacting with a white man.

The law isn’t like to explicitly favor one group over another, but the the systems of law have shown they do favor one group over another.

"The law" in gp's quote is not referring to codified (abstract) laws, but rather their application in reality. To wit: we refer to police officers as "the law" because they represent, and wield, the law, and in the moment it doesn't matter what the codes say, the living breathing officer ("of the law") takes precedence.

That is not the definition or description of "conservativism". That is a strawman.

You need to broaden your view from American political culture. Conservatives exist in many different types of governments and many different cultures. This explanation makes no sense.

The rules on abortion have been around for decades.

Conservatives seemed pretty dead-set on changing them.

Pretty sure it goes deeper than that.

Regarding specifically socialism, there was something about this article that immediately jumped out at me from being familiar with online leftist spaces.

Each of the first six bullet points, as well as the last one, sound exactly like the kinds of things that I see leftists bringing up as the inevitable result of "late stage capitalism". The author even sort of admits this:

> Capitalism has become a "success disaster."

It's therefore fascinating to see someone take all those exact points and conclude that these problems are not, in fact, natural consequences of the values and incentive structures of capitalism, but rather the result of just not doing capitalism the right way. We should instead be rebuilding things collectively in a decentralized to achieve the "dreams of capitalism" which we've strayed from.

The author is this close to retreading the philosophy traditional left-anarchism from an entirely different angle.

what's wrong with socialism? in the early days the internet was mostly a fully distributed communist space. the physical internet structure itself is still distributed/communist. it was the Silicon Valley venture capitalist client-server model that enclosed the web and killed it's potential (until now).

i love the Telekommunist Manifesto by Dmytri Kleiner for it's fantastic and concise material analysis of the web, specifically the chapter Peer-to-Peer Communism vs. the Client Server State: http://media.telekommunisten.net/manifesto.pdf

video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YEzHDxn5nY

I wasn't conscious until the early 2000s, so forgive me if my comment conflicts with any firsthand knowledge you may have. My guess is that those in those early days, the internet was a frontier less concerned with extraction of value because it much less clear how to do that versus today. The internet was probably going to play out roughly how it is now no matter what happened once you got enough people on it, overwhelming those who valued the open culture and structure which came before.

Regarding socialism/communism as you used the word, I personally don't think it is a good system to apply to the total breath and depth of society in the real world, but it seems to me when the internet was in its infancy and on a plane of existence almost entirely apart from the real world, it's easier to be communist. Having a terrible time on the internet probably meant you just lost a bit of time, productivity (esp. if you were one of the early users/academics/professionals which found utility in it before the masses), and a few cents of electricity. Now, everything I care about in real life such as my bank account, social reputation, work, and so on can be connected to, accessed, improved, or destroyed on through the internet in some way. It's made a lot of things more convenient, but there's a lot of power to be had and space for chaos to be sown. The stakes of real life have spilled over and with it all the internal and external problems socialism/communism has to contend with in the real world.

> when the internet was in its infancy and on a plane of existence almost entirely apart from the real world

> there's a lot of power to be had and space for chaos to be sown

i'm seriously not sure if this is a GPT-3 generated response used to waste my time... lol

I think it's rather disingenuous to complain about vague and un-named "internal and external problems socialism/communism has to contend with in the real world" in a thread about explicitly enumerated problems that capitalism has directly led to.

The internet didn't become capitalist because socialism is inherently bad. The internet became capitalist be we live in a society run by capitalists and they realized they could exploit it.

> What's wrong with socialism?

Nothing, in principal. I happen to be in favor of it. But I try not to phrase that more neutrally in a forum run explicitly by and implicitly for capital-c Capitalists.

true, there are subtler ways!

I love your last sentence here - so well stated.

You're conflating Western leftism with liberalism. Wikipedia defines liberalism as "a political and moral philosophy based on liberty, consent of the governed and equality before the law." [1]. Liberals are interested in individual rights and often are opposed to collectivist ideas such as those espoused by state socialists. Your position on global consensus is a more collectivist perspective, not necessarily a liberal perspective.

> We as a global society _need_ to agree to be productive. We need to work together to find the best solutions for as many people as possible.

I'm not sure how familiar you are with the history, but the process of forming a government is often _very difficult_. Even forming governments in relatively small geographic areas is difficult; Europe went through centuries of warfare before it settled on its current set of governments. The aftermath of colonialism has created terrible tensions in Africa and the Middle East which is making it terribly difficult for governments to form in those regions.

What you're asking for, to agree on broad sets of things to be productive, is essentially to form some form of limited government across the world. We're not even close. The UN routinely makes resolutions that are ignored by member states. Many countries still oppose the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I highly suggest you spend some time reading about, and if possible or safe, traveling in parts of the world with very different cultures than your own (again if it's safe, which can be challenging for certain demographics :( ). There's a lot of diversity in human thought.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism

> I think this is often thrown out there to push back on liberals and socialism but this is the wrong point. We as a global society _need_ to agree to be productive.

And when someone tells you "no", how do you respond?

You have three basic options:

1. Submit (but you can't submit to everyone saying no)

2. Take your toys and go home (but then your group will forever shrink)

3. Force people to say yes

The only good answer is (2) but that means some systems are simply untenable if they require universal decentralization.

4. "How about we have a conversation, perhaps if we think about it we can find a compromise that works out for both of us?" Note also that such conversations can even be had that don't involve the disagreeable party (if they're that difficult), but if they are of high enough quality and visibility (such that they can get public momentum) they can change the person's mind based on them seeing which way the wind is blowing.

5. Something neither of us have thought of.

4 is just 1. Compromise inherently involves both parties giving something up. That only works for up to N parties. You can't achieve stable compromise with everyone ever because you have parties that are not rectifiable.

You could also read 4 as an example of 3. If you are going to force someone to say yes by social pressure or threatening to burn down their house, that's still authoritarian.

> 4 is just 1. Compromise inherently involves both parties giving something up.

Submission and compromise may be similar in many cases, but they are not the same.

> That only works for up to N parties.

In the cases where it only works for N parties (which can vary wildly depending on the situation), agreed.

> You can't achieve stable compromise with everyone ever because you have parties that are not rectifiable.

That which is impossible is indeed impossible. However, that which is predicted does not always turn out so.

> You could also read 4 as an example of 3.

If you aren't concerned about accuracy, I suppose.

> If you are going to force someone to say yes by social pressure or threatening to burn down their house, that's still authoritarian.

Depends which meaning of the word you're using, this is the first hit on Google:

authoritarian: favoring or enforcing strict obedience to authority, especially that of the government, at the expense of personal freedom.

That which is may be that which is not, unless it is and your senses don't deceive you, and no evil genie is in play, and then it probably is unless you're trapped in a simulation.

But you can't solve everything with consensus, and you're welcome to play word games but forcing people is not "consent".

> That which is may be that which is not, unless it is and your senses don't deceive you, and no evil genie is in play, and then it probably is unless you're trapped in a simulation.

Very nice!

Can you give an example where "That which is may be that which is not" (with or without the "unless it is" part)?

And considering this idea: do any conclusions or interesting ideas logically follow from it with respect to our preceding conversation? I'm not seeing any, but the odds of my senses deceiving me seems high.

> But you can't solve everything with consensus...

Right you are, hence my lack of making that assertion.

> ...and you're welcome to play word games...

As you are welcome to engage in evasion and rhetoric.

> ...but forcing people is not "consent".

Right again, and I've made no assertion that it is.

This is a fun conversation, I hope we can continue it - perhaps we can drill down and determine where it is that you and I disagree (assuming we actually do).

I agree. I dont think all systems require consensus and its likely most things do not. When it comes to things that optimizes for survival, it is likely we will need consensus to be productive.

Consensus only need to happen when we are close to one another. Technology has the side effect of bringing us closer together.

I don't think technology has to bring us closer together.

I agree with you that the current default state is bringing everyone into the same sphere. I don't believe that is actually what we want.

I don't want to listen to every Bob's or Mary's political opinion or outrage take. I'm happy debating with a small group that has agreed upon rules (and excludes people who don't follow those rules). Likewise, there are plenty of political discussion groups that want to exclude me because I don't agree with their rules.

Technology should work to make small, discrete groups able to form while ignoring physical proximity.

What is the pattern in common among all industries politics governments and culture? The article proposes these things are all interrelated but doesn't make the connections among them.

Also for going to identify the pattern we need to have a common frame of reference. The facts have to be indisputable.

>Everyone seems to increasingly be in it for themselves

Everyone? This sort of hyperbole makes it difficult to identify patterns. We have more examples today of public benefit corporations than 10 50 or 100 years ago.

Maybe it's subjective or arbitrary, but let's say at 1 billion dollar valuation a corporation must by law become a public benefit corporation. Do we always need to have regulatory regimes compel corporations to comply with civil or social good? We know about regulatory capture. So we know a regulatory regime doesn't always work. Sure, it works better than outright feudalism.

Is there such a thing as the proper range for wealth inequality? I don't know that we even know the answer to that question of let alone what that range would be or how to maintain that range in a civil way.

The innovation of the United States of America at its founding, was its distribution of power. Forming a polyarchy instead of a monarchy. Of course, it's a biased distribution. Not everyone gets power. But the idea is that centralized power leads to corruption. And creating a competitive environment for ambition, reduces the chances not for corruption, but totalitarianism.

But I wonder if democracies have optimized as far as they can.

Yes, the original US idea was that of a central government that had very restricted power, and a bunch of states that could reach different decisions within that framework. And that the people being governed had more influence over what the state did than over what the country did, so the state was more responsive to the peoples' needs, wants, and desires.

I would argue that over the years, we have moved away from that. We now have a much more powerful national government, that is more ruler over the states. And I think in doing so, we have gained some things, but we have also lost some things.

I think there is merit to the idea of a multi-level hierarchy, where the higher levels have more restricted areas of power, but are also harder to change. But there's one other piece that's needed: Mobility between lower-level domains. If I don't like what California's doing, I can move to Texas, and we need similar things (hopefully easier than physically moving) in other systems.

>But I wonder if democracies have optimized as far as they can.

If you dig your powdered wig out of the closet and look back at the founding of the united States of America, their big idea is still pretty good. The article makes this point, obliquely:

>All we need is to build distributed systems that work. That means decentralized bulk activity, hierarchical regulation.

Having the Big Nationwide Things happen at the federal level, and the Not Quite As Big Local Things happen at the State level was a fine idea. You can't get Tennessee and North Carolina to agree on BBQ; do you really think they're going to have the same ideas on social issues, or how to handle them? It's all well and good to have nationwide building codes, but even that falls apart rather quickly. You don't build the same way in California as you would on the Gulf Coast.

Cramming everything into the federal purview wheelhouse is great if you're in NYC or LA, and you can't stand that some people in Nebraska or Alabama disagree with you.

Paul Frazee (of Beaker Browser) had a thread that got some good reach on distributed without consensus (but often some ability to see people break their contracts). Holo did come up. :)

> Maybe it’s time to dig into the non-blockchain smart contract idea that’s been floating around for a while. Drop the PoW and transaction fees, but maintain the trustless verification and open data/code

https://twitter.com/pfrazee/status/1462491070244208640

As for the 1000 years post being great- in general Avery Pennarum is a world treasure. Great ability to surface ideas & through & make situations legibile. Another very fine example. The "state my assumptions" lead in is divine all on it's own.

One key observation leading to Holochain, is that the systematic breaking of the assumptions of a "Smart Contract" (the shared DNA code, in Holochain terms) is a valid form of agreement.

If some group wants to lie and pick each-others pockets: well, OK, carry on. Just let me know about it, and not take part in it. It's not the end of the world.

The fact that holo introduces a shitcoin when any payment channel (lightning, some USD service, etc) would work means I'm not going to take it seriously.

A cryptocurrency that will continue to work reliably and without a bound on aggregate transaction rate in the face of network Partitioning is … a “shitcoin”?

Point is if you solved a problem, you can sell the solution for USD

Attaching a solution to a cryptocurrency comes off as just wanting to sell tokens, not sell the solution.

> Attaching a solution to a cryptocurrency comes off as just wanting to sell tokens, not sell the solution.

well yeah it's not ideal, yet the holochain foundation does all their work in the open and have to fund their development somehow (https://github.com/holochain/holochain). better doing an ethical ico-like crowdsourcing (based on a unit of computing power, like Airbnb but for processing power) than strapping into the chains of Venture Capital.

most important though is that the main framework created by the Holochain team is fully open source (linked above). so using the Holo host system is optional. it is meant as a way to enable easy onboarding of new users for new Holochain apps. Holo's distributed web of nodes help non-technical users use Holochain apps without being technically literate enough. so Holo users like my mom will be comfortable using Holochain apps that look like client-server apps, until we as a society transition to fully p2p apps, and the ecosystem as a whole matures to a point where we no longer need this 'bridge'.

also cool is that, inspired by LETS and similar systems, the holochain framework allows easy deployment of mutual credit currencies [1]. imo the most exciting implementation of this is the Resources Events Agents (REA) accounting by http://mikorizal.org led by, amongst others, two retired software engineers. you can check out their project http://valueflo.ws. there is another project not building on Holochain, but using the Valueflo.ws ontology/vocabulary called bonfire: https://github.com/bonfire-networks/bonfire_valueflows (main website: https://bonfirenetworks.org/)

anyways, before dismissing this project because of preconceived notions about the cryptocurrencies (which i agree are 99.999999% shitcoins), please read through their awesome developer docs: https://developer.holochain.org/

think of Holochain like a Ruby on Rails framework, but for distributed applications instead of client-server: https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati...

[1] https://medium.com/holochain/beyond-blockchain-simple-scalab...

There's no such thing as an ethical ICO.

Raising funds for an interesting project, from free agents willing to fund the project, is never ethical?

Are you certain of this?

true. i wish they'd called it crowdfunding. they sold credits for a mutual credit currency that is very different to centrally issued credit.

Is it a hosting marketplace or did they also secretly break the CAP theorem and forget to mention it on the front page?

Yes, it's a shitcoin. If I saw someone inventing a P2P hosting marketplace and not trying to pump a shitcoin on the side, I would take it more seriously.

Yes

> That means decentralized bulk activity, hierarchical regulation.

Interestingly, he also mentions that central economic planning doesn't work (although I am not so sure I completely agree with that thesis), but this sounds very similar to Cybersyn's design.

Central panning doesn't scale because of limits to economic knowledge and calculation. You can't possibly know enough about what everyone needs or wants in an economy. Even if you did, calculating resource allocation based on that is NP.

People constantly forget that large multinationals like Amazon are bigger that many countries, are purely authoritarian structures and work as 100% centralized economies.

> Central panning doesn't scale

On the contrary, it scaled pretty well in China and in Soviet Russia, leading to the two cases of the fastest economical growth on the planet. The problem is not scalability.

The problem is that dictatorships (both countries and private companies) exist to benefit those in power. When push comes to shove everybody else is expendable.

Take Walmart as an example. If a country, it would rank 25th economically (above 188 other countries and the likes of Austria, Argentina, Norway, Ireland, and South Africa).[1] Walmartian central planning scales at least that far.

1. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3524078

Nobody is claiming the central planning doesn't produce value - i think the language is ambiguous as to the meaning of "doesn't work".

Central planning fails to give the little people what they want. Walmart's central planning is to ensure the profits continue to flow up to the share holders. The workers are expendable, and get a bare minimum the profits (as wages).

Central planning in a communist regime is exactly the same - it enriches the regime, at the expense of the people.

Central planning is the ultimate version of monopoly. It is what happens when a single company owns the entire country and no longer has to compete for anything. It is the only employer and the seller of goods, for every good. They banned the import of other goods, so they are all you get. Also they make the laws, so you can't even protest without having tanks moving you down.

"I really hate these corporate overlords, what can we do to fix it? I know, what about giving the corporate overlords all the power in the entire country? Yeah, that will fix it!"

> large multinationals like Amazon

I don't know about the internal workings of Amazon specifically, but many corporations are set up as hierarchical "business units" that each operate as separate companies within: selling their products and services within the company. There's still a market, not everything is determined centrally.

> On the contrary, it scaled pretty well in China and in Soviet Russia, leading to the two cases of the fastest economical growth on the planet. The problem is not scalability.

China grew much faster after it instituted market reforms. I'm not as familiar with Soviet Russia, but I'd be surprised if it grew faster than similar market-based countries during the same time period.

Sears mostly collapsed because they decided to make their internal departments independent competing companies. The departments acted more in their own interests rather than in the interests of the whole company...

> but many corporations are set up as hierarchical "business units" that each operate as separate companies within

The overwhelming majority of companies, including Amazon, does not allow different units, departments or teams to compete with each other by providing the same service.

Essentially each BU or even team is a little monopolist.

Soviet Russia actually had to reintroduce markets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy) to dig itself out of the economic hole caused by the hyper-centralized planning of "military communism".

You must not be from a former communist country. The system worked for two-three decades during the initial industrialization phase. When that phase ended growth was hard to find (the whole system was based around factories and moving villagers to cities). That's when the numbers started going down and the system started faking numbers to give the appearance that all is well and nobody could disagree with them.

At a country level (not talking about Amazon) these systems are fragile and don't handle volatility well.

Re: Amazon - you can't compare countries with private corporations.

I wonder if the growth problems that SU came across was more due to external pressures than inherent systemic limitations of a planned economy

> The system worked for two-three decades

Yes, that's my whole point.

> Re: Amazon - you can't compare countries with private corporations.

...and why? The similarity is more than evident.

Amazon has competitors, a central government do not. If the central planning fails to deliver a product then there is nobody there to deliver the product, if that product was food then people starve. This lack of competition is both bad for robustness as I described, and bad for efficiency since it means that people has to get their goods from the government and can't choose to get it somewhere else, so there is no selective pressure to keep the government deliver goods people want. You could say that other countries pressured them via war, but the people couldn't choose to buy American, the competition happened at a way too high level to matter.

Or rather, ultimately the people made their choice, central planning was scrapped and people could but American goods. So in a way the competition helped, people ultimately picked the superior option and the inferior option went under. But it took a very long time for that to happen, capitalism is way faster.

> Amazon has competitors, a central government do not

Countries engage in international trade and also go to war. If anything they compete more ruthlessly.

We definitely do broad-strokes central planning in the US and every other developed country with tax system design, social support systems, and industrial policy.

The Soviet Union sucked, but it lasted an extremely long time.

The moral of the story is central planning kinda does work, just not very well if you do too much of it.

I think it's more that you need layers. A centrally planned layer of regulation and safety nets that provide a base level to keep things running (and people alive), but without the cost and inefficiency of trying to control everything, and then a more efficient, free market–like layer on top that relies on the lower layer to provide the "free" in "free market".

I believe it would be more productive to argue about where the layer boundaries should be, rather than endlessly arguing about whether one or the other layer should even exist. (Because they'll both always exist. People will help each other out even in a free-for-all; and black markets will always come into existence in rigid, fully-planned economies.)

How are the current economic agents solving the NP-hard problem of economy? It seems like they are are just as incapable as a computer (assuming the substrate independence of computation).

You can't just assign random semantics to "consistency", "availability" and "partition tolerance" if you want to apply the CAP theorem.

> Disintermediation is always always always a myth. It only means replacing a previous intermediary with another, supposedly more deserving one.

pic.twitter.com/jTM45MNas0

Enforced uniformity is the law. You cannot have discordance in law. You can choose to either institute law via centralized delegates, and make it mandatory, which is tyranny imposed by central authorities, or through a decentralized protocol that achieves uniformity through opt-in global consensus.

apenwarr prefers the status quo, and ridicules the new cryptoeconomic systems which make the latter possible.

> This article is profoundly insightful.

Insightful? No discussion of environmental, ecological, social, and economic collapse if we continue on the way we're going, yet, somehow, it was "insightful?" Sorry, I do not buy it. Modern civilization doesn't have 100 years on our current course.

Seems nice in concept, but Rust and Node.js is a bad and limiting in execution

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