Right, but the government is not just some unaccountable third party that sits between you and the rest of society. It is meant to embody the society, and, in a democracy, represent its interests effectively.
This leads to a more nuanced view of web3 and smart contracts: a way to acquire law-like order in business dealings at a vastly lower cost. Or put yet another way, if lawyers and the government got their act together and used technology to reduce the cost of their services (and actually passed on those savings) then smart contracts would never have been a thing.
Where exactly does the leverage of smart contracts come into play?
The biggest reason libertarianism is a nonstarter is that it outright rejects the state monopoly on violence. Without a lone arbiter, societies fragment due to intragroup competition and violence. As a society fragments, the size of the monolithic projects it can engage in become smaller and smaller.
International trade is already so fragile that a stuck tanker threatens swaths of the entire thing. Now picture how infinitely improbable a system like that is if there's no physical enforcement mechanisms backing contracts up.
If the crypto court makes an unfair ruling, you tell everyone to never trust their judgement. Now they’ve lost credibility and nobody will want to escrow funds with them in the future.
Whichever court provides the most consistent fair rulings attains the best reputation and becomes the most utilized.
By contrast, if government courts make an unfair ruling, they’re still going to be in business tomorrow and there’s nobody that can stop their monopoly on broken justice.
Some people might argue that their western country has a fair justice system and that everyone should be glad to be subject to that system.
That argument would be overly generous to even the most fair countries, and completely falls flat in the many countries where corruption is rampant.
The thing I don't understand about all of the cryptocurrency negativity on HN is nobody's forcing anyone to use decentralized products, but the naysayers seem to insist that everyone needs to continue use existing centralized solutions even if they're not happy with them. What's so bad about letting the nerds LARP amongst themselves even if you don't want to participate?
It's entirely possible it's the only thing that has prevented anti-discrimination lawyers from hollowing out corporate America with lawsuits
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-saddam-sta...
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/enforci...
Most libertarians want the government to retain a monopoly on violence so that the institution that uses violence is accountable to the public.
The government is not some representative of the collective will. Thomas Sowell provides his experience at the Department of Labor in 1960 as a poignant demonstration of the fallacy of that notion: https://youtu.be/v6PDpCnMvvw?t=38
Another example would be the latest $1.5 trillion infrastructure bill. It was 1,500 pages long and no legislator read even an appreciable fraction of it. There were provisions in it that the public was discovering a week before it was voted on, like one threatening to classify cryptocurrency nodes as brokers with KYC requirements for any transaction they processed.
Apparently Treasury had worked behind the scenes to get this provision in the bill, to give DeFi the Patriot Act treatment: https://twitter.com/jswihart/status/1422785103386669058?s=20
The fact that the provision you mentioned was discovered is an argument FOR this system. The fourth and fifth estates need to play precisely this role, of parsing and communicating the actions of government and business.
Living up to the unfortunate pun, cryptocurrencies make crypto-fascists giddy. No accountability. No transparency. No arbiters of justice. Every segment of society decouples from accountability to any other: individuals hide from governments, governments hide from the press, business hides from government...
What exactly is the argument that you think would make that a worthwhile future to pursue?
>>The fact that the provision you mentioned was discovered is an argument FOR this system
Being discovered a week before the vote meant that there was no time for all those affected to study its effects, let alone to negotiate an amendment for it, and furthermore, that it came within a hair's breadth of NOT being discovered.
Other very worrying provisions were only discovered after the law's passing.
>>Living up to the unfortunate pun, cryptocurrencies make crypto-fascists giddy. No accountability. No transparency. No arbiters of justice.
Crypto systems are opt in. The government mandates are violently enforced on those who would prefer to opt out. This sophomoric socialist argument that private enterprise is fascist is totally shallow.