Libertarianism for Me, but Not for Thee | Hacker News Reader

Libertarianism for Me, but Not for Thee

ez.substack.com

>Wait, what you’re telling me is that crypto is unrestricted and unchangeable, but companies can choose to control what happens within their ecosystems based on their judgment?

I am sad I can upvote this article only once.

Ledgers may be public, but the systems guided, configured, and controlled by them sure are not. Whoever has the root password to these servers can decide on a whim that whats on the blorkchain no longer matters.

If the early internet were set up like the banking system currently is with pay-to-play rules and relationships, we would probably still be using AOL, Yahoo and Excite to search the web.

The key change with the internet was that the open access to information fostered competition.

So yeah maybe OpenSea makes some questionable governance choices, but at least the underlying information is accessible via the public blockchain making it easy for competitors to emerge. New ideas can be tried in parallel without complex business arrangements.

of course if the NFT you're buying is ultimately just an opensea URL, well then I think there's a saying about fools and money.

> we would probably still be using AOL, Yahoo and Excite to search the web.

There is always a pay-to-play system, the only difference is what we pay with. The early internet harvested money directly, the current one our personal data, and an blorkchain based system again harvests money directly from people buying virtual tokens.

There is no such thing as a free lunch in business.

> the underlying information is accessible

The underlying information is a ledger of who has which non-fungible, or how much of fungible tokens. The actual information and value that keeps a business afloat; code, knowledge, connections, servers, contracts, machines, employees, finances, is not on the blorkchain.

Sure, in theory, someone else could build a competing business on top of the available information. In practice, displacing an already existing business is next to impossible unless the competitor offers features the competitor doesn't. This is true even if the competitor has vast financial resources; just ask Google how well google+ went.

Your final point is true however having vast financial resources is an advantage when your competitor doesn’t have that. Which wasn’t the case for Facebook. Sure Google had a lot more money back then. But Facebook still had billions.

I still agree with the point though of course.

What happens to the transaction fee then? Who pays the price of the mistaken listing? This article is way too sarcastic for me to handle.

This has nothing to do with libertarianism.

Author is just whining about a scammy hype driven ponzi-esque scheme built on a fraudulent fake “cryptocurrency” and claiming it is libertarianism.

This is a strawman argument.

Thr problem is actually this is 100% real-world libertarianism. In the exact same way that communism always has and always will end up in the same corrupt bastardization of a communist system, libertarianism will end up the same corrupt bastardization of a libertarian system. And just like communists will insist "it doesn't count" as commission, libertarians will try to insist "it doesn't count" as libertarianism.

But they both will always reach these failed end states because they fundamentally ignore human nature. Libertarianism and Communism are opposite sides of the same coin. Naive belief systems that people idolize that ignore the nature of reality.

In an unchecked system, people with power and wealth will create a system of rules to centralize that power. And the only defense against it is to build a system with built in checks against that unfettered centralization of power.

Guys, you don’t need to use opensea to buy/sell NFTs. That’s the magic. It’s just one NFT exchange. They can freeze your stuff but you can just use someone else.

You can post all the sarcastic takes you like, but if you don’t get this part and you’re all like “oh it’s just like the normal world reinvented” your model is missing some crucial predictive elements.

> Guys, you don’t need to use opensea to buy/sell NFTs. That’s the magic. It’s just one NFT exchange.

This is also true of selling on Amazon, but being banned from Amazon (or even just losing search ranking) also kills lots of small business.

It's also true of email, and yet you essentially can't use email anymore if Gmail decides to block you.

There can be de facto centralization, even if a technology does not require centralization. Humans really like centralization -- it's convenient.

Hmm, well, that was baked-in intent so I don’t quite get the problem. Yes, you could make a marketplace so popular that everyone disregards products not in it.

That’s not “libertarianism for me, not for thee”. That’s literally “libertarianism for both of us”.

Your original point was you can use something else. The commenter said you can’t and has examples on top of opensea. You didn’t respond to that retort. You brought up different things.

I suppose I imagined that we were working in the universe where the article was relevant and not tabula rasa. Granted if we were discussing tabula rasa, my response might be non sequitur.

Tabula rasa doesn’t work here. What has happened is what almost always happens. A status quo quickly emerges. Usually because of previous status quos. In this case opensea dominates. Some semblance of mostly centralization and a few encumbers was always going to happen. It’s not important that it’s opensea. What is relevant is this sort of power dynamic and status quo was bound to happen. It almost always happens.

You brought up that if others say it’s the real world reinvented they are missing some crucial predictive elements.

The real world’s status quo and power dynamics are what are at play here. That doesn’t get reinvented. That continues on.

I don’t care when fools are parted with their money, but if this truly is approaching the point where there may be systemic risk then there must be *no bailout* for crypto. Stabilize the system, but let all of these people go bankrupt.

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