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Comment by etherael | Hacker News Reader

I was convinced government doesn't work and indeed that is the only reason I am interested in blockchain applications. Watching first hand how badly the entire affair has gone has been very useful into getting insight into why government doesn't work, which I still firmly believe. However I am no longer under the illusion doing away with it and replacing it with a blockchain based substitute is either cheap or easy, and if we skipped a hundred years into the future and it turned out that the end result looked almost indistinguishable from what is presently described as government I would not be altogether shocked. I would however consider that amongst the worst possible outcomes.

It may well be that there is a necessary deadweight economic loss to pay based on the nature of human social interaction at scale and this loss cannot be avoided entirely, only minimised to a certain extent.

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So, at no point did you consider that you were wrong in your base assumption and government does in fact work? Because it looks like you examined anarchistic alternatives to government, found them all worse than government, and then didn't do the (to me) obvious thing if updating your "government can be good" possibility.

> So, at no point did you consider that you were wrong in your base assumption and government does in fact work?

Of course, many dozens of thousands of times throughout my life, desperately wished for that to be the case. Unfortunately there is no evidence for this and immense amounts of evidence for the contrary.

> Because it looks like you examined anarchistic alternatives to government, found them all worse than government

I didn't say I found them worse than government at all, I said the first hand experience was very useful for seeing directly why government is as broken as it is, because all the same "incentive of last resort" mechanisms are typically in play in blockchains. It still turns out to be much better so far if measured by deadweight economic loss for economic coordination between a given transaction volume.

This is also why I said I would not be too surprised if it just becomes the next iteration of government. People who think that the government is desirable and its political structures are useful, parliamentary democracy, voting, departments that run projects and are accountable to elected officials, all of that kind of thing. You could clone it with a blockchain much more reliably and with much more auditability than you have with the multi-century old variations thereof running on some variant of "trust me" that we have currently.

Thus you could at least say "Yeah sure this is bad, but at least we can prove that everybody is following the rules on all elections, transactions, etc, and we have all the signed blocks to prove that from genesis" rather than the current trust-free alternative of an endless propaganda machine spinning whatever it wants people to believe at any given point in time with zero proof whatsoever.

I believe audits and transparency are amongst the tools that can and do improve 'government' / 'democracy'. I can see ways that crypto (in it's old generic sense) can help but I don't particularly see any way that blockchain tech can help though?

Probably much the same way you can see that crypto in its old generic sense could do these things, with the additional security of the applications running on a blockchain, and the assurances about transaction integrity, censorship resistance, availability etc.

You can have a cryptographically secure platform for whatever governance platform you like, but if it's running on a traditional centralised server infrastructure within a political jurisdiction, it's completely vulnerable to tampering of government agencies within that political jurisdiction. This is a well acknowledged issue referred to as "data sovereignty" with the limitation that the way to ensure it's handled is to pick a reliable jurisdiction.

If we acknowledge that no jurisdiction is reliable, however, blockchains are the only choice.

That seems a bit of an unwarranted leap and very hand-wavy.

Why would blockchain be better than a decentralized, non-blockchain tech, hosted in multiple jurisdictions for transaction integrity, censorship resistance, availability and so on?

And why is a blockchain a better alternative? If the blockchain assumptions fall (51% control) then it's game over. Even the founding fathers were a step ahead of that and trying to prevent tyranny of the majority (probably code for "the rich staying rich", but that makes it an even better analogy) It all feels a bit like wishful thinking to me.

No matter where FAANG host their infrastructure, if a particular set of states want to tamper with, censor, or surveil that infrastructure, they will be able to do it.

The legal structures and the ability to identify ultimate beneficiaries guarantees this for pretty much any legal corporate structure organised under a state. The only chance this has of not being true is a blockchain, the ultimate beneficiaries can't be identified, the infrastructure is not linked to a particular legal structure. There is no guarantee the state can identify the appropriate necks to apply the appropriate boots to.

If an organisational unit is to exist that will destroy the state, at the moment the only candidate for its infrastructure is blockchain.

It was you that claimed blockchain could improve the state, now you've switched to only blockchain can destroy it? And replace it with "an organisational unit" which is apparently, not a state/government/democracy?

None of this sounds like a good idea, even in theory.

Monarchy was an improvement on despotism, maybe constitutional republics were an improvement on democracy, etc etc etc. The organisational units could be considered destroyed, or they could be considered reconstituted, the point is that the functions handled by the OUs in question went to another ostensibly more efficient instance thereof. This is much easier if the new OU does not rely on its underlying infrastructure from the old OU.

Things should improve somewhat is a pretty hard ask for something that doesn't sound like a good idea, letalone in theory. Of course, it's an open question as to what the end result of all of this will actually be, and maybe it will indeed be the worst catastrophic case of making the largest cause of non natural death in the past century even worse, but you'll excuse me if I find that hard to believe and think clearing that particular hurdle ought to be pretty easy, especially because this would be a non violent form of revolution, and the only competition is war. In a world of weapons of mass destruction that's a horrendous problem space to be working with.

You don't want a national system to be truly decentralized because if it is, adversaries can simply co-opt and control it. If you have to look out for that and roll off onto a different system (and have a mechanism to do so) then its by definition centralized and you can skip the whole blockchain chicanery.

You can just throw up a tamper-evident log based system. [1]

[1] https://transparency.dev

> Of course, many dozens of thousands of times throughout my life, desperately wished for that to be the case. Unfortunately there is no evidence for this and immense amounts of evidence for the contrary.

I think the fact that 7 billion people live overwhelmingly under a multi-hundred-year improving standard of living [1], leveraging low-friction global trade, commerce and communication in among the most peaceful period in human history [2] is a pretty clear indication that government does in fact work.

Is it perfect? No, nobody will say that. But of course the solution to problems in any overwhelmingly complex system with a long track record is not re-invention but continued optimization. [3] Takes a long time to turn a big boat, and anyone promising you otherwise is selling you a crock.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief

[2] https://towardsdatascience.com/has-global-violence-declined-...

[3] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

Nothing that is the largest cause of unnatural death in the last century should be considered as "working".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide

https://mises.org/library/anatomy-state

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Political_Aut....

Blockchain based systems over the duration of their existence by contrast have killed nowhere near as many no matter how you scale it, and although I believe the system to be rife with fraud and inefficiency, the amount of capital growth that has taken place is breathtaking pretty much any way you look at it.

I believe the state as a structure needs to die and blockchains so far look like the obvious sword. Nothing else has even come close.

It’s the largest preventer of death lol. Citation needed there. People will always die. Government minimizes this to the best of our abilities. How many do not die each year because of government?

As in software testing we don’t often measure the impact of our work in terms of things that don’t happen because our system exists. It is far easier to count instead the failures. But this misses the whole point. Count the deaths that don’t happen.

Meanwhile bitcoins thirst for coal kills thousands per year and achieves literally nothing.

Blockchains can only represent true state of things wholly representable on chain, which is why only currencies actually work. As soon as you try and ledger things off chain reality gets in the way and reality supersedes the chain.

Citation originally provided. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide

> How many do not die each year because of government?

I'd honestly like to see any kind of attempt to quantify that, I've seen a few for example that gave credit for removing lead from fuel to the government and then tried to by extension say that the positive externalities from that should be attributed to government. Which of course runs afoul of the point that the government was responsible for promoting leaded fuel to begin with, right up to the point of suppressing alternatives. Which in turn begs the question, what will the government actually do generally speaking? And as far as I can tell the answer is work in its own interests and accrue benefits to those on the inside at the expense of those on the outside, and that's all. If hundreds of millions die in the process, that's totally fine.

That almost everybody accepts that entity should have a monopoly on violence and basically unlimited power strikes me as increasingly crazy as every year goes by and it does progressively more insane stuff and we slide closer and closer to the possibility of an extinction level event war.

> Meanwhile bitcoins thirst for coal kills thousands per year and achieves literally nothing.

I'm not interested in defending BTC generally speaking, as I despise it. I should however point out that proof of work has no intrinsic "thirst for coal". Merely the lowest possible cost of energy, right up to the point of subsidising alternative renewable low cost energy projects, which many POW miners have done and why hydroelectric power is such an oft-constituted part of their energy supplies.

My point in the first half is that you can’t look solely at the costs without looking at the benefits - unless you evaluate both you can’t make a meaningful judgement on the efficacy of a system. Yes for sure the government is the largest source of death — but only because the government stamped out all other sources of death. Removing the government would shift that death to elsewhere and not remove it. And if history is anything to go by, dramatically amplify it. That’s why government needs to be iterated on not removed.

Re: renewables in bitcoin, it’s all greenwashing. Every kWh wasted guessing nonces on renewables isn’t spent decarbonizing the grid where we do actual productive things. While generating inordinate quantities of e-waste. I mentioned in another reply 97% of all bitcoin mining hardware will be thrown out, burned, crushed or buried all without ever mining a block successfully in its entire useful life.

I know there are other consensus mechanisms but they just rely on feudalistic control of the supply and just create systemic inequality without accountability.

There’s no good that comes of this. In basically every case decentralization and permissionlessness is not what anyone actually wants or needs.

> My point in the first half is that you can’t look solely at the costs without looking at the benefits

There is no benefit from a political authority wielding entity which has not been provided by an entity that does not wield political authority. Therefore the political authority is not necessary for those benefits.

> Removing the government would shift that death to elsewhere and not remove it.

Removing the hundreds of millions of people who were killed in the name of national security and the maintenance of political authority would not magically make them die for some other reason instead.

> That’s why government needs to be iterated on not removed.

Whether you call providing the benefits of typical governments without their horrendous costs an iteration or a removal is semantics. My concern is that it gets done.

> Every kWh wasted guessing nonces on renewables isn’t spent decarbonizing the grid where we do actual productive things.

This would assume that those energy forms restricted to specific geographic locations are not so restricted. This is not true.

> I mentioned in another reply 97% of all bitcoin mining hardware will be thrown out, burned, crushed or buried all without ever mining a block successfully in its entire useful life.

Most e-waste won't mine a block successfully in its entire life. If it could contribute to the peaceful destruction of the state, hard to imagine a better use it could've been put to, given the statistics.

> I know there are other consensus mechanisms but they just rely on feudalistic control of the supply and just create systemic inequality without accountability.

You mean like being born economically so deep underwater it's impossible to ever even break even because of the economic mismanagement of your political authority wielding organisational unit? At least ledgers using those consensus mechanisms only levy debt on people who choose to participate.

> There’s no good that comes of this. In basically every case decentralization and permissionlessness is not what anyone actually wants or needs.

It's clearly what a whole lot of people want, as to whether they need it or not, time will tell. For all the aforementioned reasons, I think the case couldn't be clearer that they do, however.

> Removing the hundreds of millions of people who were killed in the name of national security and the maintenance of political authority would not magically make them die for some other reason instead.

Citation needed. This institutionalized protection system is actually exactly how we got government in the first place.

But also, in the last 50 years, which hundreds of millions have died? If there's clear trajectory that deaths are decelerating, why are we now more than ever eager to overthrow the system?

> Whether you call providing the benefits of typical governments without their horrendous costs an iteration or a removal is semantics. My concern is that it gets done.

Again you only speak in terms of costs and refuse to speak to or quantify benefits. That's not an objective evaluation. It's like saying computers are bad because people get hacked, and therefore we should throw out computers and start over from the abacus. You must quantify the good and the bad to evaluate.

> You mean like being born economically so deep underwater it's impossible to ever even break even because of the economic mismanagement of your political authority wielding organisational unit? At least ledgers using those consensus mechanisms only levy debt on people who choose to participate.

I reject the former premise and the latter isn't a reason to participate in a distributed ledger system.

> It's clearly what a whole lot of people want, as to whether they need it or not, time will tell. For all the aforementioned reasons, I think the case couldn't be clearer that they do, however.

Respectfully disagree. The overwhelming majority of participants are just speculators. They couldn't care less so long as number go up. The overwhelming majority of holders bought on an exchange (off-chain) and never, ever transact. They may as well hold micro BTC futures.

> Citation needed. This institutionalized protection system is actually exactly how we got government in the first place.

I'm not even sure I understand your hypothesis here. In the absence of the organisational units that engage in the mass killing of their citizenry in order to sculpt their polities to the ideology which holds sway within their murderous structure, those people will still die because "reasons". Please expand on "reasons" here.

> But also, in the last 50 years

Nobody ever did anything wrong if you can arbitrarily timeslice it in order to make your case. And even there, if you look at the things done under colour of political authority in the past 50 years, you'd still be hard pressed to find a bigger villain on the planet. It just looks good in comparison to the preceding 50 years.

> Again you only speak in terms of costs and refuse to speak to or quantify benefits.

Because once again, no benefit provided under the banner of political authority has ever failed to be provided absent the banner of political authority. When the apparatus in question reduces to an entity that has a monopoly on force in order to compel people to engage in transactions that they otherwise would not of their own free will, it is hardly surprising that all of the good things that apparatus has ever provided might in fact be easily done by the free will of the participants in question.

> I reject the former premise and the latter isn't a reason to participate in a distributed ledger system.

You can reject it all you like, but you're wrong based on the mean economic output per capita vs their debt calculated at birth plus their lifetime cost. And that is indeed a reason to participate in a distributed ledger system, the former basically guarantees collapse, it is only a matter of time, therefore moving to a system not so afflicted of your own free will is access to an easy yield in the meantime.

> Respectfully disagree. The overwhelming majority of participants are just speculators.

The participants in question is not the reason I say it's clearly what a whole lot of people want, it's because of the amount of times the exact conversation we're having about destroying the state being the exact reason any given participant in the cryptosphere is there, including myself. There is indisputably a great degree of desire to do away with political authority.

I dont think its much of a selling point in favor of government that the considered so far "anarchistic alternatives" are worse. That is by no means a recommendation

“I don’t think something is good just because every alternative is worse.”

"What is a lose-lose situation?" Seriously, the idea that every option available is a bad one is not that difficult. Hell, even voting in the US is sometimes described as picking the lesser of two evils by those who don't feel well represented by the de facto realistic candidates.

Government is formed as a way to manage a society/community of people, if blockchain/crypto gets big enough to have hundreds of thousands of adherents, you'll also need a way to manage that "society". Some people think "the algorithm rules all", but as we've seen the algorithm is messy and has bugs and allow for thefts where you lose everything in a split second. It'd be like joining a society where muggers are free to roam and mug you, and to mug them back you have to find a cleverer exploit as your knife.

A blogger I read once laughed that an exchange/crypto-coin who suffered such a hack decided, to get their money back, they would contact... the police/FBI. Yeah, so much for that "We can't trust the government!" mentality.

That’s the marketing pitch.

The nihilist position that e everything is broken, except for a highly volatile system of digital signatures that require massive “fiat” capital investments to function.

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