Hacker News Reader

> A deeply and clearly thought out argument for why immutable blockchains and code as law are terrible ideas, yet the conclusion is that crypto-anarchist technologies are a net good.

I think there's an important distinction between things like bitcoin and the technologies described in the article. The technologies mentioned in the article all take some sort of action without ongoing human input.

Things like bitcoin (and other crypto-anarchist technologies), on the other hand, preserve human agency. I mean, there's a lot of automation on the mining side of bitcoin, but the currency side allows trades to be initiated by human beings. Bitcoin preserves human agency so well that people using it to commit crimes is one of the arguments against it.

Now, you could argue that what I'm describing is a bad thing, or that the tradeoffs are unfavorable, or what have you. And there are several reasonable arguments in this area. But I think the distinction between technology that responds to human input and does work for us and technology that runs autonomously and makes its own decisions based on rules set up at a prior date is important here.

>Things like bitcoin (and other crypto-anarchist technologies), on the other hand, preserve human agency.

You have a point about simple transactions, to some extent they just do what you tell them, but etherium is the poster child for crypto-anarchism. Code is law is literally the rallying cry of these systems, because taking out trust in humans and institutions is the whole point.

Even many of the stablecoins are supposedly beyond trust because they're based on financial instruments that "guarantee" their stability. Of course that's not turning out very well. If these systems are subject to human oversight, then they're open to exactly the problems of governance, institutional control and politics as anything else. Crypto-anarchism is about automating all of that away, but that puts implacable emotionless code in the driving seat, and the article explains very eloquently why that's a bad thing.

> but that puts implacable emotionless code in the driving seat, and the article explains very eloquently why that's a bad thing.

To re-iterate my previous point, putting code in the driver's seat would imply that something like the etherium network decides what transactions to make (or possibly entering into their flavor of smart contracts by itself). I have not heard of any proposals for this.

That's literally what a smart contract is. From the Etherium website:

"Smart contracts are a type of Ethereum account. This means they have a balance and they can send transactions over the network. However they're not controlled by a user, instead they are deployed to the network and run as programmed. User accounts can then interact with a smart contract by submitting transactions that execute a function defined on the smart contract. Smart contracts can define rules, like a regular contract, and automatically enforce them via the code. Smart contracts cannot be deleted by default, and interactions with them are irreversible."

So if they can send transactions over the network, and are not controlled by a user, how is that not putting code in the driver's seat?

> how is that not putting code in the driver's seat?

Because humans enter into them.

What you're describing is not a problem of the code making decisions for people, it's a problem of people not being able to back out of something once they've made the decision.

I think there's definitely an argument around if this is worth it or not, but it's a different issue. An issue that's akin to many decisions in real life. To take a dramatic example, this is akin to firing a gun. Once fired, a bullet cannot be taken back, but the bullet is not in control, but it is a situation created entirely by human agency.

I suppose the devs who create the software we're talking about would have some agency in the previous scenarios. But I wouldn't be nearly as concerned if the people in, say, the train car were entirely the devs that wrote the train car door automation software.

I guess the distinction I'm trying to make is people being forced into a situation vs people voluntarily entering a situation (even if they might not be happy with the situation later). In the former situation, I'd describe that as people not being in control, in the latter I'd describe the people involved as being in control.

Right, I found the ending of the article to be baffling non sequiturs about the greatness of bitcoin.

> Our systems of values, and traits such as love and empathy are evolved behaviours. They were selected for by those same implacable laws of nature and survival of the fittest.

I think this is undoubtedly true, but it is also true of psychopathy.

I think that the ability to construct a false self, as a defensive mechanism, which is incapable of feeling empathy and which is able to prosecute objectives regardless of the cost to others, even to the point of suicidality is an inherent part of our nature and must have been strongly conserved considering how obviously deleterious it's effects can be to the self, the tribe, and the species.

If that is so, then how is the indifferent mechanism of evolution to deal with a trait which both provides an important situational advantage but when left unchecked, can spiral out of control to the level of species extinction?

But for that, I find flights in to abstraction to be pretty pointless, since we can just watch the answer to this question unfold at global scale, before our eyes.

> ...how is the indifferent mechanism of evolution to deal with a trait which... when left unchecked, can spiral out of control to the level of species extinction?

I suppose if we accept that alien life and civilizations do or will exist, then in the long run such traits, and counterbalancing social behaviours, will be subject to selective pressure. In the very long run.

I agree that things should be considered ultimately as political (even judicial if needed).

But it’s not a given - Black Mirror describes worlds in which that reality does not win a survival-of-the-fittest competition against harsher technological regimes. It seems every time we describe these dystopias they become true, which for me is a reflection that it’s easier to destroy than to create, absent a learned culture.

I’m not so pessimistic, all this means is that freedoms must be actively fought for and maintained. That they cannot be taken for granted. However we have many times fought against supposedly more efficient autocratic systems and won. Napoleonic imperialism, and that of the great Central European powers of WW2, Fascism, Stalinism, South American military dictatorships. We’ve beaten them all. A successor to Maoism is still in power in China, but Mao would have been horrified by the reforms under Deng. We’ll see how Xi’s reversion works out.

I know there’s a strong current of left sentiment here that thinks billionaires are somehow taking everything for themselves, but the fact is the freedom of movement and association that enabled globalisation has raised hundreds of millions out of poverty. Those billionaires employ millions of people. I’d rather they ran these companies than government functionaries. For the first time more than half of humanity now live comfortable middle class lives. Progress in my lifetime has been breathtaking, and it’s been so fast a lot of people’s ideological assumptions about how the world is and works have been left far behind.

There’s still a lot more to do of course, 10% of people in severe poverty is still far too many. China under Xi shows how a technologically competent authoritarianism can achieve a stable steady state that will be very hard to break down. We must do it though, the future of humanity depends on it. If such a regime was to gain broad sway over humanity there’s a real possibility Orwell’s vision of a boot stamping on a human face forever could come to be. I don’t think it’s inevitable though. The fact is free and open societies are actually far more efficient and productive.

Thanks for this great reply.

Ironic thing though - that 10% most severe poverty mostly lies on the African continent, exactly the place which could stand to benefit the most from China’s intervening, and of course before that it was Chinese people who were in great poverty.

Now I’m as aghast at the militant astro-turfing by that country on these forums as anyone else (and much worse inside), but there I’m not so pessimistic, perhaps seeing their own positive change effected on an outside group can cause some kind of re-evaluation for the culture.