The crypto bros crowdfunding a new country
bbc.com
bbc.com
I don't see this country thing as being any different. More cynically, I see this as a bunch of divas who want to officially be above the law because they feel they are better than that and its only holding back their greatness. They, and they alone, are the only ones smart enough to create utopia.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1...
For a more personal look, see how it affects people born in the "wrong country":
https://www.reddit.com/r/MakerDAO/s/XYh1ajhP0P
The actual laws that are needed, are those against victimful acts, like fraud, and you don't need the kind of freedom-reducing regulatory restrictions that have become so numerous in recent decades to have anti-fraud laws.
Effective enforcement of anti-fraud laws alone would be sufficient to stop the bulk of the scams in the crypto space, and there is nothing inherent to crypto that prevents legal authorities from pursuing those who perpetrate fraud and bringing them to justice.
On the plus side, free market competition has fostered innovation and discipline in the crypto space. We've gone from bug-prone smart contracts like the DAO eight years ago to highly secure bluechip DeFi applications like Aave, Uniswap, Compound and MakerDAO surviving completely unscathed in the last crypto crash.
Scams still abound unfortunately, and I believe that will only subside once people at large understand that crypto is more like cash than like a bank account, in that there is no social consensus system that can reverse fraudulent transactions in crypto like there is in banking. This is the flip side of being able to control your own funds, and transfer them without censorship.
Once people do broadly come to realize this aspect of crypto, I believe they will be far more cautious in how they choose to handle it.
I will happy to be corrected here, but my understanding is that the foundationally key aspect of crypto that makes it worth anything at all, is that people can use it to circumvent traditional financial tracking of transfers and how they are associated with the individuals who made them. So in order for legal authorities to go after fraudsters, wouldn't they need these tools - the very ones crypto circumvent by design?
These criminals are well known by crypto communities, with repeat offenders targeting a given community numerous times over a course of months/years. Law enforcement has numerous opportunities to go after these individuals, even if they used a perfectly traceless cryptocurrency.
In the case of FTX, it was run like a traditional bank, taking deposits and holding users'crypto and fiat assets on their behalf. The signs of a fraud were replete for many months before the crash that exposed it all, but the company was simply never investigated.
So are you arguing that we should do away with those laws and people should be allowed to launder money? Or are you arguing that we should keep the laws and not go after "victims" and presumably hope that everyone behaved according to the law?
If possible keep it short, if you're writing 7 paragraphs I can't be bothered.
I'm suggesting that the transaction layer is not the point at which crime should be targeted. Doing so requires the entire population being burdened with prior restraint where every they need to jump through hoops for every transaction, and need to give up their privacy altogether.
If criminal acts are generating illicit revenue, then those acts should be investigated and prosecuted. Investigations should be targeted, and done in a manner that respects privacy rights, with authorities obtaining warrants before searching an individual.
Real criminals and crime leave all manner of evidence trails. The dragnet surveillance approach to combating crime, that requires doing away with foundational rights like the right to privacy and the right to be presumed innocent and to freely associate, is not justified in any way.
These banking rules should be scrapped. They force people to give up their privacy and prove their innocence before they can transact. This is a blatant infringement on individual freedom, and it only benefits people who might abuse such powers, as agents of overreaching governments.
When it comes to fighting crime, there is no evidence that dragnet financial surveillance is effective. Criminals have been caught and prosecuted for centuries without the state needing to track every transaction. And since these laws were implemented, there is no evidence they have reduced the volume of financially motivated crime. Organized crime generates hundreds of billions of dollars worth of illicit revenue each year, despite all of the privacy that has been sacrificed.
There are far more focused ways to go after criminals without invading the privacy of the entire population. Law enforcement can geotrack scam websites, use undercover agents to gather evidence, and subpoena social media companies to get the information they need. These methods work, and they respect privacy. There’s no reason to burden everyone with blanket surveillance when the actual criminals leave plenty of other evidence.
Privacy and security are not mutually exclusive. We should repeal these invasive laws and return to a society that respects and protects the fundamental right to financial privacy.
You keep saying that there is no evidence that financial records have ever been successfully used to find and prosecute criminal activity, but I hear about these being the case all the time. A recent one being Trumps payments to the porn star.
> And since these laws were implemented, there is no evidence they have reduced the volume of financially motivated crime.
The counter-point to this is that since the introduction of crypto, the volume of scams has increased - think of those big headline cases like SBF. And of course those countless ones where scammers sieze control of like a hospital's computer system demanding payment in, you guessed it, crypto. If crypto wasn't a thing, then those scams would be much much harder and riskier to execute to the point many wouldn't bother. But with crypto it becomes easier and less risky and the volume of these scams explodes.
I absolutely support privacy rights, but I also don't want people to be scammed because the system makes it easy for the scammers to scam.
An analogy might be that we don't need bank vaults because the police can just find the criminals after they've effortlessly stolen all the cash sitting in the unlocked and unguarded room. Rather than making the cash hard to steal in the first place.
Trump's crime was in how he reported the payment in a government form, not that he made a payment. So if that's what you want: more laws and thus more laws being broken so that the state has more justification to prosecute people, then yes, financial surveillance laws are effective.
Yes people have been caught using information gleaned through dragnet financial surveillance, but there is no evidence that this surveillance has reduced the total volume of crime. Organized crime for instance doesn't seem any weaker than it was in the past, despite the absolutely enormous sacrifice in privacy and free association rights that much of the world has been forced to endure.
As for crypto and crime, yes crypto crimes were not a thing before crypto existed. The same could be said of cyber crime. It only came into existence with the internet.
But this is just a phenomenon of moving crime from meatspace to crypto space. The pickpockets have just moved into the digital asset space. It doesn't mean a net increase in crime.
We need to go after criminals, but not at the expense of privacy rights. There is no excuse for it, when crypto scammers already leave so much evidence that can be used to track them.
Giving up privacy is giving up a free society. It is also creating profound risks of abuse of power by people with official state power, who gain the ability to search people's private financial activity without a warrant.
Let me explain why I believe that a new form of country will appear: Companies will turn into countries.
Currently large companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and so on, don't "offer" human rights. People however want them to have more responsibility, especially in Europe. This is a changing force already in progress. Perhaps it will turn out that the European Court of Human Rights or a similar institution will do the same thing to Corporate what it already does for many countries.
Of course the ECHR is not working well today, there are many problems, but should we just give up and let Corporate become feudal? At least I propose we should think about what we people need from countries and corporate entities and how to gain these needs.
I guess at some point Europe could enforce corporate entities to give the right to be heard to people, for example.
And that's one step of them turning into countries.
Perhaps you think, a country, that's something with an army. But an army is not really neccessary if there is some other way to control power. Currently, however, the world doesn't seem to have a lot of power as we see with many different wars.
I am a bit pessimistic about the future of humanity, but I still hope that in the long-term we will find a way without raw material power to resolve conflicts, because this is really wasteful and might even lead to our demise.
Maybe the story could focus around a plucky courier named YT, a reluctant hero in black and feature swashbuckling hi jinx in a Balkanized landscape of competing franchised techno micro states.
Pretty sure he’s just pitching the social layout of Snow Crash.
Maybe not quite what you meant....
.... but the GDPR gives users the right not to be subjected to decisions based entirely on automated processing (including AI).
Thus, you have the right to have a human (an actual person!) consider your bank loan application, parking fine, passport application, membership cancellation etc, rather than just have an automatic system say "computer says no" with no right of appeal.
This is an important law which restricts potential tyranny (and I use that word with its full meaning) caused by allowing governments and corporations to limit public's engagement with wider business and society though the use of a restrictive IT practice.
Probably it's time to rethink what a nation means.
At least I got a vision, citizenship is like being a member of an association.
Currently, citizenship is very restricted, but I hope for a more open world, where citizenship is a lot more fluent than today. Of course many protections are neccessary which are implicit in citizenship. That's why I wrote about human rights and corporate organisations. I imagine an automatic membership bound to residency and what is citizenship today turns into membership to some cultural association.
And customers become members of their corporate entity and thus gain many rights we don't have today. That's why I said, corporate entities turn into countries.
Perhaps in about a hundred years if our civilization is still thriving at least somewhat?
Removing the concept of nation to become a scattered technotribalism doesn't make sense, we need to go up a level where the whole concept of separating individuals by nations start to dissolve and we all share a common culture of being humans. For that the first barrier is language, without a common way to communicate between ourselves it's pretty hard to see the other as similar to you.
What you advocate for is going back to tribalism.
One example was Córdoba, where Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived together. They even had different laws, because the Muslims had what they called "dhimmi" status, which meant that different groups had their own jurisdiction granted by the Muslim rulers.
This ended because of many factors, one of them being the collapse of the Caliphate due to internal strife. So I grant that it is difficult, but not impossible.
Our descendants will see if this form of living together can be sustainably established in the future.
The point I’m trying to make here is that you’re assuming certain structures will outlive the governments that created the rules in the first place, which seems unlikely given the significant divergence between the goals of government and the goals of for-profit industry (in theory, at least).
For example: I wonder who will tell the folks with nuclear weapons what to do, and insist Rule 506(b) offerings that don’t benefit said folks be respected? Probably something lost in my gulf of misunderstanding. I sure hope so!
And if they ever do figure out how to pay a potential military, then I'm sure the current actual owners of the land they're on (ie the country whose territory they're in) will quickly want to have a chat with them and disabuse them of that notion.
[0]https://www.seasteading.org/
[1]https://www.ubm-development.com/magazin/en/maldives-floating...
Actually, the more you learn about the country we live in, the more you will realize that it has little morality and is hardly worth much pride. To give just one example, we have the worst healthcare in developed countries despite spending the most on it. We have introduced and have been accumulating PFAS toxin like it doesn't matter at all, even adding it to pesticides to intentionally be sprayed on food. In general, the more our governmental agencies can be lobbied, the more corrupted they already are by corporations.
Let’s assume for a moment they’re not as stupid as this makes them sound. (Because, good luck getting nation states to let go one inch of territory their people have bled over for hundreds of years.) What are they really after? More tax havens? Free trade zones? Regimes with weaker enforcement against money laundering?
Ultimately private companies can exist only because the state allows it. Just last year we all saw what happens when a private army threatens state power.
“Obviously, democracy is great,” he said. “But the best ruler is a moral dictator. Some people call [that] the philosopher king.”
That claim feels right to me, but it's weird when you look at how much territory the US has bought for less than a thousand dollars per square mile in today's money.
Otherwise, though, I think the obsession with making a new country is slightly off the mark. Labeling yourself as a country puts the target on your back in a way that doesn’t really exist for a global distributed corporation/organization with a specific purpose. Many of these efforts would be better served creating novel forms of corporations that exist within existing states, not trying to found a new state itself. The model should be the Hanseatic League or something similar, not a fully-fledged nation state. Even a private club like SoHo House is probably a better first step.
Is there some version of this that doesn't sound like a corporate technofascist dystopian anti-fantasy?
The most interesting idea for me was about whether something similar could emerge within already existing states, performing some of their functions but otherwise hybridizing with them. Remote work and starlink and so on open up some geographic possibilities for networked communities.
Yeah, that’s probably the closest, but it only works because it parasitises an actual country (the US), and is very circumspect about what it actually _is_. It wouldn’t be tolerated for a _minute_ if it went around openly calling itself a country.
I’m not advocating for any of these, just pointing out that they exist.
Fuck Curtis Yarvin and fuck all his clones. Fuck all these billionaire nerd gangster wannabees.
Fret for your AI and fret for your crypto and fret for your commute back to the campus and fret for your contracts and fret for the wokes who just can't understand why you should be king. Fret for the market and fret for the government fret for the homeless who shit where you want to eat fret for your Cybertruck fret for the white man and fret for the ape juice that slurped up your NFTs.
We know what happens when you hand absolute power to a single person. We know what happens when corporations become more powerful than governments (literally, not in the way people now say that Facebook and Twitter are, just because they can ban A SITTING PRESIDENT, but because they have private armies and guns and slaves.) A benevolent dictator is a contradiction in terms. But this time it'll work because the god-king is an ardent Randian capitalist who can reverse a b-tree on a whiteboard, and runs the country like Amazon but now with company scrip and a monopoly on violence!
Some say a comet will fall from the sky.
Followed by degaussing drives and flipped bozo bits.
Followed by segfaults and use after frees.
Followed by millions of dumbfounded dipshits.
And some say the end is near.
Some say we'll see Armageddon soon.
I certainly hope we will.