Judge Rules Decentralized Autonomous Organizations Not So Decentralized in Law
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
It's not just that. It's also plain stupidity and the delusion to think you can live in a fantasy land of your own creation, and the whole world has to play along with you. IIRC, the people running one of these DAO organizations didn't understand the difference between owning a copy and owning the copyright to the work, and massively overpaid for a copy before they figured it out (https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a38815538/dune-c...).
I've had many conversations with self-described "smart" "autodidacts" who claimed to understand entire fields better after essentially zero study than people who worked in those fields for a lifetime. They couldn't understand that other smart people studied (often in universities) and devoted years of practical work in those areas and who communicate with one another and might possibly understand what they were doing better than an isolated neophyte.
DAO organizations are a perfect example of that, because their proponents really want code and law to be the same thing (code), without really understanding what the law does and how it is different.
There seems to be a lot of "Bitcoin ideology" (my own very poor term) that feels disconnected from the end result. The folks I know into crypto seem to carry a lot of that ideology with them, very loose ideas about freedom, fear of government taking things from them, and a sense of empowerment.
Yet the ecosystem they dive into seems to be full of scams and an incredible amount of complexity for them to safely navigate.
They're somewhere between being victims of a con, and gambling addiction. Both of those are really tough attributes to confront & overcome.
By that logic, if I create an "autonomous" software-controlled gun that then kills people at my direction, I'm off the hook because the gun was fired by software?
> Judge Vince Chhabria found that, under California law, Lido represents a “general partnership” and is therefore subject to the same regulations that such arrangements are beholden to. He also found that those organizations deemed Lido’s “institutional investors”—that is, the large companies that fronted much of its money and managed its operations—should be deemed members of that partnership and, therefore, held liable. Those companies include investment firm Paradigm Operations, well-known venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and investment firm Dragonfly Digital Management. A fourth firm, Robot Ventures, was excluded as a partner.
Ouch, IIRC the liability of a general partner is unlimited. Serves them right, though.
Second, most people pushing crypto simply don't understand the financial system. That's sort of the "disruptor" mentality run amok. But thing slike reversible transactions are a feature not a bug.
Third, crypto has a lot of former gold bugs who bemoan the death of the gold standard. It's necessary to point out that the US dollar has never been 100% backed by silver and/or gold. What really backs the US dollar is the US military.
Lastly, to tie all of this to together with the topic at hand: it would take one law (possibly just one regulation) to completely kill the crypto ecosystem. If the US government decides to use its power against the crypto ecosystem, crypto will collapse like a house of cards. The decentralization will mean absolutely nothing.
For example, if the US said today that a requirement for access to the US financial system was to bar converting fiat currency to and from crypto of any kind thencrypto would die. Yes, the blockchain can technically survive but it's the utility in the real world that gives it value. What initially drove Bitcoin was wealthy Chinese people using it to escape China's capital controls (ie mine Bitcoin in China, cash out the Bitcoin outside China).
That whole space though is either completely unrealistic / absurd, or owned by folks more interested in corporatism.
This is a very sweeping statement about a political ideology that varies as much as "liberal" and "conservative" do. Believing that roads and courts shouldn't exist isn't baked in to some official libertarian Bible—all libertarianism necessarily signifies is that someone believes that both personal and financial freedoms should be given roughly equal consideration, where a liberal might prioritize personal freedom and a conservative might prioritize financial freedom.
Where someone falls on the spectrum of how much government involvement is appropriate in either type of freedom can vary quite a bit.
(The average libertarian who runs for office as a Libertarian does seem to be extreme in the way that you describe, but I think that's a side effect of our FPTP voting system—only a fanatic would truly believe that it's better to run on their own than get behind the least-objectionable candidate—than it is a result of libertarianism as a philosophy.)
Part of the problem here is that so many Americans (in particular) simply haven't done the reading. Take, for example, your labels of "liberal" and "conservative". Classical liberalism is a hyper-individualistic philosophy that enshrines "private property" as a basic right. Really nobody is a classic liberal anymore. They're neoliberals. What's a neoliberal? Someone who deeply believes in deregulation and capitalism as well as being a liberal.
In that sense, anyone labelled "liberal" or "conservative" is a (neo)liberal.. There are only aesthetic differences around social issues. There is no sunshine between the foreign policy of the two major parties in the US, for example.
Libertarianism is really just a flavor of neoliberalism where deregulation is taken to the extreme yet somehow it's believed that free markets can still exist. But start probing the details: what do you do if you pay someone to build a house for you and they just don't? Or they do and it collapses 3 months later? Or what if someone just comes along and steals your stuff?
"Free markets" are largely an oxymoron anyway but such as they cann exist, they require a strong government to exist. Building codes are necessary. Courts to enforce contracts are necessary. The ability to enforce court rulings is necessary.
People are often attracted to the idea of libertarianism through a misguided desire for "freedom". This is a consequence of not being paid fairly for one's labor. In other words, you're being exploited. Well, if you're being exploited in the current system, what makes you think you won't be exploited in a system without some government-provided safeguards?
I'm not a fan of libertarianism, but I feel you're talking about the most extreme version: anarchocapitalism.
Anarchocapitalism is a deeply unserious idea, because it starts with the contradictory assumption that am extremely unstable social system would in fact be stable, then proceeds to spend books worth of text reasoning about how that thing would work if it were stable.
The reality is anarchocapitalism, if ever instantiated, would immediately decay into something else entirely (probably something like feudalism).
Take a look here for example: https://www.lp.org/issues/taxes/
Instead, the newly elected US officials will very likely create a "strategic bitcoin reserve" where the US government buys bitcoins, enriching the whales who will finally have a large enough buyer to absorb all their mounds of coins. It'd be like if they had created a 'strategic beanie baby reserve' in the 90s.
Why, the invisible hand of the free market, my good person!
Kidding. There's literally nothing but game theory and that no longer means what it did when humans interacted face-to-face in networks of no more than 300 people.
Game theory originated as a discrete field of study with von Neumann in 1928, after the invention and popularization of both the telegraph and the telephone. People were already living in enormous cities and doing business with people that they would never meet face to face or do business with again. Game theory accounts for this by distinguishing between repeated games and single shot games [0].
What you might actually mean is that game theory has never perfectly accounted for human activity because at the individual level humans are deeply chaotic and irrational actors.
Humans were far less likely to act irrationally in social contexts when they had to face that same social context (groups of people in situations) over and over again. They might have thought irrationally, and weren't perfectly rational actors, but we're a social species, and enforced normal behavior through social situations.
DAOs are another attempt to abstract all of that away, and they suck at it, because we're not wired to care about what some abstract concept of decency means.
[0] https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/urbandevelopment/overview