Comment by mercuryrising | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mercuryrising | Hacker News Reader

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Extreme one way: Stop pretending the United States exists. It's an imaginary line in the sand that has changed many times through the years. There is nothing different about the physical land between Mexico and the United States, or the borders between any countries.

Extreme the other way: Cyberspace is a reflection of the world that we live in (kind of like a mirror - it's the same as the 'real' world, but a little bit different). It's real when we want it to be (print out this paragraph, it's now physical), it's a place where thoughts and actions occur, it's the 'coffeehouse' of our generation, where like minded souls can find one another and communicate. I can see pictures and videos of places I've never been to, imagine one day when I get a robot with a holographic camera that I can drive around to places I've never been to - but I might experience it just like I was there. The bridge between 'reality' and 'cyberspace' is strengthening everyday, with more and more people trusting this cyber world. If we all believe hard enough, can we make it just as real as the world we live in?

I think you've hit it right on the nail here. Countries are also fictitious, in a way. Your mind expands when you realize this, and it gives you a set of tools to think about "cyberspace" in a more accurate way than by waving your arms around saying that cyberspace isn't a geographical location.

It seems to be something of a pattern that when the state has in recent history held monopoly power over something that is evolving in a way corrosive to that power, they immediately jump to the stage of dismissing it as "unreal" in some way, and just end up shooting themselves in the foot by pointing out that their own claims of sovereignty are exactly as "unreal".

The state rules by force, its currencies are real because they say they are and have the power to force behind them, its borders are real because they say they are and have the power of force behind them.

As soon as they lose that power, as in the case of bitcoin for currencies or other digital property or jurisdiction in the case of cryptographically protected distributed spaces which simply have no visible anchoring in the physical world, their claims are worth exactly nothing.

It will be an interesting world as more and more things move out of the sphere of state control and into this sphere.

> its currencies are real because they say they are and have the power to force behind them

No. Currencies are real because people trust they'll have value tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, as Shakespeare said. Otherwise, the old Zimbabwe dollar would be in use, as opposed to being dumped after the hyperinflation.

Hyperinflation doesn't so much make a currency unreal as simply worthless, Zimbabwean dollars were still Zimbabwean dollars, and the government was still charging taxes in that currency and enforcing its laws and systems by fines in that currency, but it becomes a little bit of a moot point when as you point out the currency is devalued, there's no real way for governments to stop that.

That surely hasn't stopped them from trying, either in the Zimbabwe case or all throughout history, governments are extremely fond of making ridiculous proclamations to support their currencies whilst undergoing hyperinflation to very little effect, but when the great majority of people refuse to listen to you anymore and you have no credibility it ceases to matter.

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