I came across this interview with Nick Szabo today:
His sentiments remind me of Eric Voskuil’s “axiom of resistance”:
In modern logic an axiom is a premise, it cannot be proven. It is a starting assumption against which other things may be proven. For example, in Euclidean geometry one cannot prove that parallel lines never meet. It simply defines the particular geometry.
Proving statements about Bitcoin requires reliance on other systems, such as mathematics, probability or praxeology, and therefore the assumptions upon which they rely. However Bitcoin also relies on an axiom not found in these systems.
Notice how and why Voskuil invokes this axiom and how he treats it:
One who does not accept the axiom of resistance is contemplating an entirely different system than Bitcoin.
I notice too that Szabo and many other early Bitcoin evangelists share a similar disdain for government and institutions (Roger Ver, Amir Taaki, Andreas Antonopoulos Saifedean Ammous).
I think this happened partially because of the financial success certain early adopters experienced which caused them to start to believe that their opportunity and timing which positioned them to be early adopters was a signal that their entire narrative of how the world works had been confirmed as being valid.
I also see that it is possible to be a “flat earther” and still have a high functioning capacity in this world or in certain specific subjects. I am also reminded of Ted Kaczynski who’s biography shows he was quite gifted in mathematics but his mind ultimately degraded in intellect towards the belief that our societal advancement was not towards the direction of moral progress.
I think there is a baseline that many people like this miss which is an extrapolation of our natural rights to pursue our own endeavors provided we don’t encroach on another’s freedoms.
The actual implementation of such a baseline is far more complex than what can be compartmentalized however on a grand scale it is quite obvious that we are in general MUCH more free than we were in the ancient (and perhaps even obviously recent) past.
There isn’t much of an argument that institution hinders us from progress so much that it can be said to be in the opposite direction of it, rather, someone that wants to be anarchic in their political leanings must create a narrative that somehow ignores or explains around this simple truth.
A socialist type of thinking I think also can be cured with this balancing point where people make the complaint the government needs to be the great equalizer of quality of living. For all I can see such people that have this belief have never been properly exposed to the counter argument to socialism nor the point that a disparity in wealth is not that bad if EVERYONE’S general standard of living is rising dramatically regardless.
Incidentally this (counter)point I make is an example of what I call “re-solution”. It is an example of a rheomode I created that means to bring the balancing point to the dialogue such that the whole observation becomes seen as obviously true. To bring up the counterpoint to the narrative that reveals the narrative to be slanted. To mix the contrasting points together as if they were never separate but by our own bias.
I think the next revolution or enlightenment will be the levation of this approach to thinking and dialogue.
So many vocal people on social media are hell bent on perpetuating a narrative that only speaks to strawman counterpoints. The left fights the right and the right the left, but they never steelman. They never attack reasonable opponents; they only find and attack the fringe ones.
Today in the world we are seeing another movement (or the continuity of an age old one) of protesting under the symbol of “yellow vest”. And different media and independent social media accounts will report on the movement as being based on different complaints.
Some countries are participating in solidarity but with their own local twists on the complaints.
I recently read this paper endorsed by Vitalik:
It breaks down the problem of competing governments into two weapons that have evolved 1) panopticon and 2) chokepoints in which the leading governments have the ability to put surveillance based pressure on both allies and enemies and also potentially to use financial network chokepoints to induce a type of economic siege.
The paper however has the same axiom of resistance type narrative and I think suffers from the missing balance point that in general we are increasing our standard of living as a global community.
We arrive at my basic point here which is that it might become quite obviously the reasonable and implicit direction of mankind that we approach inter-relationally stable money between the existing major currencies.
Returning to Voskuil he has stated that fiat exists specifically as a (hidden) tax in which the state gets much of its power from:
…the reason there is a difference between legal tender and reserve currency is to enable inflation of the currency in use (taxation) while holding a hard currency in reserve (savings). States hold hard currency because even other states cannot debase it and issue soft currency so that it can be debased.
This somehow becomes the basis for why “state” will never converge on the issuance of inter-relationally stable money (which isn’t even really a question of inflation directly per se):
The theory is therefore invalid. Either fiat will cease to exist or it will collect tax. States only surrender this tax under extreme duress and in such cases only briefly. If anything the “ideal money” will be Bitcoin, and it will not trade freely with state monies (to the extent they remain).
I see this narrative as problematic since it has been show by Nash to be considered quite game theoretically sound to suggest that we will eventually converge to a single inter-relationally stable system and what is more important is that such a system would remove the ability for governments to besiege economies as the exchange price of the currency would become known to be a signal of duress (rather than a self induced monetary policy).
I probably haven’t shown the truth of that perfectly well but its a simple fact that if currency competition is no longer a valid tactic then much of the imbalance in power in the world might become far more balanced. This point comes with the observation that the USD would no longer be the de facto reserve currency as the new basis for stability and quality would be an implicit basis which would be highlighted by all currencies and not controlled by any one state.
In such a world I think we might see our governments as coordination technology which when running in an optimal fashion are great tools of the people (created by people and upheld by people). And while I don’t disagree that we should advance subjects like computer science to make the workings of government less susceptible to imperfections in human nature I think it's quite counter productive for us to think that we need to abandon such technology rather to improve it.
