I think its rather ironic that you are so passionate about a disruptive technology but you seek to belittle a disruptive thinker.
Hey, I find Jorge stimulating. I think he is well educated, fairly intelligent, and well socialized. "A man of wealth and taste" in the words of Keith Richards.
It's his pernicious ideas and his misleading tactics that I want to nuke from orbit. They cut much closer to the bone than do more ham-handed idiocies.
The second I'm not sure about institutionalised violence -- but yes, I'd like to see an end to military spending...
Pretty much everything the government does it does by violence or by threat of violence. Well, in the modern social contract, it also offers carrots as well as sticks. I consider those mostly a form of moral violence, but that's taking the words into a whole 'nother universe, so it's not a useful path.
Property rights are interesting because I see that as being extremely capitalistic and transact and contract seem very business orientated. Sounds like everyone in the BNW will have an MBA. I'm also wondering how you resolve your property rights with the traditional owners of your land?
Fun stuff. But please, I'm describing the ideas in their relationship to the label "libertarian". I have affinities to some of the ideas, not others. I would self-identify as libertarian only inconsistently, if it were useful to move the ball forward. Let us prefer "one" over "you".
Property rights have always seemed to me factitious, cultural. I'm ambivalent about them personally. Until you try to use my toothbrush, that is. The best argument for property rights is the evil done when people violate them.
I am very pragmatic. The internet was going to make our lives so much better -- it's had huge impacts but they've been balanced between good and bad -- but technology does not make the world a better place, people do.
Technology is the tool they use to do it. And the Internet has indubitably made my life much, much better. Never-ending stimulation. Illimitable knowledge resources. Instant world-wide access to sensors. One day, instant world-wide access to effectors. In fact, that's what bitcoin is.
Just as the web gives you remote eyes, bitcoin gives you remote hands. (I like that idea, so I made it bold. Money is power to change the world.)
Is it any wonder when you are skidding around like this -- banks are about to collapse, next they're not.
Being useful and entrenched doesn't make them immune to collapse. When things get tightly coupled they get brittle. When they get addicted to energy, they die without it.
So, what you are describing is evolution rather than revolution. Which is contrary to your earlier argument about chaos etc.
Chaos is to be defended against, but it is also a necessary process. I argue that the anti-fragile properties of Bitcoin is useful for the defense, in particular with regard to economic reorganization. I will also argue that a degree of chaos is inevitable, even desirable, and some painful chaos is likely to arise soon as we enter regions of the phase space of the economy which are prone to catastrophic transformation. Those catastrophic changes will be revolutionary. It is super-duper hard to predict what changes will be evolutionary and what changes will be revolutionary. It's also hard to predict the outcomes, especially of revolutions. But there's enough icky stuff around right now, so that I have hope the change will be an improvement, overall. It will be, if enough people of good will take vigorous action.
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