Example: say a business wants to begin paying their employees in Bitcoins? well, it's not that easy. there's so much monopoly on what it means to be a business, it seems. you need insurance for various types of businesses, and not to mention all the legal issues. I feel like for bitcoin to go to the next level, we are going to have to get rid of all government. There is no way for the government to adapt to this new peer to peer world. The government must go, then the free market will flourish. Otherwise, Bitcoin will come and go.. they'll eventually be worth $0.00 if nothing is done to take them to the next crucial level.
YEAH!. Lets get bitcoin to the next level by breaking down the substrate of society!
I'm sure humanity is overall smart and wise enough to be able to deal with themselfs without governance.
If you have bitcoins you don't have to worry about the problems governemnts solve.
Let's just all be positive, ok? If you're positive things will just magically work out. That is the magical rule.
Next Level FTW!
Lets get bitcoin to the next level by replacing the current inefficient and chaotic substrate of society that is based on violence and one size fits all "solutions" with one that is self-ordering and based on voluntary interactions.
The problem is that we need at least some of those 'one size fits all' structures. You cannot just replace them. You will need to first have something that operates parallel to it so it can support the same kind of societal functions.
There are many things that we centralize in governments. We have treaties that ensure food supplies. What do you think would happen if a city like New York would have to reneg their grain import? I can tell you, either the New Yorkers starve or they pay way too much for bread. I mean, what does New York have to offer to someone who has grain? Managers?
So its pretty difficult to make a transition from our centrally steered economies to self organizing economies without breaking the existing logistics. Breaking the core logistics means breaking society, at least untill a new stability is reached. And nobody knows how long it would take for the new substrate to self order or where the balance will end up.
I mean, maybe it is now economically cheap to educate people to become architects. So a self organizing system will use the opportunity and maximize the output of architects.
But then it takes a couple of years to get these people on the market and only THEN will the self organizing system notice t he effect of the inflow of architects. And then it turns out that there are waaaay too many of them. And also not enough doctors.
So the system cuts down on architects and pushes for doctors.
But those doctors won't be on the market for another 5 years, maybe 10 if they specialize.
So society will have a big shortage of doctors for years while the system sorts itself out.
And these sorts of dynamics will be going on in every specialism.It takes some amount of high level societal planning to get more or less in the right direction and you would be surprised how much of the world you see outside relies on a steady flow of output from society. We rely on stability, food supplies, infrastructure, goods and skills to be there is a certain quantity.
I don't think we can permit ourselfs to overwrite this with a new untested system.
The problem with self ordering structures is that it is about the structure and not about the people that form the structure. It forces people to act along market dynamics. Market dynamics prefer short term solutions. People will have less freedom then ever because everything will relate in an economical way. Every choice, every relation you have will be based on economics. You'll have to because it will be the only way to survive in a market driven society.
You will also force humanity to go into an arms race on an individual level. When the workers in the next town upgrade their arms with robotic prostheses then you will have to do it as well becasue otherwise they will outcompete you.
Very efficient, i'm sure, but words like 'human' will become increasingly meaningless. Your proper designation in this brave new world will be 'market element #9235874773'.
And a self organizing system doesn't prevent monopolies.
So let's say RoadCorp buys all roads in Los Angeles.
They now have a monopoly on the roads in LA.
Is there any chance for another company to 'order' itself into a competing position?
Nope, no chance at all because there is no room to build competing roads.
So now RoadCorp puts toll booths on all the important interconnects around the city nd ask for an unreasonable amount of money to get through.
How can you top them?
You cannot compete them out of the market.
RoadCorp is privately owned so you can't make them.
There is no police force and RoadCorp has hired a PMC to protect their investment.
How would your self sorting substrate deal with such problems?
If you have bitcoins you have less to worry about how the governments have done a poor job of solving problems.
Not realy, since you cannot buy anything with bitcoins not created in the non-bitcoin economy.
If you could then the same societal problems would apply to bitcoin and everyone would be screeming for it to be regulated in various ways. Bitcoin, at the moment, works because it is not very big. We still need to see how it will work if it actually is a substantial part of our economies.
Let's be positive, and recognize that the market does seem to work magic, even though it is really just the unleashing of human creativity and productivity in ways that no politician or bureaucrat can possibly imagine.
The market does its magic by eating itself up. Its easy to do magic if you have lots of resources. But it turns out we never had them in the first place. Market dynamics have eaten the bottom of our financial system.
So i don't think the market by itself is a stable solution. It is only stable while growing but we know for a fact that it cannot grow forever.
Free market is an idiotic way to organize society.
But then again, it did release a lot of creativity and productivity.
I personally think that we need something in between.
We need cleaner/tighter governments that ensure a certain societal base in a democratic way.
And then we need a capitalist arena where people with lots of ambition can fight it out without the possibility to make the societal base dysfunctional.
Some natural monopolies,like water or roads, should be protected agains being hijacked by corporations.
Pick one thing you can do that will help rebuild a better society, and concentrate on that.
Here's one example that I think really illustrates the point: car registration and driver's licensing. Our (at least the American version) current way of doing things is ridiculous. We have government's controlling the licensing and car plates, when that is clearly corporate welfare that protects the insurance companies and their profits. Why not instead place the regulatory burden back onto the insurance companies by making them handle licensing and plate issuance. The insurance companies would own the plates, and if you are paid up you can keep the plates on your car. If you stop paying, they repossess the plates. Anyone driving without a plate is uninsured, so other motorists can take notice and be more careful around them. A good insurance company might have a better plate, that can use simple tech to indicate whether or not the current driver has a license and possibly even what skill level they have shown. This allows for more freedom while also allowing people to take more control of their own safety.
I think there are a lot of ways in which we can optimize our governments and in fact i think the process of pruning is a continuous one.
But i'm not sure your example here will work out the way you think.
The insurance companies have a drive to get people to insure with them.
Why would you trust the information on their plates?
Is that really a Class A driver or is he a Class A on-time payer?
Only the insurance company knows this.
There is also nothing preventing the 'competing' companies to form a cartel. They could all ask for twice the money if they play nice amongst themselfs.
How does your free market deal with cartels?
Now apply that sort of thinking to any other thing that government currently does and see how that will transform society to the point that we no longer need government.
Yeah, we won't need a government because there won't be a society after the transformation. The will be corporations and their worker slave race.
People will become the actual resource corporations will fight over.
And it's already starting.
If you use google then you are googles product.
If you use facebook then you are facebooks product.
These are the beginnings of the tyranny of law-less megacorporations that compete of planes outside of public interest.
I want you to understand one thing.
No technology will save humanity from humanity.
That includes bitcoin.
