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Comment by cfcf14 | Hacker News Reader

Aside from the primary content regarding the hijacking the registrar, I really enjoyed reading about the methodological approach they adopted for tracking information and contacts during the crisis.

But to the primary content - I've been surprised at just how ad-hoc much of the internet backbone infrastructure is as I've learned more about it. The same could be said about the payments processing industry! Beneath all the complexity and sleekness underlying the tools we use every day seems to eventually lie a system of IOUs, with an honor-based resolution mechanism between sufficiently trustworthy entities.

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> Beneath all the complexity and sleekness underlying the tools we use every day seems to eventually lie a system of IOUs, with an honor-based resolution mechanism between sufficiently trustworthy entities.

This is how societies - in the end - work. It is all about trust, I think.

And although there are forces to undermine that fundamental trust, it does still work.

There really isn't a different way to work honestly. Either we rely on trust or force and that trust and force can be transferred and dissipated through a legal system but force loses its transferable value very quickly while trust can be passed on many times.

It's how the fiat money system works as well.

If you recall from January, even with the US election you'd only need a conspiracy of a few hundred people (congressmen) to completely overturn the election for whatever result you want.

Society is made out of string at best

That conspiracy was surprisingly widespread and the normal societal blocks didn't manage to engage early enough in the process to stop it but, in the end, we made through it alright due to societal pressures at large.

I don't know what specifically would've tipped it the other way but I think there were several large players able to extend effort that ended up not doing so simply due to a lack of need (i.e. the military in a non-show manner).

I believe that the point was that if that group decided to overturn the results, the democratic will of the entire population would not have overruled them. The intent of those provisions is for a case like 1877 when the democratic will of the people was actually in question.

Unanticipated in the Constitution was that a group of violent people would attempt to force Congress and the Senate to overturn the results. Had the protestors succeeded in that goal, it would have effectively ended the Republic. We would continue to be a Republic in name, just as Rome was after Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC. But not in reality. And not too many years would pass before even that charade ended. As happened in Rome when Augustus Caesar became the first real emperor.

There's also a grassroots problem: the reason it took desperate acts in the endgame to try to overturn the election was that election officials around the country refused to bow to pressure to change the results at the local and state level.

That layer of defense can't be taken for granted, especially given how aggressively hostile towards reality itself many local GOP officials are becoming.

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