CryptoPunk

The state first needs to be informed of the theft, by the victim, to be able to seize the thief's assets. Moreover, there is a significant possibility that the state will fail in its attempt to seize the thief's assets. Both of these qualities of these respective situations are significantly different than a case of a virtual good held by a large trusted third party custodian. The latter means the state by default can easily discover who owns what, and is guaranteed to be able seize whatever it sets out to seize, at minimal enforcement and political cost.

In other words, it's not a simple binary proposition, between the state being able to seize assets and not being able to. The power of the state to seize assets exists on a spectrum, with less power in the context of blockchains. I contend that this spot on the spectrum, that the blockchain places the state's power to confiscate and surveil on, is better for society at large.

In the example you provided, the state can compel the thief to forfeit his private key, under pain of imprisonment.

But there are other cases where the state is not able to intervene, because of the immutability of the blockchain protocol.

The limits placed on the state's power is a beneficial trade-off, where the state loses some power to protect people's private property, while losing even more power to rob people's private property.

I just explained how the blockchain far from "preventing any authority from interfering", relies on authorities to protect individuals from theft, kidnapping, burglary, etc, for people to be secure in their control of their keys.

It strikes the right balance between being protected against the state stealing and robbing people, and people being protected by a state from theft and robbery.

Unfortunately, anti-libertarian ideology, which is the dominant ideology in society now, cannot conceive of a need to maintain non-political checks on the power of the state, so the adoption of cryptocurrency, which imposes such checks, is very unsettling to its adherents.

The tyranny imposed in societies where socialist doctrines became dominant was simply staggering, and beyond anything that could be blamed on foreign meddling.

This tyranny was all-encompassing because socialism demonizes entire classes of voluntary interaction on the basis that they are inherently exploitative, and thus despite all appears to the contrary, nonconsensual. Socialism is an ideological dogma instead of a sober commentary on reality.

Because of this shoddy foundation, socialism ends up promoting subordination to the state and top-down order, and this is fundamentally less functional and more tyrannical than a society based on the principle of individual rights and emergent order.

This is an undeniable fact, not some "undergrad-tier bromide" as left-wing grifters dismiss it as.

Even now, after a century of failure, some dogmatic utopianists won't admit that their ideas don't work.

What is most tragic in all this is that it takes experimenting obviously bad ideas - whether it be socialism, or lockdowns - on billions of people, and producing hell on Earth, before a certain class of individuals will admit they are wrong.

Opposition to capitalism consistently produces less free societies.

>>No, tolerate a system that works as hard as possible to ensure that selling one's labor for wages is the only option, rather than a right

So you propose the government provide an alternative, by doing what I described, which is effectively to steal from the Ant to give to the Grasshopper, i.e. tax the more productive to provide resources to the less productive.

And the absence of this non-consensual redistribution is what you and Varoufakis absurdly enough, find intolerant to those who value freedom.

Marxism is deliberately obfuscated, to hide what it really advocates.

>>Tolerate a system in which increases in productivity accrue benefits mostly to capital rather than society as a whole. Tolerate a system in which profit is preferentially distributed to the capital that partially enabled it rather than the labor that also enabled it.

Increases in productivity accrue benefits to society at large right now. In the US, there was a small increase in capital's share of national income, but labor's share remains significant:

https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/sources-of-real-wage-stag...

In those regions which witnessed significant productivity growth, wages increased substantially:

https://www.csmonitor.com/World/2016/0207/Progress-in-the-gl...

If you read the articles linked, and look at the other studies done on global development, you see that the places that did the most to lift those limitations and regulations, that disrupt the natural checks and balances of the market, saw the greatest improvement in quality of life.

That is why there is a strong and persistent negative correlation between government spending, as a percentage of GDP, and the rate of economic growth:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170821004405/http://ime.bg/upl...

The government limiting its role to vigorously defending people's security of person and private property, and enforcing contracts, is the best way we have come up with to facilitate economic development.

This is standard economics, from experts who have studied development for decades.

The massive decline seen in poverty over the last 50 years is a matter of fact, with broad consensus that it has occurred.

It's just inconvenient to your victimhood narrative.

>>You choose every day when you work, to work under a fascist authoritarian regime. You choose that

If you're choosing it, it's not a fascist authoritarian regime.

And yes, people need resources to live, and unless they've already accumulated great wealth, that means they have to either work (via the free market), or steal (via fascism/socialism).

As Frédéric Bastiat wrote 170 years ago, the need to acquire resources is the nature of reality, not a circumstance that exists only because some authoritarian force imposes it.

"Man recoils from trouble, from suffering; and yet he is condemned by nature to the suffering of privation, if he does not take the trouble to work. He has to choose, then, between these two evils. What means can he adopt to avoid both? There remains now, and there will remain, only one way, which is, to enjoy the labor of others. Such a course of conduct prevents the trouble and the satisfaction from preserving their natural proportion, and causes all the trouble to become the lot of one set of persons, and all the satisfaction that of another. This is the origin of slavery and of plunder, whatever its form may be - whether that of wars, imposition, violence, restrictions, frauds, etc. - monstrous abuses, but consistent with the thought which has given them birth. Oppressors should be detested and resisted - they can hardly be called absurd."

>>The innovations that help people live longer aren't private property, they're medical science and city planning.

Private property is what generated the massive gains in productivity that allow society to allocate resources to employing specialists like doctors, researchers and water sanitation engineers.

Even over the last 50 years, it's abundantly evident that private property rights facilitated the unprecedented gains in wages and quality of life seen globally;

https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-bill...

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/2016/0207/Progress-in-the-glo...

I'm happy to show you data on the development of the Philippines economy over the last 50 years. Had your narrative won out, the people would have fared much worse, like the people in Venezuela, or North Korea, or pre-1978 China.

You don't own anything in YouTube. YouTube can always deplatform you.

In the "not your keys, not your coins" setup, that trusted third party is the government, which gives you security against theft, kidnapping, burglary, etc, so you can keep your keys safe.

Adding another trusted third party, like a gaming company, to the mix, to act as the custodian of who owns what, creates a much less-reliable / more-fragile private property system, as that custodian, at their own behest or that of a political faction who holds the reigns to the govenment, can deprive you of your control over the virtual asset.

So to put it another way, trusted third parties can also be a threat to private property. The right balance between being protected by a trusted third party from theft and robbery, and being protected against a trusted third party stealing and robbing you, is the "not your keys, not your coins" setup, where the trusted third party only enforces rules against others trespassing your person or home, without having custody of your property on your behalf, so as to not have intimate knowledge of and control over everything you own.

I see disease, poverty and looming death as the opposite of freedom.

That is not what the data shows, nor is it what economists who have spent decades studying development believe:

https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-bill...

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/2016/0207/Progress-in-the-glo...

>>Funny that people will say this with a straight face and then walk into their jobs and have their pompous, arrogant, and disrespectful boss tell them what to do for eight hours.

Your boss has no power to restrict your choices. They can only offer you an option, and compel you to choose it by making it better than any other offer available to you.

There is no comparison between this, and the government mandates that characterize fascist and socialist societies.

>>Myself? I know I would rather live in pre-historic state, foraging with a bunch of my relatives and friends, instead of in the current day Philippines.

Pre-historic life was brutal. Every one had ring worms. Every one had intestinal parasites. People were hungry almost all the time.

A broken leg led to shock and death, and half of children died before the age of five.

You need to study pre-history, or remote tribes that live in pre-historic modes of life. You're yet another person who underestimates the challenge of living, and takes for granted what modern civilization had to overcome.

When you recklessly abolish the innovations, like private property rights, that led to industrial civilization, you create shortages, massive inflation, etc, and quickly see how fragile the economic system was.

Hunger in the Philippines is NOT due to capitalism. Hunger massively declined in the Philippines due to capitalism.

Capitalism, i.e. the right to freely exchange, was restricted during the lockdown, with jeepney drivers, restaurant cashiers and almost every other sort of worker prohibited from going to work.

Had the fight against capitalism succeeded in the Philippines, the result would have been every bit as disastrous as it was in Venezuela.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-food-idUSKCN1G5...

This is the only genuine ownership that exists in the digital realm. Digital assets that use a ledger run by a trusted third party can always be seized or frozen by that party.

The choice is not between some communist utopia that Varoufakis alludes to, and people grinding in virtual worlds to make a living.

The choice is between a family in the Philippines facing severe hunger during the lockdown, and that family being able to sell virtual goods to wealthier people in the developed world, to put food on the table.

More generally, allowing web users to assume genuine ownership - secured by provable scarcity and public key cryptography - over virtual goods, means the profit that the internet generates will not be monopolized by a few internet giants.

Consider, the Ethereum Name Service airdrop rewarded over 100,000 accounts with its ENS tokens. This is a degree of diffusion in the distribution of ownership over critical protocols that was totally impossible before blockchain-based assets and networks.

I did search for the article to provide a link in the comment, but I wasn't able to find it.

Yes, in many places where local conversion of USDC to USD or some other fiat currency is possible, but international Stripe payouts through the banking system are not.

That reminds me of an article I read recently about New York's high-end nightlife scene, where wealthy men engage in an indirect form of purchase of attention from young attractive women, but obfuscated so that it does not appear transactional. There could be something to that.

Twitter Blue subscribers can let Twitter verify their ownership of an NFT profile picture, and then their profile picture comes to be distinguished by a hexagonal frame and a badge indicating which NFT collection it belongs to.

If AI does truly make generation of design of all styles costless, NFTs could act as the "Costly Vibe Signals" the article refers to.

So Urbit's Layer 2 solution is a Rollup, but not an Optimistic (fraud proof) or ZK (validity proof) Rollup, but their own homespun form of Rollup that they call a Naive Rollup.

It's described here:

https://18108973658826589741.googlegroups.com/attach/31d6ad2...

It appears to use Ethereum L1 solely for data availability and sorting, while the computation that ensures validity is performed inside Urbit instances. I haven't thought through the security implications of this yet.

I believe the implication is that you need to run a full Naive Rollup node, that validates all Urbit transactions, in order to ensure the validity of any given transaction.

USDC is very credible. It receives regular attestations from Grant Thornton:

https://www.centre.io/usdc-transparency

And Polygon is an Ethereum sidechain, so it charges very low fees.

So given these objections are without merit, this feature is doing people living in countries which cannot otherwise receive Stripe payouts a favor.

>>No, this is extremely wrong. I would encourage you to look into the rather large graveyard of cryptocurrencies that collapsed and are now worthless.

None of those are major cryptocurrencies, and the blockchains of many of those which are now effectively worthless continue to exist in a handful of nodes around the world, showing the resilience of this enterprise structure.

>>A digital cash platform will shut down when it's not profitable and nobody wants to use it anymore, the exact same thing is true of any cryptocurrency.

No, a blockchain is inherently far more widely distributed in its infrastructure providers and datastores, and is therefore far less likely to disappear as a trusted database for shared operations like a token ledger.

>>that's it's actually a good thing that BTC and ETH are getting "too big to fail"

In this case they are too big to fail on their own, not too big for society to allow them to fail, which is an entirely different concept, and only superficially similar. It is a good thing for the world at large when a shared ledger becomes increasingly robust to failure due to its own structure becoming more resilient. This makes for a more reliable platform for financial and social interaction.

Digicash was centralized and thus could shut down, and it did shut down. Major blockchains are effectively immortal, with open-access rules that have enormous momentum to remain unchanged.

This allows larger numbers of disparate parties to coordinate on them for financial and social interaction. I would not rely heavily on a token distributed on a centralized digicash like system but I would rely on a token my company issues on Ethereum, because I know any one receiving the tokens would still be able to access them years from now and that the infrastructure of compatible software, both client-side and blockchain-based, will only grow over time.

It's widely understood that switching to EV is part of a larger package of policies that can get society to zero carbon but it is nonetheless an absolutely necessary part of any zero carbon future. Tesla's role in pushing that forward is highly commendable, by any reasonable standard.