The 'crypto ideology' (for lack of a better phrase) of some who completely believed in the power of crypto to change the world and unshackle the masses from the tyranny of financial regulations. But then all the scams happened (and keep happening), and many commented how its was like they were speed running the last few hundred years of financial markets in realization that many rules/laws were they for good reason.
I don't see this country thing as being any different. More cynically, I see this as a bunch of divas who want to officially be above the law because they feel they are better than that and its only holding back their greatness. They, and they alone, are the only ones smart enough to create utopia.
No one believed any of that. It's always been about selling to someone else higher than you paid for it.
There is no empirical evidence that the laws you're talking about benefit society. Take anti-money laundering laws for example, which have demonstrated no evidence of policy effectiveness:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1...
For a more personal look, see how it affects people born in the "wrong country":
https://www.reddit.com/r/MakerDAO/s/XYh1ajhP0P
The actual laws that are needed, are those against victimful acts, like fraud, and you don't need the kind of freedom-reducing regulatory restrictions that have become so numerous in recent decades to have anti-fraud laws.
Effective enforcement of anti-fraud laws alone would be sufficient to stop the bulk of the scams in the crypto space, and there is nothing inherent to crypto that prevents legal authorities from pursuing those who perpetrate fraud and bringing them to justice.
On the plus side, free market competition has fostered innovation and discipline in the crypto space. We've gone from bug-prone smart contracts like the DAO eight years ago to highly secure bluechip DeFi applications like Aave, Uniswap, Compound and MakerDAO surviving completely unscathed in the last crypto crash.
Scams still abound unfortunately, and I believe that will only subside once people at large understand that crypto is more like cash than like a bank account, in that there is no social consensus system that can reverse fraudulent transactions in crypto like there is in banking. This is the flip side of being able to control your own funds, and transfer them without censorship.
Once people do broadly come to realize this aspect of crypto, I believe they will be far more cautious in how they choose to handle it.
> there is nothing inherent to crypto that prevents legal authorities from pursuing those who perpetrate fraud and bringing them to justice.
I will happy to be corrected here, but my understanding is that the foundationally key aspect of crypto that makes it worth anything at all, is that people can use it to circumvent traditional financial tracking of transfers and how they are associated with the individuals who made them. So in order for legal authorities to go after fraudsters, wouldn't they need these tools - the very ones crypto circumvent by design?
Bitcoin, the first, biggest and most important cryptocurrency blockchain is a often referred to a "public ledger". There is no obfuscation built into itz all transactions you make are public and if someone knows your wallet address they can see every transaction you've made. Very few cryptocurrencies are private by default (eg, Monero) and they hold a very small portion of the cryptocurrencies market cap.
What happens if they don't know your wallet address?
Most of the scams happening in the crypto space involve a significant non-crypto element, like a fake website that is made to look another website, or social engineering through messages on Discord.
These criminals are well known by crypto communities, with repeat offenders targeting a given community numerous times over a course of months/years. Law enforcement has numerous opportunities to go after these individuals, even if they used a perfectly traceless cryptocurrency.
In the case of FTX, it was run like a traditional bank, taking deposits and holding users'crypto and fiat assets on their behalf. The signs of a fraud were replete for many months before the crash that exposed it all, but the company was simply never investigated.
> Take anti-money laundering laws for example,
So are you arguing that we should do away with those laws and people should be allowed to launder money? Or are you arguing that we should keep the laws and not go after "victims" and presumably hope that everyone behaved according to the law?
If possible keep it short, if you're writing 7 paragraphs I can't be bothered.
AML laws are misnamed. They're really something like "report every transaction to the authorities" laws, or "prove yourself innocent to your bank before you transact" laws.
I'm suggesting that the transaction layer is not the point at which crime should be targeted. Doing so requires the entire population being burdened with prior restraint where every they need to jump through hoops for every transaction, and need to give up their privacy altogether.
If criminal acts are generating illicit revenue, then those acts should be investigated and prosecuted. Investigations should be targeted, and done in a manner that respects privacy rights, with authorities obtaining warrants before searching an individual.
Real criminals and crime leave all manner of evidence trails. The dragnet surveillance approach to combating crime, that requires doing away with foundational rights like the right to privacy and the right to be presumed innocent and to freely associate, is not justified in any way.
I agree with the sentiment here, but financial transactions have to be recorded anyway as proof of who is supposed to have what. If people can be anonymous in these transactions, then they will be used for criminal activity. These scams and such are all money-driven crimes, so the 'follow-the-money' approach seems like it would be the most effective to find the criminals and also used as proof by prosecutors to the courts.
Human rights are important, for example the right to be heard in conflicts.
Let me explain why I believe that a new form of country will appear: Companies will turn into countries.
Currently large companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and so on, don't "offer" human rights. People however want them to have more responsibility, especially in Europe. This is a changing force already in progress. Perhaps it will turn out that the European Court of Human Rights or a similar institution will do the same thing to Corporate what it already does for many countries.
Of course the ECHR is not working well today, there are many problems, but should we just give up and let Corporate become feudal? At least I propose we should think about what we people need from countries and corporate entities and how to gain these needs.
I guess at some point Europe could enforce corporate entities to give the right to be heard to people, for example.
And that's one step of them turning into countries.
Perhaps you think, a country, that's something with an army. But an army is not really neccessary if there is some other way to control power. Currently, however, the world doesn't seem to have a lot of power as we see with many different wars.
I am a bit pessimistic about the future of humanity, but I still hope that in the long-term we will find a way without raw material power to resolve conflicts, because this is really wasteful and might even lead to our demise.
> Europe could enforce corporate entities to give the right to be heard to people
Maybe not quite what you meant....
.... but the GDPR gives users the right not to be subjected to decisions based entirely on automated processing (including AI).
Thus, you have the right to have a human (an actual person!) consider your bank loan application, parking fine, passport application, membership cancellation etc, rather than just have an automatic system say "computer says no" with no right of appeal.
This is an important law which restricts potential tyranny (and I use that word with its full meaning) caused by allowing governments and corporations to limit public's engagement with wider business and society though the use of a restrictive IT practice.
Yes, but it's a half-baked step.
Probably it's time to rethink what a nation means.
At least I got a vision, citizenship is like being a member of an association.
Currently, citizenship is very restricted, but I hope for a more open world, where citizenship is a lot more fluent than today. Of course many protections are neccessary which are implicit in citizenship. That's why I wrote about human rights and corporate organisations. I imagine an automatic membership bound to residency and what is citizenship today turns into membership to some cultural association.
And customers become members of their corporate entity and thus gain many rights we don't have today. That's why I said, corporate entities turn into countries.
Perhaps in about a hundred years if our civilization is still thriving at least somewhat?
In this future you will have different factions living under the same territory, each belonging to a different "corporate entity". Usually in human history anytime this happened we either joined forces of different factions into a "nation" sharing a common territory or all-out civil war broke out.
Removing the concept of nation to become a scattered technotribalism doesn't make sense, we need to go up a level where the whole concept of separating individuals by nations start to dissolve and we all share a common culture of being humans. For that the first barrier is language, without a common way to communicate between ourselves it's pretty hard to see the other as similar to you.
What you advocate for is going back to tribalism.
sounds like the setup to a William Gibson novel.
Or a Neil Stephenson one. “You would choose your nationality like you choose your broadband provider. You would become a citizen of the franchised cyber statelet of your choice.“
Maybe the story could focus around a plucky courier named YT, a reluctant hero in black and feature swashbuckling hi jinx in a Balkanized landscape of competing franchised techno micro states.
Pretty sure he’s just pitching the social layout of Snow Crash.
So instead of policy, these citizens would just have common interests? Idk if he’s bullshitting or actually huffing his own glue
No mention of how they're going to pay any potential military, so this is a complete non-starter.
And if they ever do figure out how to pay a potential military, then I'm sure the current actual owners of the land they're on (ie the country whose territory they're in) will quickly want to have a chat with them and disabuse them of that notion.
*disabuse
Thanks, fixed. :)
> Then they acquire land, becoming physical “countries” with their own laws. These would exist alongside existing nation states, and eventually, replace them altogether.
Let’s assume for a moment they’re not as stupid as this makes them sound. (Because, good luck getting nation states to let go one inch of territory their people have bled over for hundreds of years.) What are they really after? More tax havens? Free trade zones? Regimes with weaker enforcement against money laundering?
Ultimately private companies can exist only because the state allows it. Just last year we all saw what happens when a private army threatens state power.
I read this as the delusional fantasy of a wanna be little dictator:
“Obviously, democracy is great,” he said. “But the best ruler is a moral dictator. Some people call [that] the philosopher king.”
> Because, good luck getting nation states to let go one inch of territory their people have bled over for hundreds of years.
That claim feels right to me, but it's weird when you look at how much territory the US has bought for less than a thousand dollars per square mile in today's money.
The difference is that the US already had an army
But can you even imagine two countries doing a deal like that today?
I guess someone's been re-reading The Diamond Age.
I find the idea of new countries fascinating and the constant disparagement of their supporters as “crypto bros” annoying and inappropriate for a supposedly serious news organization like the BBC.
Otherwise, though, I think the obsession with making a new country is slightly off the mark. Labeling yourself as a country puts the target on your back in a way that doesn’t really exist for a global distributed corporation/organization with a specific purpose. Many of these efforts would be better served creating novel forms of corporations that exist within existing states, not trying to found a new state itself. The model should be the Hanseatic League or something similar, not a fully-fledged nation state. Even a private club like SoHo House is probably a better first step.
Quite vague on any details about how this would actually be workable, but that might just be the reporter's slant.
Is there some version of this that doesn't sound like a corporate technofascist dystopian anti-fantasy?
The most interesting idea for me was about whether something similar could emerge within already existing states, performing some of their functions but otherwise hybridizing with them. Remote work and starlink and so on open up some geographic possibilities for networked communities.
“Seasteading”, Prospera, LiberLand. Lots of attempts. Nothing that stands the test of time. Except maybe SeaOrg of L Ron Hubbard infamy.
> Except maybe SeaOrg of L Ron Hubbard infamy
Yeah, that’s probably the closest, but it only works because it parasitises an actual country (the US), and is very circumspect about what it actually _is_. It wouldn’t be tolerated for a _minute_ if it went around openly calling itself a country.
The best way to create new countries to try different societal models is by claiming the only unclaimed territories in the world, international waters with floating cities. There are various projects going on [0][1][2]
[0]https://www.seasteading.org/
[1]https://www.ubm-development.com/magazin/en/maldives-floating...
wow, sounds like someone is taking the back story of Snow Crash a bit too seriously!
It's like Hives in Too Like The Lightning. I do admit I like the idea of having a different set of laws in the same geographical space. There are some things that are like that: accredited investor, etc. And it would be good to broaden the amount of things where you can say "I'm an adult; if I lose, I lose" and then refuse it to people who could not possibly reasonably say that.
In this proposed world, whom decides what constitutes “reasonable”?
Same way we decided on the accredited investor thing or how we decide on informed consent. You can self-assert and lose protection to get freedom. And of course you must be literate etc. We don’t need to invent new things. We can just use the existing technology we have.
This whole group of a16z are scared folks who will do anything to keep a seat on the table. One needs to be careful they don't sell state secrets to Saudi. They have no morality or national pride.
> They have no morality or national pride.
Actually, the more you learn about the country we live in, the more you will realize that it has little morality and is hardly worth much pride. To give just one example, we have the worst healthcare in developed countries despite spending the most on it. We have introduced and have been accumulating PFAS toxin like it doesn't matter at all, even adding it to pesticides to intentionally be sprayed on food. In general, the more our governmental agencies can be lobbied, the more corrupted they already are by corporations.
I will not argue with you about our health care. I agree it's a complete shit show. But to hide your plans as love for the country but just protecting your seat at the table is heinous.
I'm sure it'll go as well as everything else crypto bros are involved with.
There's a part of me that hopes that the crypto bros succeed in forming their own country, so they'll be there instead of here.
Does anyone else read stories like this and wish Tool had written Aenima about Silicon Valley?
Fuck Curtis Yarvin and fuck all his clones. Fuck all these billionaire nerd gangster wannabees.
Fret for your AI and fret for your crypto and fret for your commute back to the campus and fret for your contracts and fret for the wokes who just can't understand why you should be king. Fret for the market and fret for the government fret for the homeless who shit where you want to eat fret for your Cybertruck fret for the white man and fret for the ape juice that slurped up your NFTs.
We know what happens when you hand absolute power to a single person. We know what happens when corporations become more powerful than governments (literally, not in the way people now say that Facebook and Twitter are, just because they can ban A SITTING PRESIDENT, but because they have private armies and guns and slaves.) A benevolent dictator is a contradiction in terms. But this time it'll work because the god-king is an ardent Randian capitalist who can reverse a b-tree on a whiteboard, and runs the country like Amazon but now with company scrip and a monopoly on violence!
Some say a comet will fall from the sky.
Followed by degaussing drives and flipped bozo bits.
Followed by segfaults and use after frees.
Followed by millions of dumbfounded dipshits.
And some say the end is near.
Some say we'll see Armageddon soon.
I certainly hope we will.
> Run by a for-profit company based in Delaware in the United States, Próspera was granted special status under a previous Honduran government to make its own laws. The current president, Xiomara Castro, wants it gone, and has begun stripping it of some of the special privileges it was granted.
That's why it cannot work that way. As soon as a leftist is elected (Xiomara Castro is a leftist), it'll strip away the rights granted by the previous president. Leftists have one religion: the religion of the state. And they accept no competition.
What "rights?" The rights of a corporation to exploit and pollute?
Dang. Lefties ruining this too, huh?
Let me know which right-wing state allows for private entities to forge their own laws. The closest example I can think of is Disney but even that is a huge stretch to call "making their own laws".