Mottoi : “The creativity that allowed for Bitcoin to be created could only happen in a world that accepts legal pluralism, only in a world where you reject the status quo.”
For those unfamiliar with what precisely “legal pluralism” is, the term can be used in the following two senses :
i) The juridical, wherein a legal system deals with cultural diversity by recognising the laws of distinct cultural groups as binding for their members in lieu of a broader alternative, or
ii) The empirical, wherein individuals in a social setting are confronted by different and often conflicting behavioural norms and requirements, and choose between them as the case may be.
Over time, a given actor in a legally pluralistic environment will intuit heuristics and develop preferences for one set of laws over another depending on the specific situation using (largely) unconscious weighing and re-weighing of external factors to guide his course of action, not unlike a wave finding its way through a sand castle depending on the strength of the breeze, the design of the castle, the depth of the moat, etc. If our actor here were to constantly, and irrespectively of ulterior impetus, attempt to balance the variously applicable forces of the assorted cultures that necessarily overlap everywhere outside of tribal goatfuckistan, he’d be mentally crippled by the impossibly expensive behaviour, which is precisely why he won’t do it unless absolutely necessary. It’d be like an ocean wave hiring a local man with a water bucket to pick up some of his water and pour it on a specific spot on the beach just to knock down one particular castle wall that was looking at the wave funny. I mean, how would the wave even pay the man back ?ii
So when faced with his neighbour’s willing wife or a $100 bill on the sidewalk, our actor is not about to draw out a table of pros and cons with which to arrive at an informed decision – it’s pretty much always more profitable as well as more energetically economical for him to act now and rationalise lateriii – so it is and so it must be for as long as human cognition is an evolutionary spandrel wrapped in its own quagmire of ex post facto “understanding” that’s really little more than an overdeveloped machine for narrative storytelling.
Anyways, it looks like Mr. Law-talking-guy is right on the money, but likely not in the way he intended. While he appears to be advocating for multicultural societies that foster “innovation” and encourage “revolutionary” technologies, as with so many other post-post-modern idealists, what Bitcoin achieves in praxis is even more wonderfully iconoclastic than he could begin to appreciate.
Bitcoin, in case he (or you) didn’t know, is sound money, and as such, allows for a far more conscious legal system to develop, one in which gentlemen of proper standingiv may dispute and contest contracts, charges, and so on and so forth, all as a matter of public record, relegating “the people” and their attendant emotional problems to the unwritten half of history, while leaving those who actually write history to take their best shot at precisely that. Bitcoin, then, with its fully-formed legal system – complete with public forum, punishment gazette, and medium of exchange, just as is required of any self-sufficient economy – has neither care nor need for the soi-disant “legal” or “justice” system of fiat states, preferring to leave such cattle pens to the suitably more bovine inhabitants of the planet.
Since 2011, an emerging schism between physical geography and the Internet has developed, whereby, more than just choosing from an existing set of mores and cultural axioms, Bitcoin began to fashion its own set of rules and regulations from the scavenged relics of former empires – those both long dead and presently dying – while filling in the necessary gaps needed to accommodate the newly digital nature of human existence.v This cleavage has since grown and will continue to grow, ever-wider and ever more irreconcilable, and it means that Citizens of Bitcoin will, before long, enjoy the benefits of diplomatic immunity in many a jurisdiction as local courts will prefer to leave gentlemanly matters to gentlemen, mostly on account of the costs.vi
Fiat and Bitcoin can and will continue to come into direct and sometimes indirect conflict with one another, but the system with the stronger stock always wins, and against the spiritually weak and debt-addled Western scamocracies, it’s not much of a fight these days (just ask ISIS or the Chinese.).vii
As to Satoshi and the felicitous Bitcoin – that which now provides the world with the context it so desperately lacked before – he built directly on two decades of foundation work laid out by David Chaum (who developed DigiCash), Adam Back (HashCash) Jackson+Downey (e-gold), Wei Dai (b-money), Nick Szabo (Bit gold), and Hal Finney (reusable proof of work system). Not quite ex nihilo (nihil fit!), but putting these pieces together and keeping the project quiet enough until it had gained a critical mass of network security and critical level of monetisation was, if we’re honest, two parts genius and three parts luck.
But that’s a story for another day.
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- Said by some Law-talking-guy, somewhere, sometime. His name isn’t important, but he probably sounded a bit like this before he “retired” to academiae.↩
- Wavecoins, perhaps ? And you thought Bitcoin was a metronome !↩
- Humans are, after all, not rational but rather rationalising, even if “economists” have yet to fully grasp this subtle difference. Whither homo economicus ? Crushed beneath the weight of reality, where he belongs.↩
- ie. You’re in assbot‘s L2 WoT and can voice yourself in
#bitcoin-assets#trilema. This group is properly known as people, firmly implying that, yes, other things are not – they’re merely “people” (or more usually, “the people”) and need not be treated with any particular degree of respect, nor even recognition of existence, lest they become confused as to the height needed to ride this particular roller coaster called Adult Life.↩ - In the words of
a self-aware adult who lives in the world :Bitcoin is ready to start over, in the sense that for years it already has. Enumerated procedures of relief and no general remedy has been the rule in Bitcoin ever since forever. Copying this is not optional, but mandatory. Just like making a signature and registering it in the WoT is not optional, but mandatory : for the SEC, for “the press” and for everyone else. Not like Bitcoin distinguishes between any of these anyway.
So… yeah. The “Justice System” was just the closing act. Bitcoin’s ready to start the show over.
- Quite simply, without the power of coercive taxation, large states lose the ability to contest the power of wealthy individuals on an even approximately equal footing. Without coercive taxation, the effeminate and epicurean nation states become the broke-ass bitches they should be, and wealthy individuals – assuming they’re still productive enough to hold on to it and aren’t just “socially mobile” – are left to their own devices. Absque argento omnia vana, you know.↩
- To prove the point that, indeed, the USG is all too fallible and largely composed of enweakened mongoloids, The Most Serene Republic already has a few of their maggot-infested heads on spikes around our fair fortress with more are on the way. And we’re just getting started.↩
[…] not propose anything whatsoever. It’s not their place. Not everyone has a voice, not for all the rationalistic wishing in the world can a mouse become a man or a burning bush […]
[…] 22. 21 Inc. and Comcast sitting in a tree, d-e-r-p-i-n-g. 23. Wences whacked, Xapo zapped. 24. Legal pluralism as it relates to Bitcoin. 25. Zcash will crash just like Gavincoin, Garzikcoin, XT, SegWit, and Classic. Now you know. […]