Bitcoin is already working well in Russia.

Power is already “snaking” away.

Software is eating the world and that will never stop.

“All that needs to happen is for the Feds to show up and the ISPs can shut it in a few keystrokes. They assuredly will.”

You’re going the way of Peppermint here. It’s really silly. Read up on meshnets and get it into your head that everything will be put into code and made increasing distributed and resilient .

“But the idea that writing a few words means anything is folly and delusion. ”

words?

Regarding debt, bitcoin is getting derivatives, so portfolios will shift and that part of finance will be eaten in turn. The sooner bitcoin gets huge, the less dramatic of a “suicide” it’ll be.

So the russian mob starts a Proof of Stake russiacoin, so what. Getting into cryptocurrencies doesn’t neccesarily mean relinquishing any control.

I’m going to emphasize this central point again: The Cathedral is caught in a global debt trap. They can’t back out of it, anyone who tried…well..perhaps they suddenly commit suicide? You can’t steal $100 T USD and back out. Esp when your mad hope of personal escape are the hundreds of $USD Trillions you’ve bet on derivatives.

“people who’ve stolen $100 Trillion and have point spread bets on over $1000 Trillion are so vested.” — they’re vested in survival .

If you don’t understand American politics [I have no idea who you are] then our politics in practice since Clinton has been the privitization of American National Finance in mutual capture. However the silent but not unknown partner at the table is: The Rus Mob. aka The Roof.

That’s what the Rape of Russia did, it not only privatized finance&govt it criminalized them. Harvard, Wall Street, Finance, Treasury, and RU oligarchs all sitting down at the same table in the 90s.

The Mob doesn’t go away ..ever…for instance that’s why in Cyprus and indeed over Ukraine no personal accounts were ever nationalized.

These people can’t back down no matter what statutory exit you give them.

Make it work in Russia and I’m going to take it seriously; Challenge a serious State.

All that needs to happen is for the Feds to show up and the ISPs can shut it in a few keystrokes. They assuredly will.

You can put anything online including Law, enforcing it another matter.

What is so desperately desired is a solution that somehow snakes power away from the snakes that have it: This is delusional and not going to happen. Power is conserved with those who have it unless it is taken away. Those who have it are insane, evil, and desperately in debt..trapped in the gravity of their own vices. However there’s good news they are also craven, cowards and in the West failed utterly the first step of tyranny [esp one dedicated to plunder and harm] of co-opting and cutting in their police and military. Both of whom especially in America but in the West in general – but esp Merica – made enemies of with endless nonsensical prosecutions, investigations and the rest. All the while stealing in the open and snarling and hissing at the police and soldiers.

That’s the good news.

The other good news is John Q has awoken and armed – arms race in fact.

So there’s the good news and the bad news.

But the idea that writing a few words means anything is folly and delusion.

There’s no pudding without the blood, there are no proofs for this pudding as it does not and cannot exist.

Computational governance is actually one of the few things that I think can stabilise the mess that is India. I’ve thought on similar lines and like the idea (and your exposition of the same) very much.

@VXXC

The key is Moldbug’s old term – Formalism.

Formally, the republic is run for the benefit of the people. Atleast for the US, I could imagine the following. Let’s say that a democrat from silicon valley rises up and presents computational governance as the core of his platform. Unlike obamacare, this guy knows the development and has ideas on how the data structure will actually work. Someone with enough knowledge of the law to deflect the obvious barbs at him and realize when the critiques are too subtle to be understood by the public. His main campaign points are – what have you to hide? and stirner’s excellent sentence “Rights are for citizens, not for bureaucrats or politicians”.

Incidentally, these ideas are not very dissimilar from what arch-progressive David Brin writes in his book, the transparent society. These are tools that can be used by either side, I guess.

It is, slowly but surely as I said. (There’s a startup every other year that tries to do it, but gets too ambitious too soon.) It’s starting with just getting the law itself online and publicly available. Germany is doing the best job of that so far. It’s complicated, but inevitable and not impossible. Once it’s all online, we’ll feed it into a Watson doctor-turned-lawyer and ask it natural language questions, and then we’ll get slowly less haphazard and more official.

Cryptocurrency is a financial weapon, and just like military robots, a country would have to be suicidal not to at least be buddies with a country that is highly invested in it.

Yeah, “dumb” was harsh, more “short-sighted”.

I mentioned the hard-fork thing. Kill all the programmers you want, as long as the miners are running (even the hidden ones on the other side of the world) the network has value and will survive at least as a black market enabler. And with Proof of Stake or Burn, there aren’t even any miners to find and destroy. The entire point of things like ethereum is to create a platform for distributed automated corporations that become more distributedTM and automatedTM every day.

Human Nature is what’s very traditional about my objections.

May I ask why this hasn’t been done yet? We’ve had the ability to do so for decades.

Codifying Law is indeed Traditional and also ancient, if the Who’s mean to govern the Whom Justly. And yet it’s not done here in USG Land. Hammnuburi, Alfred, Justinian, Napoleon all did it by hand..yet we don’t. It’s not can’t, it’s don’t, it’s won’t.

In fact our Laws are so numerous that man and presumably his magnificent counting machines are unable to count – I mean merely know the number – of our Laws. They’ve tried 4 times since 1982, the last time was 2009. They just tried to count the felonies in 2009 and gave up at 5,428. The mere statutes are best guess more than 300,000.

Cuz Power and Human nature dats why. Merely being technically feasible and indeed commonsense means…almost nothing. The almost is the only important part as it points out an interest by parties in having a legal system with more laws than can be counted. Power. Power distributed amongst so many that the lawmakers themselves can’t be counted that is to say administrative law since the New Deal, that is to say the Cathedral has many priests and this apparatus of yours takes away their power.

You might consider a bit of a apology to poor Peppermint. His objections are well founded. Your use of “dumb” towards them isn’t.

I will actually be amused if Bit/Shit/Zero money goes anywhere as the subject of money [the world’s out of it for years and is engaging in global bankruptcy settlement politics] is extremely sensitive. Any actual progress will summon not an angry but increasingly hungry Cthullu. He’s nasty enough on a well fed day..but a hungry Cthullu?

I believe someone mentioned “hard-fork” would be necessary to Hijack BitCoin. Yes. A hard fork inserted in any part of a programmers anatomy should be sufficient, indeed the very sight of the fork should bring instant and groveling compliance.

Or they could just threaten a villification campaign on twitter. Which seems to be sufficient to bring any level of groveling surrender and flight among the Titans of Tech.

Now this is delusional, the issue is Power, the levers are Force and Gain.

What’s so untraditional about code slowly yet completely codifying existing law?

Tear down all fences and replace with software said the defenders of tradition.

Law is older than 500 years, older than 5000 in fact. Probably at least 50,000. If not as old as the voicebox [400,000] and the band of hunters who would have had to have rules about spoils of the hunt, women, killing, stealing at a minimum.

Flesh beats code. And will continue to, if Flesh is replaced a Machine will stand and say Steel beats Coding, and so on.

One should avoid the Carribean in terms of private banking.

Yes but you want to get rid of everybody to advance everyone.

This sounds familiar. I’ve read for instance Han has long experience of same.

I’m afraid it just doesn’t work for us, if it ever works at all.