In a comment, Michael Strong writes,
As the crypto-libertarian generation increasingly is of age to raise children, nearly 100% of their children will be raised outside of establishment institutions. Many of these people are expats or digital nomads. The movement is increasingly international, with the brightest, tech savvy, and increasingly wealthy people from around the world simply leaving legacy institutions behind. Competitive governance is here.
The grievance study majors reigning over the rotting corpse of government institutions in the 21st century will find those institutions bankrupt within a decade or so. This world will not be glamorous or fashionable. Young people won’t be attracted to a life in this world. Already no one really wants to teach in government schools.
Speaking of the process of demoralizing teachers, Gregory Hansen writes,
I am no longer in the classroom. I won’t see the next generation of ideologues sweep through campuses. However, as the political Left endlessly moves the goalposts after each Pyrrhic victory, I hope the moment will come when a critical mass of faculty and students refuse to play the game. It is difficult to convey the toll taken—semester after semester, year after year, decade after decade—by a teaching environment in which a single criticism or correction or incautious remark can produce an explosion and formal or informal disciplinary proceedings. For almost 50 years, I’ve had to be on the alert, recognizing that conflict with any student other than a heterosexual white male could cost me. Most students wanted to learn. I developed radar for those who didn’t—for those searching after grievance. This sounds exaggerated. It is not. Many students with preferential status now work the system in multiple ways, sometimes with little awareness of the special treatment they receive.
I skimmed his essay. Reading the whole thing would be too depressing.
Strong paints a much more optimistic scenario. Call it cryptopia. It goes like this. Suppose the price of Bitcoin goes up by a factor of five. Then some Bitcoin owners will be billionaires, who can start their own utopian libertarian cities. Once bright, ambitious people can leave legacy governments behind, they will never go back.
This is the ultimate use of exit instead of voice. So far, exit strategies this ambitious have not worked, but we will see. I think it will be hard to really make an alternative financial system safe and effective. And I can imagine that if enough talent exits legacy governments, those governments will change from being stationary bandits to roving bandits, and then the cryptopias will have to worry about how to defend their people’s wealth.
Do I hear echos of Ayn Rand? There simply is no way to dissociate from the material world and hide in the digital world devoid of adverse consequences associated with bad actors. Trustless protocols magically remove uncertainty and leave us whole and infinite.
The lesson here is not intellectual sophism as advocated by libertarians and progressives. Reason alone does not counter progressives despite Any Rand’s gallant libertarian heros. I suggest people look to all revolutions of the type we see in American Universities and among American intellectuals for the end and new beginning. Look to Mao and Pol Pot to see how they story ends and how new beginnings arise.
My take on crypto:
I like the spirit behind the movement. However, I mostly consider it an attempted work-around because smart people have concluded our problems are too hard to solve and the political system is too messy to get involved with. So we write some code and hope something changes for the better.
It will fail because at its core it’s simply a way of avoiding our problems.
“It will fail because at its core it’s simply a way of avoiding our problems.”
I agree with this in principle but I think it is also much simpler. Honestly, it will fail because it doesn’t actually do what it’s promising to do. Neither now and most certainly not in the future.
I was at a party a few weeks back and talked to a friend that is in cyber security. I was puzzled by reports that the people who got paid in Bitcoin for hacking the pipeline had been tracked via their Bitcoin and had it recovered. I thought the entire point of Bitcoin is that couldn’t happen.
He said that Bitcoin can definitely be tracked, it just takes a lot of work, so most people don’t bother to do it. If the incentive is strong enough, it can be done.
This.
Also, let’s not forget the thousands of btc miners in China that are being wiped out, forced to shut down, or move because of their supposedly untraceable digital currency activities. Digital currencies are digital but are still bound by basic rules of the physical world, and basic rules of the physical world is how governments operate and coerce.
The case of China shutting down their miners is actually something that cuts both ways.
On the one hand, yes, it shows a vulnerability of the bitcoin design in particular to very strong, very smart, very serious national governments intent on disrupting use of crypto institutions by going after hard-to-conceal physical operations in their jurisdiction.
On the other hand, there have been innovations which are much less computationally intensive and would be extremely challenging to interrupt in this manner, or, to put it another way, probably only China could and would do what would be necessary to thwart it.
Furthermore, what we can infer from China’s actions is that the state recognizes in these alternative crypto institutions a clear and present danger to the CCP’s capability to completely and exclusively control and manage any social phenomena, as it deems necessary and appropriate.
What that means is that the senile and decrepit institutions in other, more developed countries, are equally at risk. However, those other countries won’t recognize this early enough, or be ready, willing, and able to do enough to stop it.
And what that means is “opportunity”. But it is an opportunity for “creative destruction” that inherently goes all the way to the top, and as the wise man said, if you aim at the King, you best not miss.
This is getting a bit far from the topic, but that was not the point of Bitcoin, which was designed with a very open ledger in which transactions could be scrutinized with the simplest forensic accounting techniques. Indeed, from the very beginning, the folks trying to use it for illicit transactions had to go to special efforts to try and launder and obscure the inherently traceable track record. These folks created mixing and other services to do so, but even so, just like with money laundering if there is solid bookkeeping, these only increased the effort and cost required to track something down to its origins. And so also almost immediately, the usual beltway bandit companies headed by former senior official bigshots cashing in on their ‘public service’ started making fortunes by selling the government “deanonymization services” in which giant supercomputers could unravel the veils weaved in the blockchain, if the price was right, thus, if the target was important enough.
Some attempts were made to come up with layers on top of Bitcoin which would do the mixing automatically – e.g., Zerocoin from 8 years ago – and, if enough people all did it, you would need prohibitive amounts of computation to unwind any particular person’s activities. For various reasons, these attempts did not work out.
The answer of course was to come up with Bitcoin alternatives which were inherently much harder to trace, because the blockchain itself would be protected with the same encryption steps as those used to secure the transactions. This is what Monero and some others do, and precisely why, if you dabble in the sector, all the big players which make it easy for ordinary people to have account and trying hard as they can to not run afoul of the law will *not* let you deal in them, at least, not yet. At any rate, while these services make dealing in crypto very convenient, the whole point is that if you are willing to take some risks about the lack of certain protections, then besides paying the fee to the number-crunchers validating transactions, you don’t technically need *any* traditional financial services intermediaries to get things done.
Right now, there is a whole deep rabbit hole and steep learning curve to really get into all this and know how to do it right, safe and with enough good opsec such that unless you a big drug dealer or top tier hacker it is just not worth a nation-state’s time to even try to go after you. But a lot of this dust is going to settle by the end of the decade.
“But a lot of this dust is going to settle by the end of the decade.”
In all likelihood, no noticeable dust will settle and in a decade no one will be talking about it.
Best case scenario: makes the VH1 the “I Love the 2020s” episode.
Rubik’s cube anyone?
Context here:
https://youtu.be/8puN23JT9m8
(Full disclosure: I’m still struggling 40+ years later to solve the Cube. My feeble mind can’t do it. Maybe just don’t undo it in the first place? Boom!
But, I’ve already solved for the Bitcoin equilibrium…same as the GameStop equilibrium. See you on the way down!)
@Kurt: I’ve been reading people be similarly dismissive towards crypto for about nine years now, since bitcoin passed $10 (now around $30K).
Without getting into the object level argument, do you have any good explanation for the meta question of why whatever mechanism in the implicit model you are asserting will quickly bring about “the ultimate correction” of a zero price equilibrium hasn’t done so already, and indeed, at any point in the last decade despite the 1,000,000% appreciation? That’s just one cryptocurrency too.
People are putting real money on the line and building new digital mining operations with dedicated power plants big enough to power whole cities and long-term energy contracts to supply them.
Some of these are publicly traded companies, so you could make a fortune shorting them and riding them all the way down to bankruptcy. Just like Amazon or Tesla or housing.
Now, the usual argument is this is all some kind of tulip mania and the bubble will pop down to zero any day now. Ok, but why not yet? What makes you so confident in “just the next few years”, that makes 2021 obviously different in this regard from 2015?
@Handle
Likewise, I’ve been waiting for bitcoin to go mainstream over the last 9+ years based on all of the libertarian marketing efforts. Turns out that like 99.9% of the population doesn’t care. And, it’s not even close.
Look, you got the verdict in the George Floyd matter wrong as well as the disposition of the McCloskey matter.
Why might that be? Copy/paste that logic to the Bitcoin matter and you’ve got a pretty decent first approximation of where you’ve gone wrong.
Handle, why didn’t the dot.com bubble pop in ’98 instead of ’00? Mass delusions can last longer than you’d expect, but the blockchain bubble will inevitably do just that.
It is impossible to decide if you have a grasp on the topic or not based on the vague comment you wrote: what are “our problems” that they’re avoiding? The problems they’ve chosen are to replace the centralized Big Tech platforms and national currencies with decentralized tech like Diaspora, ipfs, Bitcoin, and so on. You could instead argue their tech isn’t very good and get no argument from me, but those are certainly large problems worth solving, as the legal system is gearing up for the same problems.
Crypto technology depends on a reliable and accessible internet and on reliable, affordable electric power. Both of these are under attack by authoritarians, including in the Western democracies.
Maybe in the past, an English major was respected as a serious academic pursuit. In today’s culture, it is not. Today’s culture views it as a blow off major or a remedial option for people who can’t or don’t want to pursue something serious. The author complains of lowering academic standards of rigor in a field that today’s culture doesn’t care about. Today’s adults are passionate about political fights; they are not passionate about maintaining the rigor or discipline or quality of English studies.
This is different in fields like computer science and engineering and math that are considered serious and important. There is still a ton of awful politics in those fields, but society also considers the academic content as serious and important for serious careers and serious research.
As a STEM grad student at a top rated public U, the course content, the textbooks, and the grading are very serious, high quality, and rigorous. Students are super smart, and stressed out about learning lots of demanding material and completing assignments and prepping for exams. However, outside of that, the schools are loaded with dirty politics. Particularly the Administrative staff. The Dean of Engineering is more of a politician than a serious engineer and she talks like someone on CNN.
Also, great comment by Michael Strong, but that’s another thread 🙂
Doug Flutie says hello to the libertarians. Good luck to you guys!
https://youtu.be/ZeExa2R2nf0
I think we might see a seperate set of institutions develop (similar to what has happened to schooling in California) but complete exit is imposible for too many reasons.
Also I suspect that people are overestimating the intelligence and sanity of potential bitcoin billionaires as a group.
LOL! How naive. You might not be interested in them, but “the grievance study majors reigning over the rotting corpse of government institutions in the 21st century” will be interested in you.
“Suppose the price of Bitcoin goes up by a factor of five. Then some Bitcoin owners will be billionaires, who can start their own utopian libertarian cities. Once bright, ambitious people can leave legacy governments behind, they will never go back.”
Apart from a billion being too little, doesn’t it seem rather more likely that the newly minted billionaires, like so many before them, will be coopted into existing society? For instance, we have a lot of fresh billionaires from IT, internet, big tech in the last two or three decades but no utopian libertarian cities at all.