Open ctapang opened 2 years ago
ctapang
commented
2 years ago I think your idea for L0 > L1 + L2, which you presented during the Solana BreakPoint Conference, would be the best follow-on chapter to the network state chapter. Our priority should be to protect the freedoms we already have in democratic societies and further spread these ideas through political firewalls by osmosis.
goognin
commented
2 years ago +1 here
We can create a lot of fancy virtual networks, but them gatekeepers of the “physical nation states” will enforce you to collaborate with them.
Google is banned in lots of countries, TikTok got issues in the US, many local governments are trying to extra-tax tech giants, some are physically chasing the network state’s leaders (Snowden), etc.
So: yes, you can build a network state, but you have to be too complex for the old governments to understand how to deal with you before you’ll get enough “citizens” to be able to negotiate on equal position.
shelby3
commented
1 year ago @ctapang
Just a reminder that we are still physical beings.
@goognin
We can create a lot of fancy virtual networks, but them gatekeepers of the “physical nation states” will enforce you to collaborate with them.
Steganography. Jurisdictional arbitrage.
Legacy protocol, 1 MiB blocks Bitcoin will function over for example short-wave radio broadcast, with solar powered mining in the Sahara desert. Orphaned block rate increases though with latency which has security ramifications for example in the percentage of the network hashrate needed to for example invoke the selfish mining attack. Although the selfish mining attack probably makes no sense from a more holistic economic analysis such as sunk costs and the Nash equilibrium of Bitcoin’s power-law distribution of wealth.
The Non-Aligned Movement (← click for global map) can’t be controlled by the West anymore because of their complex network of trade. Western military and sanctions are effectively impotent against the former colonies. The West (NATO) is going to be left without a price-elastic cheap supply chain source and will implode. The Western debt bubble was sustained by the Cold War peace dividend. That now ends. It’s over. Stick a fork in the West. Chaos and pestilence looms.
@u32luke
From my perspective, I see this idea of network states as being a decentralized mechanism for increasing the degree of social coordination in a world where large scale coordination is challenged.
Agreed with refinement. The naive, narrow conceptualization of ‘social’ would not emphasize the economics of the posited, ostensible ascension of the maximum division-of-labor (broken link archive), ascension of knowledge accretion, cooperation/coordination around the forces of the Coasian Theory of the Firm, and the hypotheses about driving forces for friendship and that communities larger than our Dunbar number limit, require religion to scale cooperation in which we don’t reify our bond to every parishioner or broad ecclesia. Yet all collectives eventually collapse under their inertia, the fact they’re power vacuums and power vacuums can only be captured by the most ruthless. For example, liberalism started as a noble ascension to reason and devolved to a “point deer, make horse, 指鹿为马”, memebot, virtue-signaling, leftist-holiness-spiral, self-immolation lead by the maniacal, megalomaniac leaders (e.g. Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum) erecting scapegoats for the collapsing (debt-based) reality of linear-thinking, holier-than-thou Puritanical idealism. Without any new paradigm to escape that morass one might posit without any other options that the U.S.S.A. will split into two societies: the low IQ African Liberia cannibalism one they created which literally eats all the leftists alive and the high IQ, Christian one that remains stable.
CoinCube (B.S. Applied Math, M.D.) postulated and now with my nuanced reinterpretation that we view Religion, State, Technology as mechanisms for scaling human cooperation. Various forms of governance and religion have formed to maximize cooperation within the limits of the epochal, contemporaneous technology reality. We’re on the cusp of a radical shift in the technological landscape, which will presumably precipitate new forms of governance and ideological norms.
My aforelinked seminal essay on the Rise of Knowledge, Demise of Finance argued that the nature of and organization of capital itself is undergoing a radical paradigm shift, because brains and their knowledge accretion aren’t fungible.
So in my interpretation, the Networked State (Book) makes the salient point that it becomes cost ineffective for the current Weberian model of the State to use force when all it can do is Whac-A-Mole the irrelevant, dispersed, amorphous, needle-in-a-haystack tangible capital — what I had figured out circa 2013 in my aforementioned essay. That form of governance will eat its dying Industrial Age, concomitant top-down, fact-free followers amplification, memebot social networks, and that includes India’s and China’s price-elastic cheap supply chain source of mass produced goods. Paul did not assert in Romans that the government is always good.
@ctapang
The objective of any network state is to expand its membership. The challenge is to expand this membership beyond ideologically erected firewalls.
This will not be a paradigm for billions to ascend to “heaven.” The Christian monasteries and feudal manors preserved through the (non-Byzantium) Dark Age west of the Hajnal line, the accumulated knowledge as recorded in books.
The chosen ones come from the future-past parallel universe, not of this world. Information Is Alive being fundamental to the humanity’s cooperation and ascension, I propose the inverted commons taking the form of the one commandment virtuous, agnostic defender of the books or IOW in our digitally-networked paradigm the defenders of the weak-subjectivity, permissionless, timestamp ordering (c.f. an explainer) — perhaps the first self-annealing religious ideology (i.e. religious in that we fervently bond seven-degrees-separated) that hopefully isn’t a subterfuge-seeking power vacuum.
Yet we have a technological barrier. Let’s remember (or if you haven’t heard the news and all the proposed “improved” mining difficulty algorithms will break) that all scaling forms of Nakamoto proof-of-work are doomed (i.e. there can only be one proof-of-work chain in any shared universe) and proof-of-stake is doomed to Weberian, power vacuum capture by the tragedy-of-the-commons of its necessarily, inviolable power-law distributed stake because there’s nothing-at-stake in the absence of a Nash equilibrium to make it so. Or as Vitalik Buterin noted that altruism is an undersupplied public good, e.g. the Prisoner’s dilemma that other stakers know their stake will be censored if they don’t censor as stipulated by the higher authority. Immutable, legacy protocol Bitcoin is a panopticon Great Harlot and self-immolating, winner-take-all paradigm. Monetary capital is not and can not abstract over knowledge aka knowledge doesn’t reify into accumulated wealth — saplings grow to mature oak trees but oak trees don’t grow to the moon is a metaphor for example how whale monetary capital (aka “the 1%”) aims to enslave the faster growing, more knowledgeable fledgling dolphins and minnows capital. Vast accumulated monetary wealth inherently forces one to become either corrupt and/or statist — or abstractly restated, “How do we ameliorate the ill-effects of the natural, inviolable power-law distribution of fungible resources?”
Thus actually there’s no consensus mechanism nor scalable technology to enable the proposed commandment yet. The fundamental Second Law of Thermodynamics’ inexorable trend to maximum entropy won’t allow for an inexorable single-total-order, consensus ledger of timestamp orders. We’ll need to accommodate multiple parallel universes (i.e. information transcends spacetime and the speed-of-light thus the special relativity light cones collapse without defensible obfuscation analogous to a cryptographic, modular math trapdoor aka friction aka lack of omniscience), i.e. like real life it’s always relative to the observer and nobody is omniscient. But if so then does politics and the power vacuum of religion emerge in the outcome thus nullifying its raison d‘être? Or do the forks retain internal, benevolent Nash equilibrium, forked only by necessity against for example attacks on its objectivity? (this unpacks into a more detailed discussion)
Personally I’d only end up the priest, the warrior, the nerd, the philosopher, the synthesizer, the reductionist or the messenger, if someone else more capable doesn’t act. I get sucked into this by my desire to live free as a bird. Perhaps you can relate? I don’t view myself as exceptionally capable (and getting older, precisely six years Elon Musk’s elder) although I’m founding stock. I have a very strong drive to live without oppression, a voracious curiosity in the quest for knowledge and a longing for a viable framework goal. I’m delighted to discover somewhat belatedly herein there are others pushing these concepts forward. I reject the reactionary, regressive, antediluvian faction of the Dark Enlightenment’s delusory (MAGA-esque) proposals to cross-the-rubicon backwards to a monarchy form of governance that solved a different problem that existed in the radically different, mill-horse technological era.
Apology for my prolix writing style. I decided to dump here some assimilation-synthesis I had been planning to write down; and this mark down format and maximum post size is more amenable to the Telegram group I’ve been voicing on recently. There isn’t blogging platform I haven’t been banned from, or a block chain which hasn’t been subverted (e.g. Steem), which I could have linked to. Meaning I don’t trust my post to not disappear after a while, so I am not going to apply the effort.
Hi Balaji, I see here the germination of a great idea. Just a reminder that we are still physical beings. Yes, we can buy land or a condo anywhere, but the physical location of that property is limited to where a geographic government allows it. It would be difficult to locate an "island" of a crypto-based nation in mainland China, for example.
A network is any group of people whose actions are interrelated by some means, physical or ethereal. A network can be a group of people who believe in some idea, say a god (religion) or an ideology (politics). At any one time, each of us can be doing something and if that something pertains to a group, we are part of that networked group. Even without the internet, this grouping is possible: for example, during the Christian Reformation (Protestant Reformation), there were groups who have read Martin Luther's books and were influenced by him such that now they belonged to a network of pro-reformation people. In other words, as Niall Ferguson observed, the idea of networks preceded the advent of the internet. Imagine a world without the internet but with print technology: this idea of a network state would still be possible, and in fact it is partly the reason for how the USA got started.
The point is that the physical world cannot be discounted. The metaverse is important and I think I get that; but without a physical substrate, any network state is less impactful. We have to aim to get our ideas through physical barriers like the Chinese Great Internet Firewall because if China remains powerful and occupies Taiwan, there is no network state that can help that. However, if we can get through the Chines firewall barrier, we can show the common Chinese citizen that there are other possibilities than what their communist party has been presenting to them.
The objective of any network state is to expand its membership. The challenge is to expand this membership beyond ideologically erected firewalls. Let's form network states that do not take for granted legacy governments that rule the physical world. Part of the objective should be for network states to eventually rule the physical world and not just rely on the given state of geographical nation states.