arvin on Nostr: In other words, the point of bitcoin is simply to break the diminishing cost of ...

In other words, the point of bitcoin is simply to break the diminishing cost of violence as entities/states scale

quoting
nevent1q…fmza

It might not be so simple as “because people can still be violent, Bitcoin doesn’t fix state theft of income and wealth.”

It’s important to remember that the govt racket doesn’t work because they go one-by-one and steal from everyone. That’s economically impossible. It works because of the economics of violence at scale. All they need is to sell a half decent story and violently attack just a piece of a percent of those who openly defy them, and everyone else “voluntarily” accepts it because they feel it’s impossible not to.

If the problem was merely the cost of one-on-one violence multiplied by millions of people, then the state would never be functional as a system. It would cost more in lives and enforcement than they would get in “profit” from the plundering.

But it isn’t. Instead, there is a negative feedback loop on the scaling of violence, because our wealth is physically trapped (our home, our community, our businesses, our belongings, etc). And then so much more of our wealth and income comes from other large, trapped institutions and systems that are centralized and even *easier* to control.

In other words, the bigger they are, the less violence they *actually* have to commit in order to obtain the proceeds of what would otherwise be an enormous amount of individual violence.

The two biggest ways to undermine this economic reality is to dematerialize wealth, and hyper individualize ownership.

Remove the ability to cheat the money, Turn the negative feedback loop into a positive one, and literally everything we think about how society is structured will have to change on a long enough time scale. Wand you’ve taken the single most potent means of wealth confiscation.

Remove the limitation of a vast portion of our wealth to be geographically trapped, locked into a particular set of map lines, and you’ve taken a most important element for trapping wealth inside their system.

Remove the large, centralized, public, and geographically trapped custodians and institutions for service provision/income/trade/etc, and you’ve cut the strings they hold over the individual’s livelihoods and savings.

And the cumulative outcome doesn’t need to be that violence is non eixtstent, which is obviously absurd. But merely that the cost of violence *increases* - even if only by a fraction of a percent - as the state gets larger and more distant from the citizen.

All we have to do is break the negative feedback loop of returns to violence at scale, and it will force everything we think of as “government” across the world to change irreversibly. It won’t be a choice, it’ll be an economic certainty.