This is essentially the conclusion I came to a long time ago. The anarchocapitalist utopia so many early bitcoiners espoused is basically unachievable in an adversarial world. Dismantling a modern state creates a vacuum of power that will be instantly filled by surrounding powers, and the experiment in non-governance immediately dissolves. The same game theory applies to the fiat arms race. Unilaterally disarming your credit printer immediately allows a money-printing adversary to outspend and overwhelm you. It is naive to imagine a scenario where every global actor suddenly decides to cooperate to advance a largely unpopular socioeconomic philosophy that has never succeeded at scale.

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Interesting. I had serious misgivings about the most extreme opinions I came across in the early days as well. Then I read a bunch of Austrian economics and got indoctrinated ๐Ÿ˜‚ At this point I'm finding myself somewhat more in the middle ground. Expecting an overnight revolution still seems incredibly nieve, but gradually building parallel systems which subvert the power of central planners still seems achievable. There's also a thought in the back of my mind about the speed at which many technologies were adopted in my lifetime and how that could extend to bitcoin as well, but that's obviously theoretical today ๐Ÿ˜…
umni's avatar
umni 2 weeks ago
There are so many more variables to counter these arguments basically coming down to, under appreciating the scaling in size and speed of various trends. Regardless this is one of the most interesting topics worth thinking about.
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