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Both Szabo’s smart contracts and Nakamoto’s Bitcoin replace the possibility of defection (trust) with the possibility of malfunction (operation). They are transcendental critiques, or virtual mutations, of the *grounds* of their respective objects. 1/3
They exclude the possibility of intervention in order to exclude the possibility of injustice at a particular moment, obviating it. But this also excludes the possibility of justice being carried into this moment from another. Can we produce an on-chain justice oracle? 2/3
Can we simply add voters, or smart young men, or some system that will re-introduce the possibility of defection into the operation of these technologies? Can we avoid capture by existing economic or future political movements we dislike? Can state fiat be excluded from this? 3/4
The critique of mechanism-design volunteerism that cryptoeconomics entails has some bad news for you. All the way down. No amount of gesturing to the Code of Hammurabi or making Galloway’s Error can escape that attractor. Good intentions are just its Hawking radiation. 4/5
To make these gestures in the name of trying to reinstantiate liberal bourgeois legal justness theory (or whatever) But On The Blockchain is fractally bankrupt centrism. To do so with the angle that one’s ideas or position will be central in administering it, well............ 5/5
(If you want to render this in slightly more standard language, replace “operation” with “reliance”...)
