The Future is Lawless
A couple days ago I wrote a post about how regulation of crypto is impossible. I got quite a bit of pushback to this claim for obvious reasons. I think @yabapmatt summed it up perfectly in his comment:
They definitely CAN regulate crypto, I think what you mean is that the regulation will be ineffective for those who care to get around it, which I would argue is the case for a lot of existing regulation (such as drugs, like you pointed out).
Regulation just means telling companies what they can and cannot do when it comes to cryptocurrencies. Specifically, it will most likely be telling any exchanges that operate in the US that they cannot list a large number of the tokens they are currently listing, and then that will tell other US institutions what cryptocurrencies the government says that it's ok for them to invest in.
Regulation is much more of a corporate thing than an individual thing.
Hm, yes, exactly.
So when I read a comment like this I'm seeing pretty much zero friction between what I have said and this sentiment that appears on the surface to be saying the exact opposite. "Regulation is much more of a corporate thing." Yep. So from my perspective, this is not crypto regulation. This is just more banking regulation. Par for the course. Crypto is not being regulated. Corporations/banks are. We are saying the same thing. I'm just coming it it from a very different perspective.
Crypto is the next Gold Rush.
What happened during the California gold rush? People on the East Coast straight up traveled all the way across the country, risking their lives and uprooted everything to find themselves in a hostile lawless landscape where anything could happen. There were scammers (bandits) and danger around every turn. The risk was high but the reward was higher. Crypto is transitioning the entire world into the next gold rush. There aren't going to be any rules. A crazy segue to anarchy is coming.
This is a very difficult future to imagine at the moment because crypto is small and has very little power compared to the legacy systems. However, the writing is on the wall. Crypto scales exponentially larger than the legacy systems before corruption sets in. Corporations will scale into DAOs. Entire governments will be founded on DPOS voting (or something similar). These governments will be more powerful than existing governments and eventually the legacy systems will all be replaced with the new stuff.
What does that mean?
Well it means crypto cities and communities will start popping up, and they are going to be ushering in the ideology of crypto itself. KYC will go away. Anyone will be able to buy a house or buy a cell phone plan or open a bank account (or be their own bank) without having to identify themselves.
That's when all this Chainalysis nonsense becomes completely worthless. Can't track Bitcoin or anything else if users aren't sending money to a KYCed bank account. Even if you could how could you find them? Their address isn't on file anywhere. They won't even have to use a real name to navigate this new society.
Crypto is ushering us into a state of lawlessness.
We can see it happening already. Look how many scams there are compared to how many people actually get held accountable for their crimes. Doesn't matter. The high risk is worth the reward. This is one thing the naysayers simply can't wrap their head around.
It's very easy to look at crypto and be like, "Wow, look at all these scams and all this garbage." So many DEFI rugpulls. So many worthless NFTs with zero utility. But what the naysayers don't get is this simple fact: "How are these scams so profitable?" "How are their so many of them?" The obvious answer to these questions is simple: Crypto is so exponentially valuable on a fundamental level that it intrinsically subsidizes the scams and all the garbage. The garbage only gets flushed down the toilet during the bear market's 80%+ retracement.
So when I say that crypto is impossible to regulate, I'm actually coming at it from a perspective that goes much deeper than that. Not only is crypto impossible to regulate, it's going to destroy ALL legacy regulations and rules except for the ones that communities choose to live by on a local level. That's a lot of diversity in terms of the rules from location to location. A return to city-state governance is inevitable given this trajectory. A severe Balkanization across the entire world is guaranteed to happen given the value of crypto in combination with the very definition of decentralization.
DAOs are unregulable
It is not possible to govern a Decentralized Autonomous Organization from the outside because it already has, by definition, its own form of digital governance. This completely defeats imperialism and the ability for power to be centralized in a given location. The members of such a DAO can be located anywhere on the planet, and much of the activity that takes place will simply be on the Internet itself.
Milestones to lookout for:
We are going to see many many examples of this play out in real time. For the most part, DAOs are going to completely ignore intellectual property laws, instead opting to make the claim that data can not be owned and everything is open-source. Brands will be stolen and co-opted and there's nothing anyone can do about it. This is torrenting and pirating moving on steroids.
For example, a DAO could create a Star Wars video game or movie. They can then proceed to allow anyone to play the game or watch the movie. No one can stop them, and the currency being used gains intrinsic value from this development. It will be trivially easy for DAOs to profit off of the IP of others without being to take them to court. Who would they send the letter to? The developer of the thing could easily be anonymous, and even if not their address can be hidden, and even if not they could be in a country that won't take the cease and desist order seriously.
And even if the people who make the thing are taken to court... that's totally irrelevant. The content has already be given to the entire community. It's impossible to take it down because no one owns it and it's been freely given to everyone.
Another thing to lookout for is when DAOs become bigger than the biggest corporations (or at least close to it). That means a DAO has to have a million members strong or more. That's when the crazy stuff will start happening. These people will not be told what to do by the imperialists. They've had enough of imperialism and authoritarianism for one lifetime.
This is only temporary.
The Gold Rush can only last so long. Many seem to think that it is already ending, but it hasn't even started yet. The world will continue to decentralize until every single legacy system that exists today is gone. Every government, every corporation, every bank that exists today will not exist after this transition is complete. The only way crypto can scale up is if it bulldozes everything in its way.
Time is relative.
This could take fifty years easily. Fifty years is a very short period of time to completely disassemble a thousand years of centralization. Again, this is a difficult future to envision because crypto is so small and weak, but I only see it getting stronger (even now during the bear).
That's potentially 50 years of slipping farther and farther into complete lawlessness and anarchy (more likely that catalyst events occurs randomly and huge changes happen all at once). And yet this future will still be more than worth it because massive value is being created seemingly out of thin air. There's no reason to think that the scams are going to slow down. In fact, we must assume they will get exponentially worse given the exponential gains of crypto subsidizing their existence and the greed/desperation of users within the space fueling them.
Also worth noting that networks that have been around for a long time will be seen as the safe havens from all the 'garbage' that may or may not make it. In ten years, networks like Hive and Bitcoin (or literally any other coin still alive) will be the place people go when they are playing it safe and just want something with a reputation.
Military
Every city-state has a military. This is a big milestone to look out for as well. What happens when the crypto-militaries form alliances? It's safe to say the legacy systems are going to be extremely threatened and throwing lots of propaganda against these things. Given a decentralized architecture, it's possible to defeat the military of a crypto city-state, but it's not possible to take control of the infrastructure therein or to upend the government and install puppet-masters.
Much like Steem suffered a digital hostile takeover, I expect that one day we'll see the same thing happen within the physical world. A crypto city-state will fall, but the attack will only make the citizens richer as they cut off the attacker from making any kind of profit from them. A garrison placed inside the city with the goal of controlling it will cost more than the value that can be extracted from it. The money attack will fail.
Conclusion
Society has reached peak centralization and corruption. The Balkanization of government and money via crypto is inevitable. It is not my intention to convince my readers to believe these predictions; only to explain that this is what I fully believe will happen. This is my perspective and view of things. When I say something like, "crypto is impossible to regulate," I'm coming it it from this world-view, where crypto is going to gobble up every single legacy system it touches and become more powerful than anything humanity has ever seen (by exponential margins).
Only after everything we know is destroyed and the new systems begin to scale up will humanity enter another period of centralization and efficiency. However, by that time 50 years may have passed and we may have even colonized another planet or two. Until then it will appear that society is devolving into lawlessness, especially to the non-believers who think it's all a scam. Libertarians and anarchists are going to have a field day.
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The people who did really well in the California gold rush weren’t the ones extracting the gold. They were the ones who provided the infrastructure and tools.
HP is a source of infrastructure and tools.
This is a great point that I was actually thinking about when writing the piece.
It was much more profitable to sell food than actually collect gold.
Also gold just had less value in that area.
It needed to be shipped east where there was less supply.
It seems like more and more each day lawlessness continues to grow. Police are useless, they either have too long a response time or look the other way, so your convictions seem pretty realistic to me. Just yesterday I drove by a guy beating and choking a woman and all I could do is hope she can get away from him because police aren't going to do anything...
Love the cyberpunk vibes of all the pics too, reminds me when I was in high school and would daydream of communities set up in old Home Depot's with shipping container homes stacked up on the racks with sunlight streaming down from the skylights in between the aisles. Or old drilling platforms on the sea with a similar setup of shipping container homes... I think I was obsessed with shipping containers back then 😅
Bladerunner meets This Old House.
Lol
What a post man.It was what I think about crypto.
Lawlessness of goverment will soon disappear when people finally embrace crytpo. People think crypto is a scam. There have their reasons but how many times they will say no to crypto or hive.
We need no government to scam.To maintain regulattories military is enough.You Said well crypto and government alliance is perfect.
Thanks for sharing your thought again.
!LUV
The real scam comes from voting only to be on the losing side each time, and then having to accept decisions which go against your wishes. The best example of this comes in terms of taxation when some of our tax money goes to pay for things we voted against. The other example would be entering a state of war with another nation when we knew it would not work in our favor.
In an ideal system-- or simple adherence to natural laws-- we would vote with our money, our time, and our feet. When people see where these things go, then adjustments are made based on our preferences. If we see that things don't go our way to the point where it is a burden to be where we are, we would be free to move to places where we would be respected or even desired.
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Exactly. It's a fact man.
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Please, someone use crypto and by Venezuela from this socialist morons. That would be amazing. I hope a lot of this comes true. This Frankenstein's monster of current economy needs to be put to rest once and for all. There's too much suffering and big companies amassing things. Crypto is freedom itself and could potentially give all people a chance to live their lives without worrying about money to get their basic needs covered. I hope crypto comes in like a wrecking ball and end all those wretched and corrupt systems for good!
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That's an interesting view, for sure. I especially like the bit about the military as it's something I've always wondered about... it's an institution that changed very little over the centuries (in terms of structure, not tech obviously) so it's hard for me to picture it being disrupted, but crypto may just well do it.
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Not that I think about it, the only example of a crypto-military I can think of would be the combined aerial forces of humanity against the aliens in the climactic sequence from Independence Day (1996).
Many of the leading air forces were reduced to almost nothing, and at the same time air forces from other nations picked up the slack. Once the weak point for the aliens was discovered, the air forces operated as independent entities focused on the greater goal of exploiting the alien weakness. Rather than a centralized command structure or even a unified command structure, they all acted locally in their global effort to save humanity from extinction.
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You have said well @edicted crypto is just like the next mineral resources because with time one will enjoy what he or she has not having to bother over how to survive..
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If the new normal persists in ruling by force it is doomed to another trip through the cycle.
Until we can convince people that ruling over others through force and fear is not very classy, what we have is what we get.
Just varying degrees of enslavement to those most willing to go hands on.
This is simultaneously a great and terrible way to look at it. The entire point of crypto is that the ruling class no long has a choice as to whether they rule by force or not. It's baked into the cake this time around that they can't. Balkanization of government makes it so anyone can choose which government they want to live by.
Notice that no one implicitly writes imperialism into their constitution. The empire and threat of force come about organically outside of the stated government on paper. In the code-is-law era it is impossible for this to happen. Anyone can come and go as they please and there will be thousands of governments to choose from. They'll have to compete to offer the best deal to retain citizens.
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That presumes that the sleeple wake up and stand their ground, an unlikely event, imo.
Ask anybody you want and they will tell you that the world can't persist without bullies farming us, it's just human nature, they will say.
Freeing ourselves from others with this mindset is an uphill battle.
I hope you are right, but the thousands of years since the first two people picked up sticks to farm their neighbors rather than the land say it is more likely that folks will just install the new boss, same as the old boss, now with crypto to pay your taxes!
Most people don't want freedom, if we give it to them they will reject it in favor of others doing their thinking for them.
It's just human nature, at this point.
We need a bigger microphone, or more celebrities.
I would say that it presumes that people are going to take the best deal offered to them.
If a job on Hive pays $20 an hour and the choice is between that and $2 an hour, what will they pick?
Not a tough decision.
The assumption you are making is that everyone needs to be on board for this to work.
That is inherently false.
A single DAO with a million people in it is more than enough to get the snowball rolling.
Crypto is a quickly evolving technology competing with fully stagnant and corrupted tech/government.
It's not a matter of if but when.
Time is the only variable.
Free market in law. This is exactly what we need. 👍👍
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Rather than trying to rule others, the paradigm should shift to self-rule combined with cooperation with others. The self-rule I speak of the rule of individual over oneself. I rule myself and cooperate with everyone else; you rule yourself and cooperate with me and everyone else; etc.
When enough people reach a critical mass to go this way, it may actually go well with the cryptofuture envisioned by @edicted and everyone else here.
After all, we've tried it "the other way," and look where it got us.
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Haha. You mean to say fLAWLESS, sire? :')
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top notch
flawless
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How bad could it be ?! The present hasn’t been any better.
I haven't heard about gold rush before. I would love to know more about it.
I don't think it is easy to predict a future when crypto will take over. I cannot imagine how the world would be when identities would be anonymous and many things couldn't be traced. It feels like there would be many worlds on the earth.
Which direction the world would proceed would depend on the hands handling the particular crypto.
Assuming this prediction is correct. Yes i'm aware of how often you make bad predictions. A lot of your thoughts line up with how I see the future going. There are two things any group will absolutely need to survive 50+ years of chaos.
Organzitions that enforce your rights under whatever non-land based government you choose to live under. i call them private rights enforcement agencies.
A way to build infastructure once the easy days of getting everything from china has passed. Of cousre whatever local governments come out of china will have great production advantages cause there are facilities ripe for the picking. will need to have local ways to produce computer chips and ensure internet connections otherwise your community will be dead in the water regardless if their have money on the blockchain.
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<Yes i'm aware of how often you make bad predictions.
Guessing which direction number is going next week isn't really comparable to long-term macro trends.
I guess I should do a post on how I think entire production lines will be fully decentralized.
Won't have to worry about production when products are being created everywhere.
I completely agree, it's all a matter of time. Society reaching "peak centralization and corruption" is what has made this inevitable. We'll keep trying to break away from all the ills that has come with centralization and corruption till we break free completely.
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This is a virtual certainty. I hadn't seen it expressed in those words before, but this is true. Anything we call "Big This" or "Big That" is big enough to think of regulation as an inconvenience or just the cost of doing business while at the same time it serves as a barrier to entry for smaller competitors they see as an existential threat.
I think I know what you're saying, but I would have written it as "Crypto is returning us to a more fundamental Law.":
As long as we agree on the essentials, the details will take care of themselves.
I hadn't considered crypto-militaries before, just because I'm not sure what they would do. Most of their activity would take place on the crypto networks or in the metaverse or Internet. However, should there be any spillover into the physical world, I wouldn't even know where to begin to consider possible actions.
However, my main concern regarding cryptocurrency is the loss of electricity. Whether this happens by means of electromagnetic pulse, coronal mass ejections, or some other large-scale event, we would end up back at 1850 in terms of technology if we're lucky. If we aren't that lucky, we'll need to consider analog equivalents of things such as DeFi and communications.
Law will always exist. In some form or other, law will exist. Whatever form it takes-- legislation, dictatorial edits, Natural Law-- there will be law.
Government? That is another matter entirely. It didn't always exist, and there may come a time when government as we understand the concept won't be needed.
Just as surely as a federal political unit could never come into being without being created by states, law existed before government.
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