Blockchain is Politics

A Balaji text

Politics is about changing the rules.

When people say 'they’re playing politics', they’re saying the other party is playing the metagame.

Playing the game means accepting the rules. Playing the metagame means playing to changing the rules.

Are blockchains political?

The activist sees them as changing the rules. They’re new governments that you can opt into. They provide alternative property rights & contract enforcement.

BUT the normie (usually a late adopter) sees them as legal ways to make money. They’re not focusing on the rule-changing aspect!

Relatedly, elections are a meta-metagame. They are the game to determine who gets to change the rules of the game.

Like the game Nomic, where the point of the game is to change the rules.

A game in which changing the rules is a move.
In many ways, excessive focus on the metagame is bad. Do we want to keep constantly changing the rules?

However, if you think about software…the current version of the script you are running is “the rules”.

So coding is also about changing the rules. It was “if X then Y”, but now it’s “if X then Z”.

We already knew people who’re in crypto mainly to make money are more reluctant about politics than people who’re in crypto for ideological reasons.

But why? Because they’re not focused on rule-changing. Rule-changing in fact scares them. They want to work in an established legal order. And that is reasonable.

There’s nothing wrong with making money of course, and it’s totally rational to want to avoid an environment where the rules are constantly changing (both because of the uncertainty and because of the associated conflict).

Moreover, there is a continuum between the “businessmen” and the “activists”.
Still, this helps me put a finger on something.

People who don’t get crypto don’t get that it’s a way to use tech to change the rules. "

Balaji Srinivasan. Original here.

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O que isso significa? Vamos analisar alguns exemplos:

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