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Independence from Government

May 20, 2020

I think one big reason people like cryptocurrencies is their independence from government. It makes me interested in what else could be run independently from goverment. Aside from financal oversight, theres quite a bit actually.

  1. Financial assistance
  2. Medical care
  3. Courtrooms and Law - a public agreement of rules that everyone needs to follow. Oversight when there is a disagreement.
  4. Protection from violence. You could argue that 3 and 2 are subcategories of this.
  5. Public infrastructure
  6. Public education.

Cryptocurrencies are in some ways, a response to people being fed up with needing the government to oversee their financial lives. I think this is shortsighted - if the government can’t do this, what will happen when you do need assistance, or need to pay taxes (and use what they are spent on), or need to take out a loan or get social security or have some medical emergency - its always a two way street. You can’t cherry-pick.

Making this list has made me think about what a replacement for other parts of it could be like. Number 4 for instance. If we didn’t need the army and the police force, what would our world look like? What if we decentralized protection. What if every person had super-powers and always was strong enough to defend from theft, assault, and disease. Or at least if disagreements with respect to these things could be mediated in a different way vs resorting to the government. In some ways, this is what gun ownership is. People prefer to depend on their own guns vs waiting for the governments guns to come along. No matter how weak you are physically, your gun is always more powerful than a physically superior assialant. It doesn’t protect against disease, and brings all sorts of other trouble, but it does help your independence from the government a bit. In this way cryptocurrency is very similar to gun ownership.

Public education -> Online education. However there is no accredidation. Public infrastructure -> Im not sure. I don’t think there is an alternative really. Perhaps trains/buses vs cars is a small version of this. Courtrooms and Law -> I don’t think there is a replacement.