This is a github post that tries to pass itself off as a "paper" (because it sounds official, right), and ends with "And that can change the world". Wow that's academic and objective.
Why are we upvoting delusional content that lacks a real understanding of behavior, politics, and law? Because if you want to change the world, a basic understanding of that might help. He could start with Plato and Xenophon and the Trial of the Generals and then progress to Reddit if he thinks crowds are wise and democracy without flaw.
The next time there is an Arab Spring, the people will be able to replace their leaders with code.
Is this serious? It's every bad Silicon Valley joke wrapped up in a document. In the real world, politicians, and armies, and people with power that you don't even know of have been ruling the world for a long time. If you want to break that you gotta be more realistic than quoting a science fiction book and a Github paper.
To create something scalable enough to run an entire nation with no representatives, we created two cutting edge technologies to serve as the foundation of the platform
Is it reasonable to make this statement without showing any code? They seem to have not scaled beyond writing thought on paper. How do you go from that to "leaders being replaced with code"? Is there not a massive gap to be bridged before such audacious claims are made?
Why isn't there more skepticism of something like this?
HN has political clusters which are mappable (and if someone would like to help me in that venture I'd appreciate it, I can be contacted via gmail).
There is a very strong libertarian contingent, a moderately strong centrist contingent, a moderately strong socialist contingent (ie the Scandinavian social democracy model you point to) and small extremist contingents consisting of a few fascists and a few communists. Some of the libertarians are anarchists/voluntaryists but being anarchists they reject labels :)
I see a lot more libertarian ideology appear on the front page than anything else, politics-wise, even if there's reasonable arguments in the comments. From blockchains to direct democracy to universal income, and a while back, an incredible amount of writings on property rights for some reason.
As much as I can see those topics as being enablers of Libertarian ideals or as being "libertarian"-themed, I don't think the majority of their proponents on HN promote them for those reasons.
I must say, I did miss the discussions/writings on property rights. Would have been interesting, as it's one of the two fundamental tenets of Libertarianism.
Universal income is not a libertarian idea, it's socialist.
Block chains are a technology, nothing more, nothing less. Big banks are using them and they have nothing to do with libertarianism.
Direct democracy is orthogonal to libertarianism. Structure of government is independent of desired role of government. Calls for direct democracy have surged from liberals in the US after the second wrath of the electoral college.
The only thing that is libertarian is writing on property rights.
Universal income as a replacement for all current Government social support functions is an idea that came out of libertarian-leaning ideology - it's a really, really good method of removing the Government's role in social support, and forcing people to take control of their own lives. Socialists support a universal income only so far as it doesn't massively affect various support functions the Government currently performs - i.e. they don't really support it, since that's untenable.
PoW and PoS blockchains follow libertarian ideology and fundamentally libertarian ideas of how the world should work - "no ability for the Government to see what you're doing and tax it" is pretty much the rallying cry of its proponents, or it was about three years ago when I was into it. (Oh, along with a healthy dose of "companies can do no wrong, and if they do, it's your fault".) The political goal is to remove the Government's (and therefore the banks') role in trade. Centralised "blockchains" as used by banks are irrelevant there, and shouldn't even use the same word.
Direct democracy is, unfortunately, something that heavily overlaps with libertarian ideology - again, it severely shrinks or removes the role of Government in political decision-making processes.
> Universal income [...] came out of libertarian-leaning ideology - it's a really, really good method of removing the Government's role
I don't think it's meaningful to credit the idea to a single ideology. It's an idea that has popped up many times, in many forms, over time. I first came across it as a tool to ensure basic human dignity for all, which is more important to me than silly discussions about "big" or "small" government.
> Socialists support a universal income only so far as it doesn't massively affect various support functions the Government currently performs
That, too, is an overly broad statement. The Socialists I know who oppose universal income all do it (a) because they think that labor is a value in itself, and that everybody should work, or (b) because they somehow think that a basic income profits Big Capital. I haven't heard any say that they think five government support programs are better than one government support program.
Making everything about government size seems to be a US thing. These are not discussions we usually have in Europe. (Except, sometimes, about the EU itself.)
Nearly all of the articles supporting basic income have nothing about repealing other social programs. If it did start as libertarian it has definitely been hijacked by socialists to increase government entitlements rather than optimize them.
"blockchain" is not the same thing as decentralized currency. Don't conflate the two. The block chain just enables decentralized currency.
Also, block chains don't prevent a government from seeing what you are doing or levying taxes against you. Pseudononymous currency is only one of the interesting things you can do with block chains.
Why are we upvoting delusional content that lacks a real understanding of behavior, politics, and law? Because if you want to change the world, a basic understanding of that might help. He could start with Plato and Xenophon and the Trial of the Generals and then progress to Reddit if he thinks crowds are wise and democracy without flaw.
The next time there is an Arab Spring, the people will be able to replace their leaders with code.
Is this serious? It's every bad Silicon Valley joke wrapped up in a document. In the real world, politicians, and armies, and people with power that you don't even know of have been ruling the world for a long time. If you want to break that you gotta be more realistic than quoting a science fiction book and a Github paper.
To create something scalable enough to run an entire nation with no representatives, we created two cutting edge technologies to serve as the foundation of the platform
Is it reasonable to make this statement without showing any code? They seem to have not scaled beyond writing thought on paper. How do you go from that to "leaders being replaced with code"? Is there not a massive gap to be bridged before such audacious claims are made?
Why isn't there more skepticism of something like this?