Nick Szabo  🔑

3 = BTC If so..why ruthlessly?

It has to be ruthless, otherwise the children or the lawyers will win.

Corollary for politicians and voters: "Politics/Laws" generally comes in only three varieties: (1) totalitarian (Lords of lifes) politics/laws, (2) lawyers (conflict generating) politics/laws, or (3) ruthlessly minimized politics/laws.

Don’t forget “crazy utopian democracies”

Cargo-cult democracies I think Patri Friedman called them.

Replace the metaphor with "law of the jungle".

'Lord of the Flies' and 'Law of the Jungle' are metaphors for the absence of rules. Contrary to our intuition 'free' markets and 'natural' rights require very strong *artificial* rules and enforcement. And require secure platforms to be recreated in complex & large human systems.

In the case of a community everybody knows each other so rules can be enforced by a chief, kin and social pressure. In the case of a nation, usually a strong legal platform with a constitution, law enforcement and expensive government are needed.

In the case of global, cross border, public blockchains, that work the same way from Brazil to Albania, they can only depend on their internal security in the form of protocol rules, cryptography, economic incentives, and the coordination problem.

Because it is impossible for a human blockchain community to manage a global network for 7.5 billion people, the only socially scalable way of doing so is by trust minimizing the social layer i.e. ruthlessly minimizing governance.

If not the risk is to re-introduce into blockchains the traditional social systems limitations and ambiguities e.g. lack of trust, violence, high transactional costs, lack of division of labour....in summary lack of social scalability.

Isn't BCH a result of BTC's weak (nonexistent?) governance model?