Nick Szabo  🔑

Huge difference between preferring that people be kind and relying on it.

But there's a correlation between leaders who criticize the manners & governance of global blockchainers & leaders who don't understand or don't like trust minimization. Global blockchains are on opposite end of scale from the we-all-hug-each-other villages we instinctively love.

I think this is a false dichotomy - you can want to reduce the amount of bad behavior and also can want to design systems that don't break when people are terrible.

I agree that they are not logically inconsistent, I just observe the correlation between people who focus on the former with those who neglect or have contempt the latter.

The reverse also holds -- a successful global blockchain attracts people who don't trust each other & thus more likely rude. So saying "Bitcoin maximilists are rude" is actually a complement to Bitcoin. If they think it's an insult to Bitcoin they don't understand blockchains.

This does not mean, of course, that it is not in fact an insult (a mostly inaccurate and unfair one, IMHO) to Bitcoin maximilists as individuals or as an ideology, since both individuals and ideologies generally benefit from being polite.

I don't know the context of the quote, but I think it's wrong to assume that trustless systems will always have Wild West behavior. Just like the market allows enemies to become trading partners, trustless systems can create civility where there was none, through common interests

I agree that civility will often increase over the long term as relationships are formed, but that's a process limited by our fixed-sized brains, and meanwhile people need to securely send money to each other.

Question & this is not to stir anything up, but bitcoin maximalists do seem quite rude. If the desire is for mainstream adoption, will these attitudes be helpful? Or is this on purpose to show people that even if people are mean, blockchain still works & doesn't care? Curious

They should get on twitter. LOL. I love the way @NickSzabo4 weaves history into things. Very important. But most of those people just want to make money and don't really care about the outcome (I'm in business/finance). Community is important and perception matters.

Community in the sense people usually mean it excludes all but a few friends and should be considered an attack. Best global governance is a loose uncommunity who mostly share a certain core ethos but don't otherwise depend on each others' goodwill or politeness.

We already have sloppily organized coalitions of people with competing interests, patched together by good intentions. It’s called government. If Blockchain isn’t offering something different then what’s the point?

All of these attitudes is why the governments and banks aren't really scared. If we can't come together as a group with like intentions and objectives, there is no chance for real disruption or adoption. People will make money and move on to AI & Quantum. Most people are into $

The beauty of real blockchain tech is that we don't need those traditional prerequisites of social success to operate on a global scale, and indeed unscalable sociality can be counterproductive to making the best use of this technology of leapfrog social scalability.

There are a few, but alas too far between.

rudeness is subjective in every person, that said bitcoin maximalists are not rude per se, maybe to some extent of the públic. People are not rude because they are bitcoin maximalists or this or that, its just a perception of society, weak thinking leads to this conclusions.

Yep, often "rudeness" is just an accurate statement that offends somebody's inappropriate sensibilities.