While this is true, outside of some specialized historical critique fields the most common usages of this term are in forums/literature of the libertarian and free market anarchist bent.
In those places its a short hand for the idea that government as currently practiced in the west is clearly bloated and corrupt beyond repair, and the only reason every doesn't agree is that they are bamboozled by some Polly-Anna version of history.
That statement is not clear and needs further backing up to many of us, who do not subscribe to the "Whig History" model but also don't think governments are objectively bad in all instances.
Whether you knew that subtext or not, you used the term in the same way, to argue a similar philosophy, so it's not at all surprising that someone called you on it.
I didn't know that. I haven't seen this term associated with libertarian thought.
> The political process differs in this respect.
On this we agree. I don't see how layering software engineering on top of politics will ever simplify politics.
If you cannot implement people's political preferences in your contract language, then your contract language will not be used for anything of substantive governmental or political importance unless you have the guns needed to impose your crypto-dictatorship.
If you can implement people's political preferences in your contract language, and your contract language is used for political or governmental purposes, then people's political preferences will be codified -- as far as possible -- in your contract language.
Which means that in order to participate in governance, people will have to understand both their preferences and also the contract programming language and its underlying runtime. Being an active citizen becomes strictly more difficult. To be very clear about it, people's preferences will not have changed. Consensus will remain a messy, complicated web of compromises that are difficult to reason about and implement via judge, let along codify for a computer.
And all of this won't even achieve your political motives, unless you're planning on building some sort of anti-Whig-ideology static analysis into your contract language, I guess.
(Which, frankly, I hope you do, because that would be kind of funny and cool.)
Can you elaborate on this? I don't understand the reasoning behind this. Why do smart contracts have to implement political ideologies in order to have a substantive impact on the world? Why can't they have an impact by raising the cost of legal enforcement of over-reaching tax mandates and regulatory restrictions, and of mass-surveillance, and thus shifting the balance of power between the individual and the state, toward the individual?
> Why do smart contracts have to implement political ideologies in order to have a substantive impact on the world?
They don't. The can -- and almost certainly will -- remain primarily a speculative investment vehicle for technophile speculators and occasional currency for black markets. Maybe, even probably, crypto-currencies will turn out to be useful technological tool for some non-speculative businesses as well.
However, you claimed:
>>> Societies have gradually grown more unfair as the political system has strained under their growing complexity... This opens the door to manipulation by demagogues and special interests
I'm simply responding to that claim.
> Why can't they have an impact by raising the cost of legal enforcement of over-reaching tax mandates and regulatory restrictions
Because -- believe it or not -- some people actually approve of some or all of those mandates and regulations.
This idea that regulation and taxation is an objective negative result of a broken process is impressive self-delusion.
Not everyone shares you political preferences or beliefs. Your political beliefs are not objective moral truth.
So. Why in god's name would people who disagree with you agree to use a system that actively undermines their genuine political preferences?
How does people approving of these mandates/regulations (which I dispute, but let's go with it) invalidate my claim?
If the cost of enforcement increases, regardless of the popularity of the law in question, it stands to reason such laws would become less common and/or less effective.
>So. Why in god's name would people who disagree with you agree to use a system that actively undermines their genuine political preferences?
Just to clarify: you're suggesting people will actively avoid adopting cryptocurrency in order to ensure the laws and taxes they support remain effective? If that's your opinion, we should agree to disagree. Time will tell who is right.
Seriously? You realize that's delusional, right? Most people -- even most right wing folks! -- aren't libertarians.
The set of people who think that blockchain is the right way to organize society is astonishingly small, and they're basically all speculators.
People may not agree on which regulations they want (environmental regulations? drug regulations?)
Or what taxes should be spend on (education? infrastructure? protectionist tariffs? military?)
Or how taxes should be leveraged (regressive? progressive? on capital or income earners?).
But for each regulation, each tax, and each thing taxes are spent on, you can find many people -- in many cases, even a majority of people -- who support that regulation or tax.
People like to talk about how they don't like regulation or taxation. And maybe their empty rhetoric has you confused. But in fact, people are self-interested. They will crucify you for doing what they say they want if you stop paying their teachers, or let their roads erode, or take away their social security, or close the military base their best friend's local economy revolves around, or build a sewage treatment plant in their backyard.
Once you get past empty rhetoric and into specific contracts, building consensus is enormously difficult. Much of the complexity in modern laws and taxation policy is essential, not accidental, and arises from millions of varying opinions and priorities and emotional investments.
My neighbor was a hard core anarcho-libertarian. Hated the police state and thought all taxation was theft. But he also called the police to have them write tickets every time we parked in the street even a minute past the time when street cleaning started. People aren't rational; they're self-interested. Everyday comforts always dominate broad ideological "beliefs". "The state is evil, but I hate dirty streets".
If you want to use computer-implemented contracts for law, you'll need to be able to describe this essential complexity. IMO that's going to be difficult or impossible, and laws will change often enough that the overhead will become enormously expensive. Orders of magnitude more expensive.
> Just to clarify: you're suggesting people will actively avoid adopting cryptocurrency in order to ensure the laws and taxes they support remain effective?
Well, vacuously.
I don't think that we'll ever have occasion to even test this claim, because no sovereign state in its right mind would ever adopt a legal or financial system in which a computer bug or Chinese supercomputer could result in constitutional crisis.
You really think the average American would be OK with throwing out the constitution for some computer program they don't understand? Or ditto for any other country? To be blunt, you're completely out of touch.
What I'm actually claiming is that your claim -- that piling complex (and apparently buggy!) software on top of contractual law somehow reduces the complexity of the legal system -- is terribly ignorant of the essential complexity that laws codify. Sorry to blunt. 99.9999% of people really don't give a fuck about what your gpu says.
(The fact that contract languages can't even come close to expressing many of the common private sector agreements and financial transactions that aren't so addled with political concerns should be more than enough evidence that this approach won't skill to the level of nation-states.)
> Time will tell who is right.
Several millennia of time already has.
We've had contracts and ledgers for ages. When a majority of people find themselves in a situation they don't like, they rarely shrug it off and say "oh well, that's the contract". They go to ballot boxes or, more commonly in the arc of history, start shooting people.
What makes you think people would resign themselves to subjugation to objectionable instructions from your GPUs when they're clearly unwilling to subjugate themselves to objectionable instructions from other people's graphite and pulp?
If anything, crpytocurrencies have negative rhetorical appeal for the vast majority of the population. And when the largest examples are hacky javascript interfaces to speculators' bank accounts, I can't really blame them.
Comments of this nature aren't constructive. It's better to restrain the urge to tell your correspondent that their belief is delusional, and simply explain why you disagree with it.
>Most people -- even most right wing folks! -- aren't libertarians.
I think most people don't think deeply about the policies they support, and the implications of those policies. Most people don't think much about the nature of the law, for example. [1]
The complexity of the political system results in people supporting policies that if they had the time to closely examine, they would not. Our political system is geared toward decision making based on shallow assessments and emotional gut-reactions, because it does not give the average person the ability to meaningful analyze the issues that they base their vote on.
But in any case, I already said that for the sake our debate, let's accept your claim as correct. There's no need to try to expand this debate more than is necessary.
>I don't think that we'll ever have occasion to even test this claim, because no sovereign state in its right mind would ever adopt a legal or financial system in which a computer bug or Chinese supercomputer could result in constitutional crisis.
I have no idea where this suggestion that a sovereign state would replace its Constitution with a smart contract came from. Can you please go back to my comment and re-read what I suggested would happen?
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/enforci...
Explain to me how you would go about changing either of those protocols?
And yes there are lots of altcoins but ethereum very quickly is going to replace a good chunk of how things are transacted. And a non-profit without some kind of policy for baked in leadership change sounds a lot like a dictatorship to me.
In the case of Ethereum, the Turing Completeness also makes it so that each contract is like a government in and of itself, which any party is free to design to meet their own preferences.
Is that not blatantly a majority imposing themselves on the economy through majority dictate?
Usage of the term "Whig history" is not confined adherents of a particular ideology, and does not require one to have/not-have any particular set of beliefs to use it (other than believing that the history of some institution is not a story of progress)..
In other words, it's not comparable to "comrade".
>Appealing to this fact in a thread about cryptocurrency is beyond ironic.
There's a subtext that you're missing here, which is that the political system doesn't work when voters don't understand the system, which is unlike most domains, which manage complexity effectively.
For example, most people don't understand how microprocessors work. But this is addressed through an effective and spontaneous process of delegating responsibility.
The political process differs in this respect. The delegation process is baked in, as a result of built-in mechanisms that actively resist change. This prevents the kind of readjustment that occurs in other institutions. Meanwhile, those affected by policy are a captive audience, which eliminates a major feedback mechanism that exists in market-based systems.
These two factors result in the system as a whole not evolving toward greater efficacy. On the contrary, it has the potential to evolve toward greater exploitation.
>Political power will flow from the arrangement of bits only when the arrangement of bits determines who controls overwhelming military force. And not a moment before.
We'll see.