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since im not sleeping anyway i read pauls "practical decentralization" and like i get that it's necessary for them to do political philosophy i wish they were better at it
its a good piece for its own merits of contrast and disambiguation and the espoused philosophy may even be accurate to what they're doing, but yknow it's kind of worse for that. ill probably read the info civics things next
just so im not vagueposting: here are some lowlights.
* interesting that the purpose of protocols and decentralization are both the same thing? i feel like the relation between them deserves a lot more elaboration because primae facie that is actually very surprising co-incidence, absent explanation
like you can say one is an instantiation of another but it's not actually clear to me which way the abstraction goes, especially with the extra "on the internet" clause. and they could both be related to some larger ethical structure that binds them to the same telos, but what is that structure and
why are those concepts appropriate to it? paul could likely confidently discuss how the purpose arises historically and for whom it operates on his view somewhat painlessly, but that story doesn't fulfill the philosophical justificatory task
* this is not an entailment, but an extension, as he says, but uh, it's a pretty drastic extension. and it's discussed with like some aspirational tone but it personally sounds nightmarish. again no gesture at rigor on personal computing and while it's understandable in a piece like this,
it's also the kind of thing you'd like to see developed somewhere. minimally, a supporting reference would be beneficial. otherwise it just seems like personal impression (which it is)
* by "ideological angles" we mean "vibes"
* "rights", if you wish to call them this, work very differently in a protocol context than in the context of a state. it would actually be interesting to see your breakout of what you take rights to be for each protocol respectively because it would
circle the drain on what you're getting at when you use the term (and it would probably be more approachable for you than the more abstract work arriving from the opposite end of things)
to draw out the above prompt: "assignment" is a key term in the above. who whom? with a state it's fairly clear, with a protocol it's more interesting
paulfrazee.medium.com/the-rules-to...
okay wait this is basically engagement with many of the points i brought up above on the more practical side (not rights though, other political concepts), but it's all the more frustrating lol
first of all the maddening cup-shuffle game of "where does Power REALLY reside?" miners, validators, clients, oh my
the section "blockchains as state" was so funny because we flip flopped from state as in stateful to state as in nation state, i had to bewilderedly re-read it a few times. i'd have to think more from a philosophy of law pov if i agree property ledger maintenance is such a core function of states
but then he seems a little lost, "power" is kind of a meaningless buzzword here but "monopoly of violence" not so much, and is not synonymous with violence simpliciter