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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
we correctly identify legitimacy as the proper concept under discussion at the end but we're still oscillating between multiple senses of the term and it still feels colloquial. legitimacy in the eyes of public discourse is different than protocol-level legitimacy.
membership in the political community of a blockchain also works differently than in the nation state metaphor. we buzzword "consent of the governed" but is that actually the general theory of legitimacy you're operating under? and what would it mean for a validator or miner to consent?
the reason it matters is that i predict you'll run into the same mess that liberal statists run into when trodding that line, and that you can't have the intuitive pleasantries and full moral force of consent while connecting that to the discrete actions that actually drive things
the closing paragraphs make rhetorical sense, and rhetorical sense alone. which is kind of how i feel reading these political-philosophy-as-metaphor type posts always are. very little substance it's just gestures at familiar things
like highkey hobbes would be killer here!! don't just say 'leviathan' and smugly walk away!!
oh god im getting baited into reading more cryptobro articles someone stop me
okay but credit where it's due this one was more well-cited and raised considerations that weren't objectionable on their face (they go hand in hand, naturally)
btw he actually handles a description of rights here to my pleasant surprise. of course it falls apart a bit when trying invoke the normative force but the thin descriptive attempt is something i suppose
i can see a vision for how you get to something useful with architectural rights though, you'd just have to be fastidious and consistent in its use. something like: [constitutional networking] protocols define a set of actions a user* is able to perform to interact with the network.
this definition is codified through the code that everyone actually runs, and is purely descriptive. it is not based on an actual constitutional document or written specification (the implementations are more authoritative than the spec!)
these set of actions one can perform are called architectural rights. btw this also means that anything malicious one is capable of doing is a right, which is fine! i just thought i'd point that out. it also means no one can really complain about their rights being violated, unless in case of an
attempt to change what code everyone runs, which would tautologically be true. updates would be about what rights you get swapped out.