"Make raids costly" -- In "The Art of Not Being Governed" historian James C. Scott describes the context of medieval Southeast Asia, where the topology created a division between "Hulu" -- mountain people -- and "Hilir" -- valley people.

Governments could control the hilir people because they were tied down to wet rice agriculture, thus were a fixed target for taxation and control. In contrast, "hulu" people were nomadic and lived at higher elevations, thus making raids costly in terms of time, manpower, energy, etc.

Encrypted comms, Bitcoin, etc -- these are "hulu" tech. They raise the costs for State intervention, potentially on a mass scale.

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And for reference, I live in the mountain of West Virginia, costly raids are at their costliest, around me.

Mountain people have always been the ungovernable misfits, all over the world. They still are.

Actually; they tend to be the raiders. Take over controll, become decadent, and at some point get raided by a new generation of hill/mountain people. The valley people are the beta cucks that adjusted to this dynamic and just accepted their fait of getting new rules from time to time

Man I love that author! 'Seeing Like a State' changed my world paradigm on a dime. Being "illegible" to the state has been one of our mantras since