When people talk about the importance of centralization, I believe that most people take the existence of an open internet for granted. Especially bitcoiners. And especially the kind of bitcoiners who talk openly about welcoming the collapse of American political institutions.
Perhaps the most important thing to consider when you’re engaging of the mental gymnastics of what could happen in a counterfactual scenario where the US government were to collapse — which I see a lot of people around these parts suggest would be some kind of deliverance, and that freedom would blossom from every town, city and hamlet, and the winds of bitcoin-fueled prosperity would sweep through and bring spontaneous order to all.
There’s so many suspect assumptions in the view that the collapse of Western liberal democracy would lead to something better that it would be impossible in enumerate in a single note. But perhaps the most important one to consider is: why are you so sure a tyrannical regime wouldn’t take its place? Also, why are you so sure that you can use your internet-bound money to resist them?
As far as that second question goes, I’d suggest that such a regime seizing control of the internet in the US in a comprehensive way would not be difficult. In fact, there’s only two or three major broadband providers in the US left today. Secondly, about five companies, who run data centers and cloud services control over 80% of the daily traffic in the internet. Thirdly, the global interconnects to and from the United States which run through undersea cables could be *easily* severed if there was political will to do so.
My argument to those who are so confident we could sit back, grab popcorn, and enjoy the unwinding of Western institutions, and hand out copies of the bitcoin whitepaper and wait for emergent prosperity to kick-in, requires taking so much for granted that it makes my head spin.
I put this kind of thinking on the level of say, liberal reformers who made the terrible mistake of lining up behind the Ayatollah in the Iranian revolution as a consensus opposition leader. Or more contemporaneously, the liberal protesters in the Arab Spring who successfully brought down governments, only to find themselves on the wrong side of the power vacuum.
I mean I think it’s kind of nuts that some people think I’m a “contrarian” when I say things like this, but I’ll make the point anyways: I think bitcoin’s success is pretty tied to the continuance of liberal democratic governance for all the above reasons.
