What do I think about network states?

The Ochs-Sulzberger family, which owns The New York Times Company, owned slaves but didn't report that fact in their 1619 coverage.

We don't just want to take existing maps of social connections as given and find better ways to come to consensus within them. We also want to reform the webs of social connections themselves , and put people closer to other people that are more compatible with them to better allow different ways of life to maintain their own distinctiveness.

Team BTC (meaning, both actual Bitcoin maximalists and US rightists in general) has some positive values, but their outright hostility to collective action and order means that they are incapable of building anything. 

Generally, I am used to the Big Compromise Idea being a leftist one: some form of equality and democracy. Balaji, on the other hand, has Big Compromise Ideas that feel more rightist: local communities with shared values, loyalty, religion, physical environments structured to encourage personal discipline ("keto kosher") and hard work. 

2) Creating new regulatory institutions that might be more efficient at serving the same priorities as the status quo.

New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for helping the Soviet Union starve Ukraine into submission, 90 years before the Times decided to instead "stand with Ukraine".

The truly interesting stuff is the governance innovation: using network states to organize in ways that would actually not be possible under existing regulations. 

This does not mean require some absolute "na na no one can catch me" ideal of sovereignty that is perhaps only truly accessible to the ~5 countries that have highly self-sufficient national economies and/or nuclear weapons. 

Team CCP can build, but they are building a dystopian surveillance state that much of the world would not want to live in. 

If governance ideas are regularly implemented in network states, then we would move from an extrovert-privileging "talker liberalism" to a more balanced "doer liberalism" where ideas rise and fall based on how well they actually do on a small scale.