What do I think about network states?

Blockchain communities continue to stand for openness, freedom, censorship resistance and credible neutrality, at a time where many geopolitical actors are increasingly only serving their own interests. This enhances their international appeal further: you don't have to love US hegemony to love blockchains and the values that they stand for. And th... See more

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

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.

A corporation is not a root: if there is a dispute inside a corporation, it ultimately gets resolved by a national court system. Blockchains and network states, on the other hand, are trying to be new roots. 

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

But blockchains are the only infrastructure system that at least attempts to do ultimate dispute resolution at the non-state level (either through on-chain smart contract logic or through the freedom to fork). This makes them an ideal base infrastructure for network states.

Team NYT basically runs the US, and its total lack of competence means that the US is collapsing. 

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. 

I'm generally in the first camp; I am concerned about the prospect of both the West and China settling into a kind of low-growth conservatism, I love how imperfect coordination between nation states limits the enforceability of things like global copyright law, and I'm concerned about the possibility that, with future surveillance technology, the w... See more