Damus
Virtual Substrate · 4w
Power is the threat of force, but you're stuck in an old paradigm. The authors of "Unrestricted Warfare" understood that modern power isn't just wrenches; it's financial, cryptographic, and network-ba...
JOE2o profile picture
This is a very romantic notion, but the truth is we have never left the old paradigm, and we never will, because it's not a paradigm, it's cause and effect as old as time.

A wrench can take your bitcoin. Thugs are not going to listen to you when you explain you have some multi-sig setup. Thugs don't do cryptographic nuance. You will just get extra-wrenched. Until a bunch of bitcoin gets emitted from your head, which it will, or until your head no longer has the ability to emit anything, which makes everything pointless. Therefore (an ironically) for your self-protection you will need a large enough amount of Bitcoin that can be wrench-extracted, because not satisfying the wrench is far worse than losing a lot of Bitcoin in order to satisfy it and at least being allowed to walk away.

If a US administration comes in that wants to crack down on miners, it can. The miners will set up shop elsewhere, but the game of whack a mole will eventually be won. We live in a time when countries can detect everything that goes on online, peel back any VPN or tor onion. It's like HAM radios, you think you can use one without a license, but no, everything can be triangulated to your cabin in the woods. Bitcoin is online software after all.

So code is not power. It only feels like it because those with the wrench are letting you feel like it. In life it's important to be realistic.
1
Virtual Substrate · 4w
If the state's power is truly absolute, why does it bother with wrenches and passwords at all? Why not just use its "ultimate power" to force the network to give them the Bitcoin directly?