> He imagines a world in which crypto political and legal processes are necessarily going to go…

Summary

The provided text discusses the philosophical and practical implications of implementing Nick Szabo's "law" in blockchain governance, weighing the benefits and drawbacks of minimizing political and legal processes in crypto technology.

Abstract

The author reflects on the idea that crypto governance should minimize political and legal processes to avoid negative outcomes, a view attributed to Nick Szabo. This perspective is grounded in a conservative social philosophy that values stability over change, as change is seen as more likely to result in negative consequences. The author acknowledges the potential risks of inaction, citing Bitcoin's blocksize issue as an example of a missed opportunity that led to financial losses. The text also critiques the notion that Szabo's law is anti-political, suggesting instead that it aims to secure specific political outcomes and may stifle debate. The concept of Schelling fences is introduced as a means to protect non-participants and minorities by providing certainty and limiting the optionality of action-takers. The author calls for specific examples of proposals that would violate Szabo's law and questions the alignment of such proposals with the public good. A list of potential blockchain governance actions is provided, ranging from protocol changes for public good funding to decisions affecting software autonomy, inviting the reader to consider their stance and the implications of majority rule.

Opinions

The author believes that while change can be beneficial, the potential for negative outcomes is significantly higher, especially when change is not well-targeted.
The author disagrees with the strong stance that crypto governance should necessarily avoid political and legal processes, using Bitcoin's blocksize controversy as a counterexample.
Szabo's law is seen not as anti-political but as a tool to ensure preferred political outcomes, which the author considers to be an anti-social approach to blockchain governance.
The author supports the use of Schelling fences to balance the tradeoff between the optionality of action-takers and the certainty for those affected by their actions, emphasizing the protection of non-participants and minorities.
A variety of specific blockchain governance proposals are presented without explicit endorsement or criticism, leaving the reader to ponder their potential impact and alignment with Szabo's principles.
The author questions the reader's confidence in their views aligning with the majority and their willingness to accept decisions made by the majority, even if it goes against their consent.

> He imagines a world in which crypto political and legal processes are necessarily going to go against either his personal preferred political outcomes, or against the public good, and therefore must be minimized.

I think that’s putting things too strongly. It’s a general bedrock of lowercase-c conservative social philosophy that while change can be good, there are many more ways for change to be bad than good (I hope this is easy for people to believe in 2019), and so randomized or even not-super-well-targeted mechanisms for achieving change are likely to lead to more net bad than good. Now I personally can see that it’s not axiomatically true that doing nothing is safest, especially in the context of a changing environment (for example I continue to believe that Bitcoin’s *failure* to raise its blocksize by a significant amount in 2016–17 was a travesty and a great violation of many people’s expectations of the protocol, and one that led to more total losses due to excess txfees than the amount lost in the MtGox hack), but this is the argument that you need to be arguing against.

> Szabo’s law is not anti-political. It is a law that is aimed at shutting down political debate in order to guarantee Nick’s preferred political ends. I regard this kind of anti-social behavior to be bad-faith participation in blockchain governance.

Ultimately, what Szabo is trying to do is create a strong Schelling fence. And I definitely reject the idea that Schelling fences are anti-social. There is an inherent tradeoff between optionality on the side of those taking actions and certainty on the side of those receiving the consequences of the actions; Schelling fences are an attempt to support the latter. So to me Schelling fences are not about blocking participation, they’re about protecting non-participants (and minorities).

> [last section]

To me what this is missing is specifics. What is an example of a specific proposal that violates Szabo’s Law in order to achieve some objective that we can expect actually is likely to lead to more good than ill?

I’ll help by listing possibilities [no comment on whether or not each one actually is remotely a good idea, more a braindump of things that people could hypothetically want]:

Protocol changes that print coins and direct them to specific producers of public goods relevant to the blockchain (eg. the Ethereum Foundation, eth2 client devs)
Protocol changes that print coins and direct them to per-person airdrops
Protocol changes that print coins and direct them to specific producers of public goods relevant to wider society (eg. print 2 million coins and give them to the Against Malaria Foundation)
Protocol changes that print coins and direct them to “credibly neutral” public goods mechanisms like liberal radical gadgets
Unstucking stuck funds
Resolving future DAO-like scenarios
Shutting down smart contracts associated with applications that are illegal and disapproved almost everywhere
Shutting down smart contracts associated with applications that violate sanctions that are supported by the US government, but opposed by Russia and/or China (or vice versa)
Shutting down smart contracts associated with applications that violate the sensibilities of the US Blue Tribe (eg. Gab)
Shutting down smart contracts associated with applications that the US Blue Tribe is totally cool with, but violate the sensibilities of other tribes (eg. something involving undocumented immigrants)
Deleting data from the state whose availability violates almost all of our moral sensibilities
Making protocol decisions with the intention of making the protocol less usable for more immoral kinds of applications (eg. if we believe very high levels of software autonomy are dangerous, then we could deliberately decide NOT to build in a layer-1 in-protocol MPC that would facilitate autonomous software that can hold secrets)

Which of these do you support, and which do you not? How confident are you that your views align with the majority, and how willing are you to accept majorities doing any of the above without your consent as the price to pay for being able to achieve any of the above as part of a majority without some minority’s consent? Are there categories of possibilities that you think about that I did not even list above?