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by fork1 3219 days ago
We had military and law enforcement long before regular currencies. Societies were already investing significant amount of energies into these activities as well. The idea that switching to bitcoin or whatever will remove the need for either is a bit far-fetched.
1 comments
AlexCoventry 3219 days ago
The advent of currency took them to a whole new level, though. Graeber describes the new social structures around currency as a "military-coinage-slavery" complex in his book Debt.

https://books.google.com/books?id=lliTBQAAQBAJ&pg=PT297#v=on...

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fork1 3218 days ago
War was prevalent in primitive societies as well, it hardly appeared with currency. Currency and in a more general way, an organized society makes you better at waging war, hence their success. If anything primitive societies' wars were bloodier compared to the population base. As for crime and law enforcement, it's the same, people have killed for some gold or cows since eons.

I still fail to see how bitcoins would let us get rid of either crime or war, nor downsize the army or LEOs. Same for the "conventional power politics", it's hardly a new thing, put a 100 random people on a island and you'll see the same mechanisms at play.

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AlexCoventry 3218 days ago
As the link I gave in the GP argues, currency was specifically developed as a tool for population control: As the sole source of currency, a state can influence its people's priorities and behaviors by providing a budget for the tasks it wants accomplished. All tax must be paid in the state currency, which creates an intrinsic demand for it from the whole population, and ultimately the only way to obtain it is to fulfil the missions on the state budget. Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State [0] provides a very good overview of how this worked in Nazi-occupied territories, but it's a similar game in any nation state, autonomous or otherwise.

If a currency were to arise with no political group can control, this mechanism of domination would be short-circuited. I don't doubt that there would still be organized violence, but there's good reason to hope it wouldn't be on the scale we see today.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Beneficiaries-Plunder-Racial-...

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