[pfraze]

Hey Mike, great comments and thanks for the kind words.

A lot of your observations on Bitcoin’s governance checks out. I stand by my theory about consensus-based tech driving consensus-based politics; the control over bitcoin.org, protocol discussions, and the core implementations might represent capture over the levers of that political power. If the Bitcoin community accepts that arrangement then it counts as legitimate political authority, but as you say the lack of transparency about that process suggests it’s dishonest. I get the sense that the btc community is ideologically inclined to pretend no such political system exists, and that’s the cloud cover that the developers operate under. All part of the reason I want to push at this topic.

Your observation that Facebook meets my description did occur to me, but I chose not to elaborate and instead let “like the p2p networks” do the heavy lifting for me (whoops). Facebook works that way for a lot of its interactions, but it leverages a lot of global collectivist resources as well like search, metrics, and anything community-oriented, while the anarcho-p2p networks use none. The difference between the product designs of (say) SSB and Facebook may therefore seem minor, but the philosophical resistance to anything collectivist in SSB is huge, and that’s what I think needs pressing against.

On the Web vs Xanadu questions you raise, the Web discarded all distributed collectivist features except for the ones I enumerated (DNS, IP addresses) and then used distributed individualism and authoritarian collectivism to handle the rest of its features. The Web did get those features in a “good enough” way though: in the authoritarian collectivism form. Decentralization is revisiting that approach and butting up against this challenge of solving distributed collectivism now, and I think the tendency of decentralizers to think in techno-anarchic forms might be causing them to miss this important area of progress.