[merelydev]

As someone who is somewhat a long time disciple of Cory Doctorow, having read his book Little Brother, when I was 17, which introduced me to Linux, Privacy/Cryptography and the Surveillance State. I think he is really downplaying the core innovations of bitcoin, which are the incentives and game theory it uses to allow adversaries to play together.

For example in bitcoin if you have enough resources to spam the network, you are incentivized to mine instead, thereby securing the network and produce new blocks.

So I think game theory and aligned incentives can be used to address the law issues, allowing different entities whether its States, Corporations and individuals to work together, even if they absolutely hate each other.

Game theory takes over where cryptography ends. Bitcoin gives us a glimpse of this.

[striking]

Except when game theory does not account for externalities. As a follower of Doctorow myself, I have to point out that everyone is rent-seeking and that the forces that restrain it are abolished by systems like Bitcoin. So when miners benefit from blocks being limited in size from the resulting restrictions on transaction counts, there's really no one you can turn to and no one who might argue on behalf of the people who aren't so heavily invested in the system. Arguably it is why Ethereum and others became so competitive despite the mindshare dominance of Bitcoin, transactions just got really expensive.

[merelydev]

I agree with you and the article. I was just pointing out though, that the main innovation in bitcoin is not the cryptography, but the game theory which goes far enough to allow adversaries to work together, follow the protocol/law. There are very few mechanisms that allow this type of adversarial coordination, another one is nuclear weapons which somewhat prevents war between nuclear states because of mutually assured destruction.

> Except when game theory does not account for externalities. As a follower of Doctorow myself, I have to point out that everyone is rent-seeking and that the forces that restrain it are abolished by systems like Bitcoin.

Yes most definitely. Decentralization is a spectrum. A village can be decentralized because everyone knows each other, and they trust each other to follow the protocol. But when you scale it up to a nation or global level where people don't know each other, you get people that don't want to follow the protocol for whatever reasons. Some attack the participants (wrench attacks) or some directly attack the protocol itself.

Usually the way to mitigate this is by adding a sub-system to filter/moderate out the bad actors. This sub-system than ends up with so much power it centralizes the system. Another way is by federation, which can decentralize the filtering. But the federations can also collude and centralize the network like the centralization of bitcoin miners, as you point out.

When someone is attacking the protocol this is the time when coordination is needed the most. Decentralized coordination on a large scale is hard, though bitcoin solved it for a very narrow use case (but not full proof since miners can collude and centralize).

So yea I agree with you, and with the article. Centralized governance might be a requirement for large scale coordination. But I cant help but see the beauty in in Satoshi's game theory, it being the key innovation in bitcoin and not the cryptography.