gloom

Crypto-positivity is countercyclic to nationalism in a different way than cosmopolitan globalism

Cosmopolitanism= nations winning peacefully, at-peace world win-winning. Positive-sum

Nationalism: zero-sum tense competition among nations over resources

Crypto-future: X% of nations in conflict-failure. Negative-sum

Blogger at ribbonfarm.com, running summerofprotocols.com, host of /gloom ☀️

In old, pre-industrial mercantilism, land was thought to be the base scarce resource and nationalism was the default.

In neo-nationalism it’s a changing basket of things like 3nm fab capacity, cobalt reserves, oil/gas etc. Neo-mercantilism. It’s economic bs but it rules politics nevertheless.

There are also non-consensus elements like carbon and pollution budget. And fundamentally religious scarcities like contested sacred territories (Al Aqsa/Temple Mount, Ayodhya…)

When nations act neo-mercantilist in a world that still has unevenly distributed non-zero-sum schumpeterian dynamics you get Weirding

Whether the world is net positive-sum, negative-sum or approximately zero-sum is strongly a function of what people believe it is. It’s not as much a function of innovation as we might hope. Innovation has highly leveraged positive-sum influence on the function but is not a monocausal determinant of outcomes

Ironically tech optimism is a kind of world pessimism. If you’re pinning all your hopes on innovation removing all scarcities and restoring win-win cosmopolitanism among nations in a peaceful world you’re deeply pessimistic about every *other* source of optimism like belief in human empathy, compassion etc.

Pragmatically I think we’ll continue in a world that’s basically 70% irrational nationalism (zero-sum resource wars, ethnic cleansing, fights over holy lands, carbon defection), 25% neo-Marxist delusions, 4% wishful hopeless compassionate mutualism, 1% nonzero-sum leveraged innovation racing against the 99%

This nets out to a permaweird world for the foreseeable future or at least the rest of my expected lifetime. That’s why I call it the permaweird. I don’t expect macro to shift to another regime in my lifetime

In this world crypto’s raison d’etre is creating an economic value ground in an asylum run by inmates

I think the Bitcoin maxis have oversimplified this (basically correct imo) intuition into a “waiting for mad max world” hurry-up-and-collapse bet where they hope for a condition of “ancap rationality.” Like larp-preppers

They’re wrong. The world can remain weird longer than you can remain ancap.

What’s a weird world? An oversimplified vision: X% of world is dependent on crypto-denominated basic economy in failing states like Venezuela, 100-X% is in fragile fiat-based not-yet-failed-state world based on some mix of USD/Euro/Renmibi. Base compute and connectivity is provisioned outside of state capacity…

What do I mean by that. Say you’re a failing state. You’ve pwned telecom services and have captured crypto infrastructure for state ends while still propping up worthless official currency. An underground crypto infra exists in parallel, using starlink, other satellites, ham, low-power fm radio, old computers…

The underground capacity exists at the pleasure of the military of non-failed states. Satellites can be shot down, pirate transmitters can triangulated and hit with missiles and drones, your jungle spare parts cache can run out of the spare obsolete motherboards your compute relies on, your solar panels can be bombed

The only actual defense is sheer numbers. There have to be millions of nodes for every component of all the decentralized/distributed infrastructure. The global infra can be relatively secured through numbers. But any particular pocket under collapse pressure like Ukraine, Venezuela, Gaza can be knocked out…

*If* global infra is robust enough, local strategy is:

1. Use distorted local fiat as much as politically necessary

2. Use captured crypto infra as much as you need to to be plausible… local thugs are going to know if you work for a foreigner for crypto 

3. Use underground sparingly

4. Maintain foreign foothold

Foreign foothold = if you need to escape physically and land in more peaceful part of world with nothing but your clothes, can you hook back into your crypto resources? 

This probably means private keys stored on other side of world, accessible by trusted personal contact OR in cartoon hiding place

While I enjoy the fun upside end of crypto futurism, full of people living out transhumanist accelerationist futures in metaverses run on digital goods economics, if that’s the only future in your forecast spread, that’s naïveté

While there are cases for crypto in cosmopolitan and nationalist worlds, they rest on much more enabling tech that doesn’t yet exist (eg metaverse) OR utopianism (“crypto carbon credits save the works!”)

As of now de facto future that crypto is a hedge for is a conflict-ridden weird world. An insurance policy.