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Bitcoin is the currency for people who've read John Locke but not Thomas Hobbes.



Your comment sounds clever, but I have read neither. Could you please elaborate?


Locke: private property is a cornerstone of liberty.

Hobbes: without government, life has historically tended to be 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.' As a practical matter, it's a lot easier to enjoy your liberty when your property isn't under constant assault from everyone else; by everyone pooling a little of their individual sovereignty in a government, aggregate liberty is vastly increased. It's a political economy argument at its core.


So after a very brief read of Wikipedia, the voting-via-hashpower mechanism of Bitcoin seems to me to be a form of social contract, whereby users consent to be governed by the rules laid down by the majority.


Extremely roughly: Locke was an idealist of liberty; Hobbes rationalized the social contract by pointing out that people are bastards and that life without it is nasty, brutish, poor, and short.


We don't want the government restricting our freedoms (i.e. libertarianism is cool), but trying to implement that with anarchy gives bad guys the freedom to take away our own.




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