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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.




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