Where things get even more uncomfortable
In the last article, we saw how despite the many ways blockchain technology has enabled humanity to better fight against the suppression of dissent and to expose the many government lies, and yet somehow it doesn’t seem to have helped.
One crucial observation we can make is that most of these efforts are intended to only allow information to be broadcast, and sometimes to allow it to be received.
That’s great, please don’t misunderstand the importance of it, but realize its place.
It will only be useful as a way to motivate action in those receiving it, if they are listening, if they care and if they believe it and if they can take action.
And unfortunately, the only actions available to people who receive this dissent, or information about corruption, are often just to vote, to beg the people in charge, to demand accountability.
How is that working so far ?
Not well. If we can just measure the success by its effects on the most recent scandals in three separate domains: election fraud and the Georgia revelations, pedophile rings and the Epstein list, the Biden laptop and Ukraine corruption, and finally the Minneapolis day care frauds, it’s pretty clear the crooks and spooks are still laughing.
Nothing has happened. Nothing is going to happen. Why is that ?
It would be easy to just blame others for their lack of interest or selective attention, partisan politics or tribalism, faith in the great Donald or other rationalizations.
But that’s not what’s missing.
The second crucial observation is that none of this creates an incentive for the people running the system to want to change.
The threat of getting dragged into the street, dipped in hot tar and feathers is long gone. The people have been disarmed, sometimes literally, but specifically in the range of actions they are allowed or willing to take. We think of ourselves as so civilized that only vigilantes would undertake such things as to hang a politician for corruption. Hollywood movies have reinforced the myth that only crazy people would abandon the rule of law and take justice in their own hands. The respectable people would endorse tracking down the troublemakers anyway, which also makes the risk of taking these kinds of actions, much too high. As we descend into an ever more authoritarian culture, the risk of boot-lickers calling for the murder of rebels is only going to increase.
The result would be mixed as well, since the event would be twisted as “just an incident, by crazy people, who were not willing to follow the voting process to get things to change, a minority of immature hot-heads”.
History is written by the victors.
Watch almost any movie involving the Belfast IRA, or any other former insurgent group and inevitably they are cast in this light, inevitably these groups feature strong men and mafia dynamics, gang attitudes, irrational beliefs and almost religious demand for loyalty.
Funny how that works. in psychology, that’s called projection.
So, from a risk standpoint, the risk is all yours. None of it is pushed back onto the people doing the lying, raping, killing or stealing. Of course once in a while, they’ll sacrifice one of their own, just to keep you believing in the system, to maintain the hope that working within the system is still the respectable strategy.
Well, now we can discuss how the world has traditionally handled risk.
Risk is always in the eyes of the beholder informed by data. As with every other research task, the research can be outsourced. Mitigating the risk can also be outsourced. For instance, if you must park your car on the street, there is a possibility that it might get stolen. That’s the risk. Evaluating this risk can be outsourced to an insurance company, who can also be the provider of the mitigation, i.e. insurance.
Because various companies compete for your business, i.e. taking on the risk in advance of you compensating them for the expected loss (not the full loss because not all cars they insure get stolen), it is in their interest to lower their price as much as possible to get your business. And because they are on the hook for the loss if they fail to evaluate it properly, it is in their interest to evaluate it carefully so they do not take on more risk than necessary. Once you enter into such an arrangement, the risk is transferred to them, temporarily or permanently.
The same thing happens for life insurance, homeowners insurance, travel insurance and many other domains.
One must be careful to remember that in many cases, the government has interfered with the normal market mechanism by threatening insurers if they evaluate the risk too well and refuse to enter into such relationships if they deem them too risky. There are countless examples of government establishing premium limits on insuring certain development zones at risk of flooding or fire, or certain populations at risk of disease. Analyzed properly, this is a probabilistic subsidy the government is extracting by force from insurance businesses toward some customers, real or potential.
The risk evaluation, actuarial science, is a specialized discipline that requires access to information people normally don’t have. It’s difficult for the average person to know which areas are subject to wildfire or crime, but those capable of gathering and analyzing the data can provide that information. The reason insurance companies are usually trusted to provide the information is because of the tension between their self interest and competition. In some cases, the government steps in with its own manipulated data, and in other cases as the sole provider of that data (for crime statistics and other such information).
In other cases the government steps in as the monopoly provider of the data and the risk mitigation. Should you decide to provide crime-mitigation services for potential customers in your neighborhood, you might get in trouble. The government decides the price you pay, the ration of prevention and mitigation you will receive, and the compensation for damages you will get, regardless of what any actuarial data someone else might have compiled. If in the process of reducing your risk of becoming a victim of a crime, the monopoly services harm you, well, most of the time, you’re out of luck because the government also runs the justice monopoly.
Of course, sometimes, the little guy wins.
But most of the time, the little guy loses. According to Death by Government, by R.J. Rummel, the number of Democide victims in the 20th century is upwards of 260 Millions, not counting wars. Read that again slowly.
Now, when it comes to defense from superpowers, well, we know it’s the same story. The monopoly provider the rules over the area where you were born does not allow competition. It might even act belligerent toward other countries, causing your risk of death to rise. The victims of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center certainly had very little control over the foreign policy decisions that lead to their deaths. There is no jury of your peers to dispense justice on your behalf.
The best you can do is run toward another country headed by another power happy megalomaniac in the hope he might want to use you as fodder for war right away - that is if you’re still allowed to leave or allowed to enter.
Borders are a symptom, as Harry Browne famously wrote: Libertarians know that a free country has nothing to fear from anyone coming in or going out - while a welfare state is scared to death of poor people coming in and rich people getting out.
If that wasn’t bad enough, with the world stage actors competing for the supremacy of their fiat currencies and conquest of resource rich lands, now we have to content with the very real possibility that the reluctant soldier are gradually being replaced by drones. As evidenced by the Collateral Murder leaked footage of the Iraq war, soldiers were still at least in control of the drones, following some chain of command and asking for authorizations, as flimsy as they were. Now, with autonomous drones, the prospect of evading a premature death will become much ore difficult, as evidenced by the numerous examples of videos coming out of the war in Ukraine.
At some point, when the robots fight each other with humans as collateral damage, I wonder if anyone will ask “what’s the point” ?
If you have not paid attention to this series of articles, you will of course be confused by this, because indeed, “our robots” killing the “other guy’s robots” seems pointless. But if you’ve followed me so far, you will understand exactly what’s is happening: Psychopaths have abused their respective populations to the point of confluence in which
In past centuries, Kings owed their titles (they had many) to the protection they offered their subjects. So at least on paper they had an incentive to preserve their lives, even if the real game was one of resources. The church certainly knew this. So wars typically involved only the nobility because the peasantry was too busy providing the food. Conquest provided the resources necessary to compensate for the depredations, as long as they were easy enough to justify, with religious or other rationales. If they didn’t, those bold enough could just leave, which is the reason behind the existence of the many counties of now Switzerland, Italy and other European ‘countries’.
With the emergence of Fiat money, the justification for your existence bears much less weight in the psychopaths’ mind, because the theft and conquest is monetary.
While in the past, some wars would largely coincide and follow natural disasters such as drought and plagues, nowadays they follow the spread of debt from welfare expansions. As Julian Assange explained: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are nothing more than money laundering operations.
Can Blockchain help mitigate risk ?
Well, of course !
Several projects were launched as ways to offer some insurance products. First, because traditional insurances were not willing or able the take the risk of touching the crypto space - ironic huh, but the growing demand for Decentralized Finance created a demand for such products, which could be built entirely on-chain. For DeFi exchanges who managed portfolios of crypto assets, or simply wanted to hedge against market events or protect their liquidity pools, the gap was filled by companies such as Nayms, leveraging blockchain contracts to democratize access to insurance. They created:
Others, such as Etherisc set out to offer insurance products that could leverage Oracles to evaluate and resolve the risks. Etherisc, for example offers the following:
The focus in these two instances are the ‘automated’ resolution with decentralized sources of truth, decentralized sources of capital and decentralized spreading of the mitigation.
I think this has a lot of potential because any future economy based on crypto will need this sort of thing. I’ve already mentioned the problem that someone running a crypto AirBnB would face when trying to insure their property against flooding. The revenue is in crypto, but the property insurance is in US Dollars, calculated on the US Dollar value of the property.
Does it help with my probability of getting nuked ?
Not really.
In the next Article, we’ll get to a solution that might solve this problem.
