The Satoshi Revolution: A Revolution of Rising Expectations
Section 3: Decentralization
Chapter 8, Part 6
Crypto Can Create a “Perfect” Political System
The anarchists…work not for a perfect social state, but for a perfect political system. A perfect social state is…totally free from sin or crime or folly; a perfect political system is merely a system in which justice is observed, in which nothing is punished but crime and nobody coerced but the invader.
-Victor Yarros, American anarchist, lawyer, and author
The perfect society is embodied by the institutions that individuals create and through which they function. The same is true of a dystopian society. That’s why institutional analysis is essential to understand how freedom and totalitarianism work. One institution is cryptocurrency, which profoundly affects other institutions of society, and reaches far beyond the financial ones.
What is an Institution?
The Random House dictionary defines an institution as “a well-established and structured pattern of behavior or of relationships that is accepted as a fundamental part of a culture, such as marriage,” voting, or bankruptcy. An institution is any stable and widely-accepted mechanism for achieving goals within society. The term applies to wide-ranging and complex concepts, such as “family,” “the free market,” “common law,” “religion,” and “the state.”
Not all institutions are compatible, however, because some pursue antithetical ends; free-market crypto and the central banking system are a stark example. Crypto is a spontaneous and decentralized empowerment of individuals; the banking system is a centrally-planned and unified expression of government control. As a practical matter, a society often contains the two institutions in uneasy parallel, but their antagonistic goals lead to inevitable conflict. Government will attempt to regulate or ban free-market crypto because, otherwise, the free market will do what it does when left unfettered:
