Bitcoin and anarchy have rules without rulers – Bitcoin Magazine
This is a transcribed excerpt of the “Bitcoin Magazine Podcast”, hosted by P and Q. In this episode, they are joined by Ben de Waal to talk about how Bitcoin-based thinking can help our political system grow into a consensus-based government.
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Q: I want to understand a little bit more about how you feel that anarchy fits into this equation, because when I think of anarchy, my mind goes to the third Christopher Nolan Batman movie where the Scarecrow is right and just sends whoever he wants out into the middle on the ice. To me, this is what anarchy looks and feels like.
P: Do you support scarecrow? Is that what Q is asking.
Ben de Waal: No.
Q: Are you a scarecrow or a joker?
De Waal: Maybe a little more Joker, but no, none of them.
So anarchy is rules without rulers, and the first part of that is still very important. There are rules in anarchy. You just don’t have rulers to set these rules. There are people who get together and decide together what the rules should be. So in many ways you could say that the Bitcoin consensus algorithm is a prime example of anarchy. No one is saying these are the rules. There are no rulers coming down and setting them. We decide them by consensus.
Whether or not pure anarchy can work in the real world I think has yet to be shown. It has been tried a couple of times. Spain at the beginning of the 20th century had a period of anarchy, especially in Catalonia. Then we have a couple of smaller examples around the world in small autonomous regions.
There have always been attempts at anarchy. I don’t know if pure anarchy can survive in the long term, but I hope it can, and I tend to think of anarchy as more of a goal to work towards rather than something to be implemented without a clock. Essentially, any time you remove unnecessary rulers from a system, you’ve made it more anarchic, and that’s a good thing.
I want to build anarchic systems inside the current systems and basically make the current system obsolete. There is actually a nice term from socialism about what is called the withering of the state. In essence, the state itself should just wither away when it becomes useless. Bitcoin is a good example of that.
As Bitcoin grows and becomes stronger, central banks wither away, they become unimportant, meaningless, useless. Whether they exist or not, no one cares, and eventually they just disappear by themselves. Other anarchic systems—potentially supported by the economic system of bitcoin—could be used to wither away other aspects of the state. I’d like to see how far we can take it.
Q: So if I’m following correctly, you don’t necessarily want total anarchy forever. It’s rather that you want the actions of an anarchy insurrection in a moment, almost for a little while, to then afford and provide a runway to recreate and fix what was broken by the leader or whoever was in power before.
De Waal: Yes, but potentially with a complete removal of that power, it just depends on what actually ends up happening. I think I said this on the other podcast I was on as well, What Bitcoin Did. I don’t want to say what the future will look like, because if I did, I’d be dictating it, and I’m not a dictator.
I don’t have all the answers. I don’t know what the perfect future looks like. I know what I perceive to be wrong with today’s society, and that is too much hierarchical control; too many authoritarians who say that’s the way it has to be. So get rid of the authoritarian saying that this is how it has to be in all aspects of society. It’s not just governments, it’s states, it’s organizations. There are companies. Get rid of the authoritarians and see how far we can take it.
