• explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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    16 hours ago

    If your organization is decentralized, then its assets can’t be seized by a court order. For example, darknet market admins (arbitrators) and their drug dealers don’t even know who each other are. They’ve had a polycentric legal system for years.

    But corporate stock remains centralized. They have a known headquarters with a known board of trustees. Their assets aren’t carried on-chain; only some guy’s promise to those assets.

    My point is that an anarchist economy needs to be built from the ground up, circumventing the state’s legal system. Slapping a blockchain on top of an already centralized system won’t make it decentralized and thus provides no benefit.

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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      10 hours ago

      Yeah, blockchain adds nothing to an existing economy. It could be useful as a means of distributed public records between anarchist communities, but it is documentation, not ownership. Ownership is an extension of political power and grows from the same barrel of a gun

    • shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip
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      15 hours ago

      Oh, absolutely. But that’s because the way we’ve always done the stock market is through centralized systems. If a company were to be formed today and only ever issue their stock tokens on a decentralized system such as Ethereum, then the Ethereum system would be the final arbiter of who does and does not have shares in that company.

      • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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        15 hours ago

        Let’s say I open a factory and issue shares on Ethereum. Then for whatever reason a judge orders the company to give up some shares. The shareholders, safely in cypherspace, ignore that court order. And then the state seizes the whole factory. In practice the original shares no longer mean anything.

        • shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip
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          11 hours ago

          Right, unfortunately you’re really not going to be able to do that until such time as the state is defanged. You’ll have to wait until there’s a point where a state can’t enforce a monopoly on violence.