At the time, eBay may have required government coercion, but the idea that “only territorial sovereigns” can prevent fraud is false. Law and economics scholars such as Robert Ellickson have shown that people can often find ways to trust each other without the state. Furthermore, blockchain technology and smart contracts offer a different solution. For instance, OpenBazaar, an online marketplace that uses cryptocurrencies as payment, allows users to use very simple smart contracts (actually, 2‐​of‐​3 multisig addresses) to prevent fraud. As OpenBazaar describes it, “When a buyer wants to purchase a listing, instead of sending the funds directly to the seller, he will send the funds to the multisig account. The three people who control this account are the buyer, the seller, and a trusted third party selected beforehand.” In the simplest case, the transaction goes smoothly, but if there is a dispute, the trusted third party decides whether to release the funds to the buyer or seller. Importantly, no one has control over the transaction apart from the buyer and seller (and only in the case of a dispute, their arbitrator), preventing fraud and making government seizure not only unwelcome but impossible.

This approach may seem bizarre, but this sort of private arbitration is used widely to resolve disputes in commercial agreements. It also has historical precedent: in medieval times, merchants who engaged in international trade, frustrated with the inadequacy of local courts to enforce contracts, created their own rules and their own courts. Rather than having to travel to the court of a distant noble who likely knew very little about trade practices, these new rules, known as the “law merchant,” allowed merchants to resolve disputes quickly before knowledgeable courts (Hadfield 2017).

Legal scholars such as Johnson and Post recognized that the law merchant provided an example for Internet dispute resolution. In 1996, as part of the Cyberspace Law Institute, they launched the Virtual Magistrate Project, an experiment in which a pool of “neutral arbitrators with experience in the law and in the use of computer networks” would resolve disputes in a timely manner. Unfortunately, the project hit a snag—there was no way to enforce decisions, and therefore the experiment ended after only a few cases. However, with smart contracts and cryptocurrencies, enforcement is relatively easy and well‐​defined. An arbitrator only has the power consensually granted to them in code, but once a dispute occurs, they can use that power to direct the money sent to a smart contract as they see fit.

“The scope of all these efforts is certainly narrow,” Peter Ludlow admitted, talking about the Virtual Magistrate Project, “but it would be a mistake to conclude from this that they will not evolve into full‐​blown legal systems with profound impact on future legal theory worldwide. It is important to remember that our current systems of law have humble and in some cases whimsical beginnings… Rather than be dismissive,” he continued, “perhaps we should consider the possibility that we are witnessing the birth of the juridical systems and practices of the new millennium” (2001). Ludlow’s statement was made before blockchain technology existed, but the same spirit applies today. It is a mistake to assume that only government can provide certain services. As Johns Hopkins cryptography professor Matthew Green made clear, “If you think something is impossible but you don’t have an impossibility proof, then what you have is an open problem.” Blockchain alternatives to government services are still an open problem, but the solutions thus far indicate that order can be achieved without government coercion.