by Andrew Barisser

The laws we are familiar with are made by mankind. They are made by powerful governments and august institutions. Some of them stem from ancient history, from time immemorial, and over the course of time have acquired an unquestioned status. Others are forged more recently. They come down from on high with awesome power. Laws are not prosecuted in the name of such and such legislator, they come in the name of the ‘People of the United States’ or ‘The Federal Government’. These utterances carry such profound power that they are almost shamanistic incantations of might.

The authority we’re used to is still quite fickle

But all the laws we know, no matter the weight of the institution behind them, stem from people. They originate in the minds of inherently flawed people. No matter the perfection of the printed words themselves, laws must be enforced by people in grey circumstances. The origination and execution of laws are products of individuals. No clever process can negate that inherent weakness. No democracy, nor wise regulators, nor a beautiful process of compromise, and not even a benevolent dictator can perfect the imperfectible.

Laws made by mankind cannot be perfectly enforced. At the very least, the guardians themselves will fail to act with perfect discipline. History is replete with instances of executors of the law undermining the law itself. A dictate made by people can be undone by people. The consensus of one generation is the heresy of the next, and vice versus. No human built thing cannot also be overturned by other people. No human guarantee can exist in perpetuity.

And yet a class of law exists that is perfect: those found in nature. Nature’s laws are perfect. We may not always know fully what they are; physicists are still resolving the edges of knowledge. But we may be assured that those laws are perfect and guaranteed. They are not subject to fickle forces like human institutions.

Natural laws do not rely on outside executors. They are self-enforcing. The age-old problem of “Who guards the guardians?” (so old it is originally from Latin Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?) is obviated. There is no process of appeals. There is no grey area. These laws do not exist in the minds of people; they exist outside. They are outside of us and we must observe them as a matter of fact.

Laws Should Be Mechanical: Predictable, Transparent, and Symmetrical to all participants

No human institution has ever equaled the finality of natural laws. That is until 2009. Then there was invented a system in which outcomes did self-execute. A scheme was created by man that had the same finality as the laws of nature. It is the Bitcoin Blockchain.

The Bitcoin Blockchain allows human schemes to inherit the self-actualization observed in nature. It is an entity set off on its own course. While humans do interact with it, no person controls it as we do every other man-made thing. Nothing was ever before made by human hands to later become outside them. There was nothing we ever created that we could not then destroy, bend, and corrupt if we so chose. All our works, even from the most magnificent institutions, were always malleable to the next generation. Until now.

Human activities can be tied to the Blockchain so they are also enforced by an analog to natural laws. Money, messages, contracts, assets representing physical goods, and still other things can be arbitrated mechanically, the same way gravity is arbitrated between the Earth and the Moon. Human economic behavior can be fit within a set of rules enforced with algorithmic rigidity. Just as you may not appeal the flow of water downhill, you cannot question a Bitcoin transaction. No one enforced it. It merely happened because the rules of the system demanded that it must.

See my new book for more: The Case for Bitcoin

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