Democracy and Bitcoin
https://ift.tt/H6JrxbS
# Democracy and Bitcoin
In this post we’d like to present some maybe unpopular opinions about something that is generally glorified and not often criticized.
We’d like to look at democracy. What is democracy and how does it actually work? At the end we will discuss how it relates to Bitcoin.
While democracy can be applied in groups of all sizes, our interest today will be democracy as a form of government of a country
– i.e. over people living in certain territory.
## Definition
Regardless of what we think of Wikipedia, it’s certainly a source of definitions of many things for many people. On democracy
[it says](https://ift.tt/nMFBult
> Democracy (Greek: δημοκρατία, dēmokratiā, from dēmos ‘people’ and kratos ‘rule’) is a form of government in which the people
have the authority to deliberate and decide legislation (“direct democracy”), or to choose governing officials to do so
(“representative democracy”).
> …
> Prevalent day-to-day decision making of democracies is the majority rule, though other decision making approaches like supermajority
and consensus have also been integral to democracies.
This is probably familiar to most of you and basically it is aligned with common understanding that in democracy the majority of people
decides what the rules will be for the whole country.
Different countries implement democracy differently. Today it is very popular to have representative democracies, but some countries
prefer more direct democracies. Back to Wikipedia:
> The most common form of democracy today is a representative democracy, where the people elect government officials to govern on
their behalf such as in a parliamentary or presidential democracy.
## Narrative
The most common narrative in “Western” countries is that democracy is good. Usually it is put into a contrast with dictatorship,
which is argued to be bad. Children in mandatory schooling systems are being told that democracy is the best thing ever and everyone
should participate in it, so that it is strong and flourishes. This then translates into common opinions of adults, such as:
– *Everyone should vote in elections.*
– *If you don’t cast your vote, you have no right to criticize the state of affairs.*
## Democracy Is …
evil. Wait, what? Are you going to provide any arguments for that? If you are asking this, the answer is yes. The whole post below is
about providing arguments to support that claim. Maybe you will not agree with all of the arguments, and that is fine since some of
the arguments need quite a long time to chew and understand, but if you manage to get to the end of this post you should be convinced.
So, can you make it to the end?
We are going to demonstrate that the common narrative is wrong, that democracy is inherently broken and evil, and that people should not
participate in elections. And then we discuss why Bitcoin can not be democracy and why is that a good thing.
This post have been inspired by recent article by Aleksandar Svetski – [Bitcoin Is Not Democratic Part One: Problems With
Democracy](https://ift.tt/lGo5APM). Reading his article is highly recommended, but
it is not required for understanding this post.
## Representative Democracy
Let’s first talk about the most bizarre, but also the most common, type of democracy today – the representative democracy.
### Ability to Select Leaders
In the representative democracy, people are not trusted to decide their matters on themselves – i.e. to vote directly for changes
in rules. Instead, people are supposed to elect their leaders who then decide about the rules.
But who else than the people themselves should know better about their own life? How could a politician who never met most of these
people better know what is good for them and what is bad for them? How can a politician make better decisions about the lives of the voters
than the voters themselves?
The truth is that each person knows best about their own life. Each person knows the best what is their taste in food and other
personal valuations of each individual. No politician can ever know better. Beyond that, each person is experienced in another
field, someone is a medical doctor, someone is a technician, someone knows how to plant trees, and someone knows about good nutrition
and healthy lifestyle. But no one knows everything and not everything is of the same importance to each person.
Since it is assumed that people are not trusted to be smart enough or experienced enough to decide on the rules, how could
they be smart enough and experienced enough to decide on who should the leaders be. Electing a representation only adds
a complexity to the problem. Instead of directly deciding on a problem, one is asked to decide who, from the possible representatives,
can decide the best. Such a decision not only needs the ability to understand the primary problem in the first place, but it
includes a new level of indirection, which by itself is a hard problem to solve.
On the free market, various experts provide their services to consumers. If these experts do a good job, they are rewarded and reap profits.
If they provide bad services, they are punished by incurring losses. Profits and losses are signals to these entrepreneurs that tell them
whether they satisfy the consumers needs or not. Those who do not provide good services for too long will go out of business because people
will shop elsewhere. This makes it easier for the consumer to pick up an expert to help with a problem on the free market. The consumer
knows that if a company operates for a long time, there is very good chance that most of the time it provides services of reasonable
quality or better. Of course it can always happen that the service provided to you will be poor, but the chances are good and you will
get the signal immediately after and you can correct your behaviour for the next time. You may now be wondering why is that you know so
many established companies that provide consistently bad services and still exist. That’s simply because we do not live in the free market
environment. Just remember all those government bail outs. Those companies should have died but they did not. This is one of many things
that disrupts the today’s market.
In politics, no such signalling works, however. You probably know many politicians that screw up so badly and yet they are still active
in their party and perhaps even reelected several times. This is because actions of politicians are not controlled by free market signals.
Politicians are not personally and directly punished if they make wrong decisions. The worst that happens to them is that many years after,
they are not reelected. But often they just cover the mess up and come with some excuse or redirect attention of voters, so that voters
forget. Or the political alternative has even worse history. Voting as signalling is thus very poor, it comes late, it is slow, and it
is very inefficient in removing bad politicians.
Thus if you do not understand a problem, you don’t have any reliable tools to evaluate which politician can solve it. Even if there is
a politician that is active for many years, it is not because of their excellent work. Moreover, the problems you are voting your
representative to solve are mostly very disconnected from your life and thus you don’t understand them deeply enough and you can not say
whether any of the politicians available understand the problems deeply enough.
Thus you may like how the politicians look or how they talk, but you won’t be able to say whether they understand the problem that you
don’t understand and have no experience with. Therefore selection of the representative is nothing but a beauty contest and the skills
to resolve the problems are not relevant. The politician who promises the best outcomes to most people and the one who has the best
marketing will win. Later a good PR allows for reelection of politicians who screwed up before.
#### Democratic Market Interventions
Many rules in democratic states are made to intervene with the free market. The free market is distrusted by politicians and they have
urges to intervene with its natural function in order to “protect” the consumers who can not decide for themselves in a way that leads
to their best satisfaction and thus autoregulate the market. All such rules, however, lead to an inescapable contradiction.
From Rothbard’s [Man, Economy, and State](https://ift.tt/RFvKbhU
> Professor Mises has keenly pointed out the paradox of interventionists who insist that consumers are too ignorant or incompetent
to buy products intelligently, while at the same time proclaiming the virtues of democracy, where the same people vote for or against
politicians whom they do not know and on policies which they scarcely understand. To put it another way, the partisans of intervention
assume that individuals are not competent to run their own affairs or to hire experts to advise them, but also assume that these same
individuals are competent to vote for these experts at the ballot box. They are further assuming that the mass of supposedly incompetent
consumers are competent to choose not only those who will rule over themselves, but also over the competent individuals in society.
Yet such absurd and contradictory assumptions lie at the root of every program for “democratic” intervention in the affairs of the people.
### Politicians Are Evil
When people act voluntarily on the market, they exchange goods in a process that is beneficial to all parties of the transaction.
When someone uses violence to take goods from others, only one party of such transaction benefits, the other loses. As
[Franz Oppenheimer said](https://ift.tt/bzYkvLg
> There are two fundamentally opposed means whereby man…is impelled to obtain the necessary means for satisfying his desires. These
are work and robbery, one’s own labor and the forcible appropriation of the labor of others…I propose…to call one’s own labor
and the equivalent exchange of one’s own labor for the labor of others, the “economic means”…while the unrequited appropriation of
the labor of others will be called the “political means.”
On the free market, one needs skills to produce goods and services that are desired by others. But government does not produce
anything and can thus only use political means. It is the core nature of the politics – to decide on what shall be taken
from whom and who it shall be given to. Therefore there is no need for politicians to have the skills of people who are successful
in the free market environment. The skill set of a successful politician is completely different. Successful politicians are those who are
able to manipulate and deceive as many people as possible for a short period of time to obtain their votes. In that they have to
promise improving the life of their potential voters by using the political means to take what is not theirs and redistribute it
to these potential votes. The politicians need to be very inventive in how they present, what is nothing but a theft, in a way that
it appeals to the masses. Morality is one of the limitations that the politician can not afford to have.
This is why politics attracts the worst of the worst. Not only the politicians are people inexperienced and unskilled to solve
the problems they are elected to solve, but they also necessarily lack moral barriers.
No good man wishes to rule over another man. Politicians do.
While technically it is possible to have a politician who is good, who would do nothing but removing the rules that intervene with
the market and making the state smaller and smaller, this is such a rare case in the real world that we can safely disregard it
and accept it as a rule that politicians are evil people.
### Mathematical Argument Against Elections
The mathematical argument against elections also works against voting in direct democracies, but we want to present a real life
example with real numbers here, so we narrow our argument against elections for now. It’s easy to imagine how the math works in case of
direct democratic voting.
If you have a very small number of people that can vote, say below 10, the weight of each vote is significant enough that you can
comprehend it. There are many cases in which, without your vote, the outcome (i.e. the winner, or the possible coalition) would be
different. Imagine 9 people vote and 4 vote for A and 4 vote for B, your 9th vote is important. Similarly, if 3 vote for A, 3 vote
for B and 2 vote for C. When the number of participants is small, the chances are good that your vote will change something. It is
always when there is a tie between two or more of the parties. Even consider when you vote for C in case that 4 vote for A, 1 for B,
1 for C, 1 for D and 1 for E. By voting C, even if A is the winner regardless, C makes the second place and becomes the only possibility
for coalition of 2 parties to form the majority.
This good chance to influence the outcome completely disappears when the numbers are in millions. When 1,000,000 people vote, your
chance of changing anything is tiny. And of course, your vote means even less if it is 30,000,000 people who go and vote. In practice,
there are tens or hundreds of representative who form the parliament. If there are 100 representatives and 1,000,000 people vote,
1 vote does not make any difference with very high probability. 100 votes do not make any difference. Even 1,000 votes do not make
any difference. This is best to be demonstrated on a real life example:
We take [Austria 2019 elections](https://ift.tt/QyBFjXN
| Party | Votes | % | Seats |
| —– | —– | — | —– |
| APP | 1,789,417 | 37.5 | 71 |
| SDPA | 1,011,868 | 21.2 | 40 |
| FPA | 772,666 | 16.2 | 31 |
| GA | 664,055 | 13.9 | 26 |
| NEOS | 387,124| 8.1 | 15 |
In this case 4,835,469 (out of 6,396,812 people eligible) people came to vote (only 4,625,130 votes are in the table above because of
the 4% minimal requirement to get into the parliament, see **Bonus for Winner** section below). To make a difference of one single seat
in the parliament, roughly about 25,000 votes were needed.
However, changing one seat does not imply the outcome of the election would be any different. It would depend on where the (new) votes
would be given and what kind of coalitions would then be formed. In this particular case, the final government was formed by APP+GA
with 97 seats out of 183, but only 92 seats were needed for majority. So transferring as few as 5 seats elsewhere would make no
difference. Only transferring 6 or more seats very from APP or GA to other parties would make the difference. These are very specific
conditions that even further lower the probability that one vote, your vote, would make the difference.
Thus imagine all possible outcomes of elections and try to imagine what is the chance that the constellation would be such that
your vote actually changes something. This is so negligible chance that it makes no logical sense to go and vote. But as we will
discuss further below, there is no need for logic in democracy.
## Real Life Democracies
While in theory, as explained in all other parts of this post, democracy is bad, in practice it is even worse.
### Representative Democracies
Representative democracies in real life are amazingly bad. Usually there are state level governmental elections every 4 or 5 years.
There have been elections in years 2017, 2018, or 2019, in many countries with representative democracies. How many people do you
think that voted in those elections for the upcoming lockdowns in 2020 and 2021? The answer is an obvious 0. Not a single person
voted for lockdowns because no political party had it in its program.
The reality is that people do not, and can not, vote for claimed solutions of the problems as they are presented in programs of
political parties. People blindly vote for politicians and then when the politicians form a government, they can do whatever they
want, whether or not it was on their program before. Often part of the program is discarded right away because coalition partners
required so, and so to achieve a compromise and to be able to form the ruling coalition many promises are forgotten instantly.
We would expect that if the theoretical majority rule was the actual case in democracy, people would cast their votes about
at least the most important decision to be made. In recent years, that decision was the lockdown decision in so many democratic countries.
And not a single person in any representative democracy with governments voted in between 2017 and 2019 was allowed to make that vote.
Thus while in theory the democracy is just a bad idea, in practice it is a terrible joke.
#### Bonus for Winner
Often, the election system is twisted in a way that the political party that receives the most votes gets some kind of bonus. In other
cases, systems are even more complex, so all kinds of weirdness may happen. The supportive argument for this is that such modifications
help the winner to rule more easily in the given period. But this further lowers the actual percentage of the people that voted for
the party or parties who form the government. While in the “fairer system” without any such bonuses for winners, the majority of people
who came to vote was necessary, with these special upgrades to the voting systems, sometimes 40% is enough to get the majority in
the parliament. Above we have argued that it is actually a minority, not the majority, that rules. In practice then, it is often
even smaller minority.
Similar effect as a bonus for the winner can be achieved via setting a minimal limit on the number of votes or the percentage of votes
received by a party to be admitted to the parliament. This allows parties and coalitions who received less than 50% of votes in total,
to get majority in the parliament.
#### Minority Rule
The above example of Austria 2019 elections demonstrates elections with fairly high voter turnout of 75.6%. And yet, there are about
8.9 million people in Austria but only representatives voted by 1,789,417 + 664,055 = 2,453,472 people formed the government. This
translates to roughly 28%. Does this sound like a majority rule?
As mentioned, this has been achieved with fairly high voter turnout. It is not uncommon to see turnout well below 70%. For example
Spain 2019 or UK 2019 were around 66-67%. With lower turnouts and with various minimal limits and bonuses for winners (as discussed
above), it’s not uncommon to get closer to 20% or even lower.
For example, [in Poland 2019](https://ift.tt/6bl8dRY), we’ve seen 61.7% turnout. There
are 460 seats in Polish parliament from which 235 seats (i.e. more than 50%) was taken by a single party. This single party
received 8,051,935 votes and the population of Poland is roughly 38 million people. This translates to the rule of 21.1% minority.
### Direct Democracies and Minority Rule
The above section on minority rule is of course most significant in the representative democracy, but it can very much happen in
the direct democracy as well that it is less than 50% of all people in the country that decide on things.
This is simply caused by the law that does not allow all people to vote and because not everyone participates. Combination of this may
easily lead to sub 50% rule.
The idea of not allowing all people to vote is based on an assumption that below certain age (perhaps 18 years) people are somehow less
able to decide on their matters. But as we argued above, the truth is different. Rather than not being able to decide on some relevant
matters by an 14 year old, no one is able to be an expert on everything. Thus it does not matter if one is 14 year old or 48 years old,
their ability to decide on matters that are not relevant to their life and that they don’t have experience with is very low.
On the other hand, even 10 year olds can very well decide on matters that are relevant to their lives.
Maybe the idea is also that younger people are easier to manipulate. If that is the case, then observing people during last two years makes
it easy to reject such argument. We’ve seen masses of adults wearing all kinds of masks to protect against a virus that spreads via
aerosols. If we are to guess why, it is probably because they said it in TV that it was a good idea. If you don’t know what spreading
via aerosols mean, it simply means that the masks that people have been using are virtually useless. This has been known since early
2020. And yet, they happily wear them, even force their kids to wear them and many demand others to wear them too. Maybe in first 6 months
of 2020, before the information was freely available, we could argue about the reasons why people did it, but for the 18 months that
followed, it has been an obvious result of a mass manipulation. We can thus safely conclude that it is so easy to manipulate adults that
it makes no sense to discriminate youngsters from elections. We can say that any arbitrary age restriction is harmful. The two year old
won’t go and cast their vote because it is not interested in that, but an 8 year old might be interested and may actually spend more time
on research than most of the adults and actually understand politics better than adults.
## General Democracy
We now focus on general arguments against any type of democracy, representative or not.
### People Are Not Qualified
As mentioned above, no one is expert on everything, yet democracy depends on that. Imagine if whether or not to treat a patient using
a surgery would be a subject to a democratic vote. But not a vote of the medical doctors, but a vote of random people from outside,
most of which have no knowledge about medicine. That sounds like an obvious nonsense, but this is what democracies are based on.
People are qualified to decide on a very small set of things, usually very closely related to their life and their interests. They mostly
know the neighborhood where they live or where they often travel to, but they have much less knowledge about most of the other places in
their cities, not to mention other places in their countries. And yet, in democracy, they are supposed to either directly, or indirectly
via representatives, decide on policies about places they sometimes never even visited and know nothing about, and about people living
there.
Maybe you know well whether your neighborhood would be better with a new supermarket or a new park, but you likely know nothing about
the same situation in a city on the other side of the country.
It does not help much that you have local governments or local politicians. First, the local politicians are usually very limited in what
they can do. The most important rules are decided on the state level. So even if everything that local politicians can do was done well,
you’d have the problem on the state level. Second, in most of the regions and cities, the decisions done by local politicians are still
made over too large area and over too large group of people. Democracy simply does not work for bigger than very small groups of people
(think small hundreds).
### Effort to Reward Asymmetry in Voting
One person, one vote. Imagine you are an intelligent person trying to make a good vote. In case of the representative democracy, you
can’t just randomly select a party then, can you? You want to make your research and educate yourself about each party. What is their
program, what do they promise, who are the party leaders. In case of the direct democracy, you want to educate yourself on the topic and
on the options that you can vote for. You read news, you watch TV debates. This costs a lot of time. For some, it could be tens of hours,
for others maybe hundreds of hours. Some only focus on it during last month before the election, others try to keep up the whole time
since last election. So potentially, we have you spending hundreds of hours in order to make the best decision you can make when the time
comes.
On the other hand we may have a voter whose parents, or friends, or coworkers, simply said something that encourage them to vote for
a specific party and by a good chance, not the party that you decided for. This other person spends the total of 30 minutes going to
the local school to cast his vote and coming back. When you are watching the debate between leaders of the parties, he watches a football
match.
You’ve spent hundreds of hours to make an educated vote. The other spent 30 minutes. And you missed the football match (let’s assume you
also like football). But your votes are equal in weight. So who is the smart one now?
Combine this with the mathematical argument from above. You spent so much time to do the research in order to make a vote that has
absolutely negligible chance of changing even anything at all.
### Voting on Market
Voting as presented in democracies is broken. Even if we take the most pure direct democracy that we can theoretically imagine, without
all those complex modifications that enable minority votes problems (see above), it is still broken. Let’s say we really require majority
of all people in the country to vote for a change, otherwise no change will occur. This still means that a huge number of people will
always be unsatisfied. If the voting result is 60-40, the 40% minority will not be satisfied.
This is a nature of the state and the nature of democracy. There is never a win-win situation except for unrealistic scenario where
everyone agreed.
The free market works differently. It fixes this problem. On the free market all transactions happen voluntarily. All involved parties
are always satisfied with the transaction, otherwise it would not take place. Moreover, the minority votes are not thrown into the trash
as in democracy. Minority votes, regardless of how small, count on the market. How does that work?
Imagine you have 3 different brands of televisions. Most people, say 60%, prefer brand A. Fewer prefer brand B, say 30%. And finally,
the remaining 10% prefer brand C. Every consumer buys the brand they like the most, which means they cast their votes on the market
by spending their money. Now brand C is the least popular brand, but unlike in democracy, it is not a loser. It still gets 10% of
the purchases and it is free to use this money to influence the market with it. This influence includes buying goods from its suppliers,
who might not be the chosen suppliers of brands A and B. They also are not losers. The money spent on brand C televisions, i.e. the votes
this brand received, is not lost and continues to influence the market proportionally. Contrast this to democracy where the parties that
did not make it to the government have often zero influence on the upcoming changes.
### Democracy Is Religion
Above we mentioned that logic is not needed in democracy. This is because democracy is nothing but a religion. You need to believe, not to
arrive at conclusions using logic. The similarities between democracy and religion are endless. Voting is then nothing but a religious
ritual. And indeed that is what it is. Since we know already from the analysis above that it makes no sense for you to participate in
voting if your goal is to improve your life, the whole purpose of the voting is for you to build and strengthen your binding with the
religion.
Another typical sign that democracy is a religion is the propaganda. Schools, especially the public ones, are designed and ordered to breed
new good believers. Democracy is glorified in schools that kids are forced to attend (not necessarily in all democratic countries, but in
[the majority of them](https://ift.tt/BNgTCD9). Leaving the school, if kids know something, it is that
democracy is good.
If you live in a democratic country, would you be able to identify any religious texts of the democracy you live in? Something that is
to be read, perhaps in the school, and remembered. Something everyone should know. And how about some religious symbols, does your
democracy have any? How about special privileges of “religious leaders”? Is it a crime in your country to speak badly about your president?
Remember the narrative we discussed above? Let’s analyze it in this context.
– *Everyone should vote in elections.* – Why would people say this? When we consider that democracy is just a religion, it starts
to make sense. By participating in the voting rituals, you strengthen your binding to the religion. Participation is important due to
[confirmation bias](https://ift.tt/JTD45PY). When you participate in the voting, you spend your resources to
perform an action for which you later seek validation. You are more likely to accept claims that support what you did rather than
claims that would show your acts were wrong or foolish. Therefore the democracy religion needs as many people to vote so that fewer
people question it.
– *If you don’t cast your vote, you have no right to criticize the state of affairs.* – This again makes perfect sense when we
understand that democracy is a religion. In science we do not have any such requirement to participate in something in order to be allowed
to provide arguments against it. Imagine you would have to consume heroin before you were allowed to say that it’s a bad idea. But
when we understand democracy as a religion, it finally makes sense. If you don’t vote, you are an outsider, a non-believer, so it is likely
that your worldview won’t match what is needed, therefore we say that you are not entitled to criticism. But if you vote, suddenly we
know that you are a believer and that’s what we want. You are now trusted to provide good opinion.
In many countries, democracy has this sacred status which must not be questioned. People criticizing democracy are demonized and assumed
to be supporters of dictatorship, as if that was the only alternative. Democracy is the one given good thing that you are not supposed
to think about. It is good, it is sacred, you must not question it. Yes, maybe the actual system in the country is not optimal and can
be improved, but the idea of democracy must not be questioned and the goal is to only improve the democracy, if there is one already,
or to establish the democracy if it has not been established yet.
### Moral Argument
Even if all of the above was not true and all other aspects of democracy were good, there is the moral argument that by itself should
be enough to every good person to reject democracy. The democracy is simply immoral.
Let’s imagine you live in a house with 4 other neighbors and each one of you have a private room in the underground garage for your
personal stuff. Let’s say that the 4 neighbors decide to make a democratic vote on using your space for their stuff. Vote happens,
you lose 1:4 and your neighbors start to use your room for their stuff, perhaps even change a lock, so you can’t access it. That’s
a democracy, but it is also a theft as your private property was violated and taken from you without your permission.
In a state democracy, it’s just like that except it is not your neighbor but someone who you have never met before that is allowed to
vote on appropriation of your property. Be it taxes, or mandatory vaccination, or any other rule supported by the majority that violates
your rights. And yet, all this is “legal”.
The bottom line is – just because the majority think it is a good idea, it does not make it a good idea, it does not make it right,
it does not make it moral.
#### What Is Moral?
Above we use words like “moral” or “good”. What does it mean though? We use these terms interchangeably. What is moral is good and what
is good is moral. What is bad is immoral and vice versa.
But what does it mean? Yes, different people may consider different things to be good or bad, moral or not. Our moral framework is based
on accepting that nature given things can not be immoral and avoiding offensive violence.
That the nature given things are not immoral implies that equality can not be a moral goal. The Earth is not a homogeneous object with all
locations equal to others. Different locations have different distance to the sea, different climate, different plants and animals,
different amount of sunshine around the year. Therefore even if all people were exactly the same, just because they are born in different
location, it would imply that there is no equality and there can not be. And no two people are the same. They have different skills,
ideas, likes, abilities. Trying to achieve some kind of equality means to go directly against the nature and punish those who are faster
because the majority is slow, punish those who are pretty because the majority is not so pretty, punish those who are smart because average
is not so smart. That’s a very wrong way to approach things.
Instead we aim to define the moral and good to be what makes people flourish. Each one should be able to use their unique skills for what
they can make the best of them. Everyone is an expert on something else and the division of labor on the free market is the most efficient
way for the people to obtain wealth and welfare. And that holds even for unskilled and less intelligent people. When we mix that with
avoidance of offensive violence, we arrive at a moral framework that feels very easy to grasp. You simply leave others to do their things,
you do not attack them, you do not steal from them and you do not deceive them. It’s a very simple and natural moral framework.
#### Don’t Vote
Those who voted in democracy for the party that forms the government are partially responsible for what the governement is doing
(in direct democracy, replace this group with those who voted for some state law/rule/action). But even those who voted for
the party that did not form the government are also partially responsible. Perhaps less than the first group, but still much more
than those who did not participated in the voting. This is because participation in the voting gives the democracy its power. When
the turnout is 60% or 70%, the vote is much more legitimate (or can be presented as such) than if it was 5%. If the turnout was 5%
or 10%, who could say that there is any kind of mandate from people? By participating in the vote, you are supporting democracy.
If your side loses and you respect the vote, you are supporting democracy.
But now you know that democracy is immoral. That makes your action immoral. That makes you immoral. Maybe you did not realize that
before and you did not know that you acted immorally. That’s a poor excuse, but it is still better than if you willingly acted immorally.
But now you know, so you can not go and vote again and make this poor excuse again.
If you go to vote, you are supporting the democratic system and you are acting immorally. And you should stop.
## And Bitcoin?
Bitcoin is in contrast to democracy. But not because it is aligned with the principles of dictatorship, as people often think is
the only alternative to democracy. Bitcoin as a system is purely anarcho-capitalist. And if you do not know the term, perhaps you
are thinking of a chaos (the “anarchy” part) and a cold blooded greediness (the “capitalist” part). If that is the case, you have been
misled by democratic and statist propaganda.
Anarchy simply means without state (or in context of Bitcoin, absence of the ruler – “rules, not rulers”). Capitalism means
voluntary exchange on a free market. There are many rules in Bitcoin but there is no single one entity to enforce them. Participants
themselves enforce those rules by running the software that implements the Bitcoin protocol. And it is not a chaos because the system
is designed to be incentive compatible, which means that actors are better off if they behave well instead of trying to do harm.
In the development part, Bitcoin is also not a democracy. That would make little sense. People who are not skilled enough to evaluate
the consequences would be able to make changes that would destroy Bitcoin (just as those people destroyed the countries where democracy
prevails). Instead, again, since there is no ruler, anyone is allowed to work on any part of Bitcoin. But only if their work has
merit, the changes will be accepted. Accepted by who? By the participants who enforce the rules by running the software. These
participants have different strategies on which changes to accept. There is a web of trust as each participant trusts different people
and weights their opinions differently. If a certain person, or a group of well established developers, or CEOs of Bitcoin related
companies, or any other prominent people in the Bitcoin ecosystem were compromised, only part of this web of trust would be affected
and compromised. Only that part would be willing to accept a malicious change to Bitcoin while the rest of the participants would not
find any reason to accept that change.
Imagine what Bitcoin would look like with governance by voting. Either we would have one person one vote system as we have in democracy,
in which case some authority would be needed to make sure that each person only votes once. Since the core design principle is to avoid
such authorities, this would not work well. Or we could say that each coin has the voting power, in which case we would arrive at a proof
of stake system with all its flaws. The more the coins were distributed equally, the more it would look like the democracy, the less
equal distribution would be more like oligarchy. There are many examples of such systems that use proof of stake mechanism at least
“for governance”. The oligarchy case is not interesting since it is just a very centralized system controlled by few. The more equally
distributed case which is closer to democracy suffers from the very same problems as we described above for state democracies. People
voting about something they don’t understand is the main concern of course, but some systems even implemented delegation of the voting
power, which very much aligns with the representative democracy, which, as we demonstrated above, is even worse.
Bitcoin has been under many attacks since its early life. If it was democracy, it would fail shortly after. Fortunately, Bitcoin is not
a democracy, it thus has a good chance to live long.
Cryptocurrency
