Property Rights and Crypto-Anarchy
Property rights are claims of ownership of various object. Typically a bundle of rights including:
- The right to use the good.
- The right to earn income from the good.
- The right to transfer the good to others.
- The right to enforce property rights.
There are many philosophical theories on the origin and merits of property rights, but basically property rights is just a claim. If everybody makes similar property claims and there are no disputes to resolve.
If we go to an empty field and build a farm, we can claim anything we want. It does not matter as there is no one around. If a second person arrives and recognises our claims as the first person who arrived to the field, then there is no dispute. “Finders keepers” is a very popular approach to property claims.
In order to have stable rights and claims, our rights and claims need to be reciprocal. Property rights tends to work around the world because most human beings make more or less similar property claims.
If there is a disagreement in property claims, we have three ways to deal with disputes:
Come to mutual agreement.
Get a third party to resolve the issue.
Use violence.
Using violence to resolve disputes negates the idea that we can have a civilisation. Using force to uphold rights, just means that “right is might”, which is not reciprocal for every citizen involved. The people with the most guns win.
Most disputes are resolved by cultural norms. People with a similar worldview are more likely to come a reasonable solution. It is not really difficult to work out who owns toothbrushes and houses to most people in the world as property claims do not change that much over different cultures.
The biggest philosophical differences in property claims are between settled and nomadic people; and between socialist and capitalist philosophies. However this does not affect most people in the world.
Sometimes disputes do arise over workers claims, landlord and tenant rights, business to business disputes, divorces, mortgages not being paid; to name a few common examples. Having a unbiased third party organisation to resolve disputes helps us to resolve disputes without descending into violence.
Ireland during the Brehon Law period, and North America during the Wild West period, are examples of intelligent ways people have created to resolve disputes peacefully. However, nowadays the state is used as the third party of last resort to resolve property disputes. Using the state to resolve property disputes is extremely expensive and generally gives disproportionate power to those who are skilled and lobbying for laws in their favour.
Having a consensus on property rights we help us build a better civilisation, without resorting to violence. We could go around stealing things, or we could just cooperate. We could waste money on political campaigns and spend more than 51% of income defending the remaining 49%; or we could reduce poverty and use advanced technology to resolve property disputes.
We cannot claim right now that cryptocurrency provides a quick replacement for the state today, however we are succeeding in build new technology to help decentralise authority, retain our wealth and gradually reduce the war machine.
The creation of Bitcoin, marks the first time in history that millions of people have agreed to a strict set of rules and abide by it without dispute. We have succeeded in creating a voluntary set of financial rules. Code is law.
Different cryptocurrencies work in different ways, but they work roughly like so:
One who holds the private key has he rightful claim to the cryptocurrency. There is no way to dispute this.
Miners running the nodes, be it Proof Of Work or Proof Of Stake, claim cryptocurrency by providing the work to solve the relevant algorithms. The cryptocurrency is theirs and they have the right to give those rights away to someone else for whatever reason, be it for trade or for fun.
In cryptocurrency, the third party that resolves property disputes is the code itself. An unbiased agreement that we all voluntarily adhere to. This way is more cost effective that the current mainstream legal systems and results in less violence.
Our next task to apply the same set principles to external property claims, such as our bodies, personal property and real estate. Titles and deeds, as well as personal identification documents have been published with blockchain technology. New projects are coming out in 2018 that are decentralising property investments into small pieces for ordinary people to make claims.
The only way to fully put property rights and civil law on to the blockchain, is for everyone to voluntarily agree to same code of law. Otherwise we will just have to resort to the state and violence to resolve disputes; which is wastes a lot of people's wealth and lives. The more people who voluntarily agree to crypto-anarchy principles, the less disputes and violence we will have; and we will be generating more wealth for ourselves and living more in harmony.
We will not be able to force people into follow crypto-anarchy. We can only convince them to agreeing to the same code law by free will alone.
To summarise;
Property rights are just claims.
Disputes are easily resolved with an agreement to the same set of principles.
The crypto-anarchy revolution has succeeded in getting millions of people to are to the same code of laws, with resorting to violence.
Using reason and logic, is how we are going to build a more harmonious and prosperous civilisation.