Before anyone gets the wrong idea, no, I’m not talking about the movie/show The Watchmen. I’m referring to the ancient philosophical question “quis custodiet ipsos custodes” or “who watches the watchmen”. Go read up on that elsewhere.
For those of you who don’t know and need a summary here, it’s a question often posed in reference to the fact that the person or people in charge of making sure the rules are honored have nothing preventing them from disobeying the rules. There’s never anything preventing the person guarding your treasure from stealing some of the treasure, for example.
What’s the best remedy to this that you can think of?
Dr. Manhattan, obviously.
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Spread your treasure over multiple watchman, each holding only a part. Keep a public reputation system for each watchman. Make the loss of reputation more costly than treasure to could steal.
Unironically communism. The more things are held in common the less incentive there is for people to steal, especially if you can ensure providing a decent or at the least constantly improving standard of living while making examples out of those who hoard wealth or violate the public trust (see china executing a few corrupt billionaires every now and again).
This is more a question regarding political organization than economic organization.
A one party state generally doesn’t provide the best checks and balances to itself.
A state with two corporate captured bourgeois parties constantly sabotaging each other is arguably a lot worse
What is to stop the one party from being captured by corporate interests?
What if we had 12 parties that were all captured by corporate interests?
Everything can be corrupted, the apparent amount of choices doesn’t make the choice any better or worse
So Watchmen watch the Watchmen?
We can all be watchmen
The amount of political parties doesn’t mean there’s any actual checks and balances, having a direct effect on the system does
The discussion is about checks and balances. So what kind of checks and balances would be there?
We can be each others’ watchers, hierarchy isn’t a natural law
More than one group of custodians, ideally with conflicting interests, watching one another? Essentially some system of checks and balances?
I dunno, but did they see the gorilla?
Anarchism.
Group with most weapons takes all, then infighting begins?
Tell me you don’t know anything about anarchism without saying it
What’s your definition of anarchism? How do you see it playing out?
Nakamoto Consensus, the mechanism by which Bitcoin is protected, is the original digital solution to this problem. Several others exist in modern cryptocurrency chains/ledgers.
With regards to protecting digital treasure, I think this fits the bill.
Smoke weed everyday
