 Quote by twofish-quant
You will *never* get the nations of the world to agree on currency, credit, and other systems. There are some things that the US and Canada will *never* agree on, and if you can't get the US and Canada to agree, good luck on signing on China, Germany, India, France, Iran, Saudi Arabia etc. etc. You have to realize that in some places in the world, big government, centralization, and socialism are considered good things.
The big question is what are the "bare minimum rules" you can get people to agree to in order to prevent another disaster.
The other thing is that things will naturally centralize in finance, and law tends to centralize things. One thing about finance is that people will want to do the deal where they can find fast, efficient, and predictable courts. So if you have a complex securities transaction, you want it done in the Southern District of NY, or in London, or in HK, because if something goes wrong, it goes before a judge that has heard a million of these cases before.
There's also the "Las Vegas" effect. If you outlaw something everywhere except for one place, that one place will make a ton of money. There are several small islands in the Caribbean (BVI, Bermuda, or the Cayman Islands) that have entire economies based on being able to do stuff there that you can't anywhere else.
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It doesn't have to happen at all at once and it doesn't mean that absolute agreeability will happen: it's more of what you are alluding to: creating some bare minimum ruleset and then taking it from there.
I didn't mention the systems of governance and society: I mentioned currency and credit.
Although I definitely agree that currency and credit paradigms are linked to many things including governance, economic models of nation states, idealogies of societies/leaders/citizens and so on, the point of the decentralization is to create the scenario where you don't get a monopoly on currency or credit creation in a way that facilitates "real" trust and not just trust.
Trust is a term that comes and goes every empire and generation. Real trust is an entirely different manner: real trust is based on something that is not infallible by the actions of man.
The thing that history should have told us not the first time or the fifth or even the tenth time, is that trusting people only on their faith always ends badly.
There are actually a lot of good ideas both new and old for having "real" trust. Some are based on precious metals (like gold and silver), some are based on technology and mathematics (like Bitcoin). Gold can't be 'printed' and mathematics doesn't 'lie' if the definitions and behaviour match the description.
With regards to financial transactions and business, this is another issue that needs to be tackled however solving the credit and currency problems in terms of 'trust' is really the critical problem that a lot of people would really like solved with real trust as opposed to trust because a fair trading environment between nation-states that everyone can undeniably agree on (one based on elements not related to human fallibility).
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