I think I finally "get" crypto. This article made me see the light. Crypto is about secession - a techno-anarchy. Decentralized governance with a self-managed currency is effectively creating a new city-state. To be honest, the idea of the United States collapsing into a collection of Crypto City-States doesn't sound too bad. Better than a Mad Max scenario.
While his article uses the word "city", I think this is entirely misleading. It would be more accurate to describe the unit of organization that it empowers as a "gang". ...an "organized semi-anonymous gang". ...and this is why it's very apt at developing organized crime. Now, to a certain degree, a "gang" that is scalable enough, profitable enough, and efficient enough - could indeed carve out a geographical territo…
The CityDAO example Vitalik gives uses a one person/one vote system.
Crypto’s not inherently about replacing democracy. A lot of it is about experimenting with varied rule systems that our existing democracies are otherwise incapable of changing. Like shaping our rules for the commons more explicitly in order to nudge things in a better direction. The article points out the misaligned incentives between land owners, residents, and the city collective: land owners want to restrict supply to make their land more valuable, but this restricts growth of the city. For many, crypto is the biggest hope not for building some anarcho utopia, but just for experimenting with tweaks that might better align the incentives for everyone within a city. e.g. put all the land in a city inside a trust and replace land ownership with a share of that trust: now land owners don’t want to increase their tiny plot by restricting supply: they want to increase the whole pie, which can better be done by investing instead of speculating.
It’s hard to believe our cities today have all found their perfect form. Crypto gives you the tools to more rapidly diversify these systems, in the hope of finding better forms, faster.