Is Web3 anything?

> This is ostensibly what the legal system provides, but anyone who’s actually tried to go through small claims court knows that the reality of that route is… painful. And it often ends unsatisfactorily

And it is in fact a key feature of the contemporary modern world: the people don't have a realistic access to court anymore, and this deeply undermines the legitimacy of the State.

This immediately reminded this article[1] which explained how the Taliban have rebuilt their power in Afghanistan in recent years, especially outside of their original ethnic group (Pashtuns): by appointing judges in every provinces, available for free, with no delay and hassle.

A quick DeepL translation of the most relevant part of the article:

> From a material point of view, these courts are rudimentary. The judges, dressed without distinctive signs, sit in village mosques, in private houses or under the cover of trees. “The Taliban courts operate in a very simple way, said one of them. The Taliban judge sits with a cup of green tea in front of him, he receives the requests in person. Then he calls a member of the movement and tells him to go and ask the people against whom a complaint has been filed to come the next day” The judges interview witnesses, examine the documents brought by the disputing parties, and render their verdict, often after a few days - at most a few months for the most sensitive cases. Most disputes concerned land or matrimonial matters, but judges also punished theft, murder and adultery, sometimes with very severe penalties (executions, amputations, stoning). […]

> The same motivation was found in a relative of Mr. Faizal Akbar, governor of Kounar province between 2002 and 2005. Despite his political opposition to the Taliban, he was forced to turn to them for a theft of cattle because, since the regime's judges were "corrupt," the costs of filing a complaint with the police and of an official trial would have far exceeded the value of the stolen cattle.

[1] https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2021/09/BACZKO/63487 (in French)

Economics 2.0 starts at "Welcome to decade eight, third millennium"

A bit further down:

> Collapse of the trans-Lunar economy: Deep in the hot thinking depths of the solar system, vast new intellects come up with a new theory of wealth that optimizes resource allocation better than the previously pervasive Free Market 1.0. With no local minima to hamper them, and no need to spawn and reap start-ups Darwin-style, the companies, group minds, and organizations that adopt the so-called Accelerated Salesman Infrastructure of Economics 2.0 trade optimally with each other. The phase change accelerates as more and more entities join in, leveraging network externalities to overtake the traditional ecosystem. Amber and Sadeq are late on the train, Sadeq obsessing about how to reconcile ASI with murabaha and mudaraba while the postmodern economy of the mid-twenty-first century disintegrates around them. Being late has punitive consequences – the Ring Imperium has always been a net importer of brainpower and a net exporter of gravitational potential energy. Now it's a tired backwater, the bit rate from the red-shifted relativisitic probe insufficiently delightful to obsess the daemons of industrial routing. In other words, they're poor.

As someone who has been through this exact thing, it sucks, but it is possible in the current court systems. Courts have complicated "Discovery" processes explicitly for this reason: to find out not just the immediate problem (a bankrupt builder or a builder who would be bankrupt by the end of the court case), but the supply lines (what other warranties apply?) and the creditors (where is the bankrupt company's money going?).

A human run court is allowed to state "this bankruptcy looks fishy for this reason, and these people are owed damages, and some of the money that moved on already to these creditors is by rights should be paid for damages to these people". It's definitely not fun to be involved in such court proceedings, and it is and likely always be an inefficient human process, but it is a process as a society we've built to be mostly very trustworthy. A jury of peers to decide if damages are warranted in the first place; a human judge with reasoning to say "this shell company is bankrupt, but these other companies can and should pay, maybe with the money they took from this shell company" or "this shell company is bankrupt but some of this still applies to the warranty insurance product they purchased and the insurance provider needs to pay up even though their client is bankrupt".

It doesn't always work right/decide in your favor, and it is slow and expensive, but "smart contracts" offer no better and often a lot worse processes. A "smart contract" can't route around a shell company/wallet. A "smart contract" likely can't discover that other warranties may have applied or other insurance products existed (and if it can it's in a programming class all its own and likely a one off you can't expect to exist in general or to work if you need to actually rely on it).