Protocol is Law

The purpose of the Law is to protect your private property. The purpose of the Bitcoin Protocol is to protect your bitcoin.

The purpose of the Law is to organize for the collective defense of private property.

The purpose of the State is to enforce the Law.

Up until now, we gave the State a monopoly on legal violence to enforce the Law, to protect our private property from would-be plunderers.

Sadly, the Law is often perverted by the State, enabling the State itself to become the plunderer.

Bitcoin changed that arrangement by enabling a new kind of law which did not require violence to enforce.

The Bitcoin Protocol is the Law.

Individuals organize through rough consensus to determine the Law, voluntarily opting in. The Bitcoin Protocol protects private property (bitcoin) better than the State could ever hope to do.

With Bitcoin, the State (a trusted third party) is not required to enforce the Law. Thus, the State cannot pervert (change) the Law (protocol).

Before Bitcoin, an economic minority of unproductive people could pervert the Law to plunder the productive economic majority. The end state of this perversion is Communism. The economic minority is incentivized to pervert the Law to benefit themselves. “Democracy” is often the instrument of this perversion.

Bitcoin is not a democracy.

With Bitcoin, an economic minority *cannot* pervert the Law, and the economic majority is incentivized to keep the Law intact, because any perversion of the Law (protocol) is against their economic interests.

Bitcoin’s Protocol makes Law superordinate, rather than subordinate. The default state of the Law under Bitcoin is to remain unchanged. The Bitcoin Protocol is anti-entropic; it creates order in a world that naturally trends toward disorder.

This is not to say that the Protocol cannot ever be changed, nor that small changes will never be necessary. The point is that changing the Protocol is exceptionally difficult, as it should be. The minority cannot change the Protocol on a whim to address some “emergency,” whether real, imagined, or manufactured. They cannot change the Law. The only way to change the Law is with the overwhelming support of the economic majority.

If the minority attempts to force changes on the majority, the result is the majority ignores those changes, and the Bitcoin Protocol persists with the Law intact. The minority succumbs to entropy, and is now using a less secure protocol to protect their private property.

The Law is order. Changing the Law is chaos.

If the Law can be easily changed, then it cannot protect your private property.

If the Protocol can be easily changed, then it cannot protect your bitcoin.

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