It's good to know a lot of the anti-CSW sentiment is based on pure misconception.
Many of these are easy to clear up, such as that Craig isn't libertarian. He's not an anarchist, but neither did I ever think Satoshi was (always struck me as a Randian). Craig will emphasize whatever he currently sees as the main failing of the common narrative. If it's complete anonymity and anarchy or ignoring the fact that the world as it currently exists is heavily reliant on law, he'll rail against that. Have we forgotten that even Murray Rothbard himself, Mr. Anarcho-Capitalism, was pro-intellectual property? That Ron Paul is a congressman? That Mises was strongly pro-state and worked in bureaucracies? Nothing about pursuing patents or libel suits would be seen as objectionable to most libertarians before the 1990s or so. Rothbard paid his taxes. He was never extreme enough to suggest you could just totally ignore the existing state and legal systems.
As to tokens such as stocks, there's no such thing as one without a centralized issuer. The whole point of a stock is centralized issuance.
When I joined the bitcoin effort in 2012 a rosy picture was painted of pseudo-anonymous, uncensorable, irreversible, borderless p2p money interacting with almost no friction with other instruments that contain those same properties such as land titles, stocks and bonds (all types of tokens) via potentially complex rules (smart contracts) on many types of devices (smart property).
Craig has a nuanced view of anonymity and privacy, which
@Christoph Bergmann just mentioned. It is indeed psuedo-anonymous. Bitcoin complies with centuries-old common and civil (and Shariah) law because of its original design choices; changing them willy-nilly undoes all that hard-won subtlety. Satoshi never claimed (in fact specifically denied) that Bitcoin was above law, anti-state, or even anti-bank (the genesis block "Chancellor on Brink" article was warning about the
nationalization of banks). He used the word anonymous but loosely, and he also decried the pushing of Bitcoin as anonymous money. Even someone like Rothbard could see that that would just prompt the government banhammer.
Uncensorable comes from mining competition. To imply this is different in BSV would be yet another myth.
Irreversible - again, completely the same in BSV. Tokens for stocks, etc. are for working within a centralized company model, and no corporation now existing in any advanced country is going to issue stock on a token that doesn't have regulatory compliance considerations baked in.
Maybe Bitcoin will someday cause the state to wither away, but it is certainly not this day, not this generation even. Practicalities of law cannot just be flaunted. The fallacy here arises from believing Bitcoin was already illegal or in the government crosshairs. This is a myth others propagated, myself included. It is not something Satoshi ever said or implied, and Bitcoin's design - very unlike any other coin I know of - goes out of its way to comply with longstanding law that is quasi-universal in advanced countries. There's again a reason Bitcoin is nowhere-banned, unlike, say Monero, which Japan is moving to ban for the obvious AML reasons.
Designing with the existing order in mind means recognizing that stocks need to be able to be invalidated by the issuer, etc. What's the point then? Just efficiency. Not anarcho-utopia. Not today at least. On the other hand, while that's not what nChain, Tokenized, etc. are building, Bitcoin script is highly general (as Satoshi pointed out) and thus can be used for essentially anything, even things CSW doesn't agree with. Darkweb organizations might try issuing stock as well, but Bitcoin isn't specifically designed to facilitate that, for again obvious reasons of law.
Craig also likes to point out that a judge can always repudiate (i.e., reverse) a transaction. Not on the chain, but in law. As mentioned above, Craig harps on what people are not getting. Sometimes too much. To a socialist he would do the opposite and sound like a minarchist. Nothing strange here: he's a classical liberal, a libertarian close to the Austrian tradition economically with identity aspects stemming substantially from Ayn Rand.
Whether or not you think script can do it all, it's still a strawman to suggest Craig is against any of the smart contract, smart property, or generalized token functionality. Even DSV and others are doable in script, is his position, and it is especially strange to point to this one as several others independently reached the same conclusion.
If you read the man himself rather than what tiny cherrypicked crumbs reach Reddit, you'll see all this is true. Not the claims, which take insight and expertise to verify, but the positions. Most of his positions are readily apparent after having read a lot of his work (though even that takes a few weeks to do). Much misunderstanding could be avoided just by reading 30 or so of CSW's recent Medium articles and watching a few of his interviews and presentations. It would raise many more questions and many new contentions, but a bunch of the existing myths would be put to rest.
