It's the height of irony that Muyuu and Theymos find their central planning position to be the libertarian one.
They fail to discern that the constancy of Bitcoin is not a result of rules laid down by Satoshi, nor of rules guarded by wise Core devs, but of the market's ongoing favorable view of those rules. Should the market's view ever change, which would take nothing short of a miracle if we're talking about the 21M cap, those rules will indeed change. Carefully and conservatively, of course, as that is what the market views as maintaining value. Bitcoin is in all aspects a creature of the market.
Here we run into the semantic blur I mentioned earlier, where someone like LukeJr would get stuck on the fact that "we can always keep something named Bitcoin that maintains all the rules." You can, but in this case the market will render it nearly worthless, taking away the whole reason why you cared about it at all. The market wouldn't call that Bitcoin anymore, so no one else would. What even counts as "Bitcoin" is defined by the market, for all practical purposes.
It's similar to a misjudgment I think Murray Rothbard made in his libertarian works, which was a tendency to conceptualize libertarian laws prescriptively (i.e., the Non-Aggression Principle) rather than as emergent phenomena. Contrast this with another libertarian, John Hasnas, writing in
The Obviousness of Anarchy:
Supporters of government claim that government is necessary to ensure that there is
one law for all and that the law applies equally to all citizens. If the government does
not make the law, they contend, there would be no uniform code of laws. People in
different locations or with different cultural backgrounds or levels of wealth would
be subject to different rules of law.
The proper response to this is probably the one Woody Allen made to Diane
Keaton in Annie Hall when she complained that her apartment had bad plumbing
and bugs, which was: “You say that as though it is a negative thing.” How persuasive
is the following argument? Government is necessary to ensure that there is one style
of dress for all and that all citizens are equally clothed. If the government does
not provide clothes, there would be no uniform mode of dress. People in different
locations or with different cultural backgrounds or levels of wealth would be clothed
in garments of different styles and quality.
Why would anyone think that uniformity in law is any more desirable than
uniformity in dress? The quest for uniformity leads us to treat the loving husband
who kills his terminally ill wife to relieve her suffering the same way we treat Charles
Manson, to apply the same rules of contracting to sophisticated business executives
purchasing corporations and semi-literate consumers entering into installment
contracts, and to act as though the slum lord in the Bronx and the family letting their
spare room in Utica should be governed by the same rules of property law.
There are, of course, certain rules that must apply to all people; those that provide
the basic conditions that make cooperative behavior possible. Thus, rules prohibiting
murder, assault, theft, and other forms of coercion must be equally binding on all
members of a society. But we hardly need government to ensure that this is the
case. These rules always evolve first in any community; you would not even have a
community if this were not the case.
The idea that we need government to ensure a uniform rule of law is especially
crazy in the United States, in which the federal structure of the state and national
governments is designed to permit legal diversity. To the extent that the law of the
United States can claim any superiority to that produced by other nations, it is at
least partially due the fact that it was generated by the common law process in the
“laboratory of the states.” Allowing the development of different rules in different
states teaches us which rules most effectively resolve disputes. To the extent that the
conditions that give rise to disputes are the same across the country, the successful
rules tend to be copied by other jurisdictions and spread. This creates a fairly uniform
body of law.* To the extent that the conditions that give rise to disputes are peculiar
to a particular location or milieu, they do not spread. This creates a patchwork of
rules that are useful where applied, but would be irrelevant or disruptive if applied
in other settings.
One of the beauties of the common law process is that it creates a body of law
that is uniform where uniformity is useful and diverse where it is not. This is the
optimal outcome.
Government legislation, in contrast, creates uniformity by imposing ill-fitting,
one-size-fits-all rules upon a geographically and ethnically diverse population. Once
again, not only is government not necessary to the creation of a well-functioning
body of law, it is a significant impediment to it. Please consider this the next time
you find yourself wondering why all businesses must be closed on Sunday in the
Orthodox Jewish sections of Brooklyn.
*Fairly, but not fetishistically. The law against homicide functions quite effectively despite the fact that the definitions of first and second degree murder and voluntary and involuntary manslaughter differ from state to state.
The part I bolded seems analogous to how the 21M coin limit is supported by the market, and is not something that will just be "left to chance" if forking is easy (easy forking is loosely analogous here to small or no central government).
Like Theymos and Muyuu, state apologists tend to see the uniformity in laws prohibiting things like murder as products of government wise men, thinking that if left to the market or left to the natural order of emergent societal rules, there would be some places where murder was fine (or perhaps merely subject to a fine
).
Like Theymos and Muyuu, they think that if the rules of contracting applied to "sophisticated business executives purchasing corporations and semi-literate consumers entering into installment contracts" were left to the market where these two situations were treated quite differently (here akin to leaving blocksize to the market and allowing it to adjust), soon we'd have redheads going to jail for murdering blonds while blonds only received a fine for murdering redheads (akin to, say, grossly increasing the 21M coin limit).
When Hasnas says, "You would not even have a community if this were not the case," it is akin to saying, "Bitcoin would never have been valuable if this were not the case." Theymos and Muyuu imagine the market value of Bitcoin derives from the jealous guardianship of the permanence of its rules by Core wise men, but actually the permanence of the rules of Bitcoin derives from its jealous guardianship by the market in the form of financial support, and rejection of all imitators and all errant forks.
Bitcoin's permanence is subject to change if the market no longer values a certain rule, but that should not be scary in the slightest, because it is already the case that if the market were to suddenly decide to value massive inflation it would sell Bitcoin into the irrelevance anyway. Easy forking isn't what would place Bitcoin in the market's hands. Bitcoin has always been completely in the market's hands. Easy forking merely allows the market to make its control more granular.
Rather than selling off Bitcoin and leaving it "a smoking hole in the ground" (to quote Gmax out of context
) because of some easy-to-fix issue, it can just sell the value-damaging fork off and buy the value-enhancing one. The lack of easy forking just forces the market to make an all-or-nothing decision. It forces the market to swat flies on Bitcoin with a bazooka; easy forking instead lets the market use a fly swatter. It means nimble adaptation in response to threats. If anything should be scary, it's a situation where hard forks are difficult. That would leave Bitcoin truly vulnerable.
