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94 sats \ 2 replies \ @Scoresby 28 Sep \ parent \ on: Stacker Saloon
It doesn't make sense to me.
But like how? How would we reach this agreement? It doesn't make sense because of "just."
I don’t think the how matters for the question why we need something that forces us to care about something we say we do
But maybe an example would help:
Imagine you’re marrying someone and you say you will absolutely never, under no circumstances, break up. But then you setup a contract to make sure what happens if it does happen.
Isn’t setting up the contract an acknowledgement that the “absolutely never, under no circumstances” isn’t true?
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Marriage, at least in most western traditions that I know of, is a public thing. There must be witnesses. Why is that?
We don't just make an agreement in private and tell our spouse that we are committed to them.
I think this is because humans recognize that we change with time. We may have a certain attitude now, but we are making a commitment for life and it is pretty much impossible to know who you will be or how you will feel twenty years from now.
So does the fact that we need to have witnesses for a marriage to be legal cheapen what a marriage is or mean that we weren't really committed when we said "I do"? I don't think so. Because a marriage is as much an aspiration as it is a commitment. The fact that we do it in public helps us make it real even in private.
Now as to censorship resistance: in a marriage you at least know who you are entering into relationship and you have the ability to choose them.
In a permissionless system like bitcoin, we are making the censorship resistance commitment to anyone who wants to join both now and in the future. We are even making the commitment to people who may want to harm us or destroy bitcoin itself.
We may be fully committed to censorship resistance, but without some kind of public, objective rule set, we'd be vulnerable to constant disputes about what actually constitutes censorship. But even worse, we'd have no way to say to the person who joins the network and actually wants to censor -- "that's a violation of the agreement."
You hit on this in your initial comment
is that itself a form of censorship?
No, because we all agree to something when we start -- but we only know thus because there is a set of rules that we can point to and say this is what we mean.
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