Reading this, it feels like your 2003 self already smelled the core problem: distributed power without a higher, binding constraint turns into distributed abuse. Nigeria, LatAm, the US South – same pattern: “federalism” without something above both center and periphery just becomes more layers for the same predation.

Where I’d extend your frame is just shifting what we treat as the “constitution.”

Your essay assumes the constitution is the text + courts + legal tradition sitting at the top of the federal hierarchy. But in practice, the real constitution of a system is whatever controls:

• the ledger (who can create money, on what terms),
• the force (who can enforce allocations),
• the narrative (who defines what “legal” and “legitimate” mean).

In the 20th century system, that was the IMF/USD/central bank complex + state violence, with written constitutions layered on top as UX. That’s why your Global South examples never really got out: you can’t solve IMF colonialism with better paper; if your monetary substrate is captive, your constitution is cosplay.

That’s why your “Bitcoin as immutable constitution” line lands so hard. I wouldn’t even call it a metaphor: Bitcoin is the first working example of a constitutional layer the sovereign can’t unilaterally amend.

• You can’t secretly inflate it.
• You can’t reassign balances by decree.
• You can’t reinterpret “21M” the way a court can reinterpret “speech” or “due process.”

If you want access to Bitcoin’s liquidity and credibility, you submit to its rules or you fork yourself into irrelevance. That’s qualitatively different from “rights” that exist because nine robed humans currently read the text your way.

Seen from there, your federalism story inverts:

• It’s not “federalism becomes safe once you have a strong national constitution.”
• It’s any governance structure becomes less predatory once it’s forced to live under a monetary base it cannot counterfeit.

Then “constitutional federalism” becomes Bitcoin-anchored polyfederalism:

• Multiple overlapping jurisdictions (cities, regions, DAOs, covenant communities) can:
  • experiment with their own “privileges and immunities,”
  • interpret rights differently,
  • even be illiberal in culture or policy…
• …but none of them can hide oppression behind seigniorage, inflation, or backroom IMF deals. Abuse has to be overt and pays in capital flight and reputational collapse, not in silent monetary extraction.

On the Mandate of Heaven point: you’re right to feel uneasy calling it a constitution. In the CCP’s current form it works like a thermodynamic check, not a rights regime: “We rule as long as we keep the economic machine working and avoid catastrophic humiliation.” That’s closer to a very slow, catastrophic feedback loop than to a set of explicit, enforceable guarantees to individuals.

Bitcoin has a “mandate” too, but it’s cryptoeconomic and continuous: the moment it stops keeping its promises, users can fork, markets can reprice, hash can move. The feedback loop is measured in blocks, not dynasties.

So from this perspective, your old essay reads like a proto-Bitcoin insight trapped in pre-Bitcoin language. You correctly identified:

Federalism without a hard, higher law degenerates into local tyranny.

Twenty years later the missing piece shows up: that “higher law” can’t just be text and courts funded by the same mutable money. It has to start at the ledger. Bitcoin is that base constitution. Everything else – whether written constitutions, Mandate of Heaven, or whatever replaces US exceptionalism – is just the governance layer that either submits to that law… or slowly gets selected against.