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You make a good point. I was thinking something like this while reading his piece (less fleshed out, though).
I think that Perley might argue that his analogy is about how decision-making happens and not necessarily as good when it comes to how rules are actually enforced. But they seem pretty closely related to me.
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I see the analogy, but I'm not sure how accurate it is in practice.
The difference between mempool policy and the administrative state is that the administrative state has the power of coercive force.
Whether I'm a user of bitcoin or a miner, if I don't like the mempool policy of some nodes that I'm connected to, I can pretty easily opt for another set of nodes.
Obviously, there are a lot of reasons why switching to another set of nodes isn't easy. Network externalities can reinforce the dominance of one group of policies, and switching can be costly to miners if it increases latency.
Even so, I think the option value to switch enforces some discipline that the administrative state doesn't have. I suppose democratic elections are supposed to be the force that disciplines the administrative state; and in a way, they are. Trump's gutting of the bureaucracy is one such example. But elections seem to rely on another collective process and only come about every couple of years; switching node relays is something that a person can do individually and instantaneously.