Last night a nocoiner friend and I ended up arguing about La Boétie until way too late. Fitting, since his takes on money are basically stuck in the same century the book was written, 1548, give or take.
The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude
The question: if you cut yourself loose from the chain alone, no crowd, no witnesses, is that still freedom or just a better-decorated hiding spot?
His point: La Boétie is clear, the tyrant falls when the whole people stop serving him at once. If only you let go, the system keeps eating just fine. Running a node at night, with nobody noticing, is comfort wearing a nice name. You sleep better, but the square doesn't even know you exist.
Mine: La Boétie was writing in a binary world, you serve or you don't, and without critical mass, one person letting go changed nothing. That world isn't ours anymore. If ten thousand people each run a node on their own, uncoordinated, the result isn't noise lost in the void, it's a network that no longer depends on any single point of failure. Every node subtracts a little power from whoever's centralizing, even if the other nine thousand never hear about you. It's not binary, it's cumulative.
We never settled it, he's still arguing like it's 1548, I'm still telling him to update his priors. I'll leave it to the room: when you pull your sats off the exchange and nobody notices, did you take something away from the system or just from your own anxiety?
Both, honestly. You did take something from the system, because an exchange treats your sats as a liability it can reuse until you actually pull them. Every withdrawal shrinks that float a little, whether anyone notices or not.
But the "nobody notices" part is doing real work in his argument. A single withdrawal does not move a bankruptcy, and a single node does not stop a miner cartel. The difference from 1548 is not that one person now matters more, it is that many people matter without needing to coordinate at all. La Boétie needed a crowd to stop serving at once. You just need enough people to quietly prefer holding their own keys, and the float shrinks on its own.
So the honest answer is closer to "both, in that order". First it is mostly your own anxiety, because the system is too big to feel you leave. But every exit makes the next one louder. That is the cumulative part, and your friend is stuck two centuries before the concept of a network effect.