I envision local, townhall direct hands on government (where you know every body within your Dunbar number limit) will be the surviving and thriving form of limited government that I envision will be enabled and sustained by the paradigm I promoted in my prior 3 posts.
I can dream can't I?]
It is a beautiful dream.
Unfortunately, I also have a hard time envisioning this scenario lasting very long due to the same "too many chiefs and not enough Indians" problem (local governmental bodies being the "chiefs.") Local governments won't always agree with their neighboring areas. State governments were formed with their own sets of laws as a solution to this problem. The previous alternative was to invade your neighbor and subjugate them to the will of your local government while abolishing theirs... There is also the issue of international arrangements and treaties.
The fledgling
Knowledge Age makes this more plausibly sustainable, because we no longer need geographical economies-of-scale, because the economy becomes dominated by virtual work and production. For example, we will no longer need eminent domain to construct intrastate and interstate highways through communities, because we will have flying cars and besides we don't need to physically travel to work. Even commerce can be virtually delivered with 3D printer designs downloaded and printed locally instead of physical shipping.
Thus local communities will become more of competing venues where constituents can vote also with their feet, moving to communities whose politics and polices suit their desires.
It is easy for government to crush or at least severely suppress an anonymous currency in the physical economy. Attaching long prison times for accepting payment in said currency and then sending out lots of undercover agents who try to buy things would do the trick.
It is in the digital realm, however, where the seller does not have to physically deliver goods but can anonymously deliver data/analysis/programming that anonymity becomes very difficult for governments to deal with. The thesis is that overtime this digital/knowledge economy will grow to dominate the overall economy while the physical economy progressively shrinks into relative insignificance.
I've heard of this potential scenario before and I'm happy to say that the government can't do that so easily in the US or in other armed societies... In the US, financial expression is protected under the First and Fifth Amendments. Spending money is a form of speech, and money is a form of property when possessed. Money is any medium for the exchange of value... If the government made a law criminalizing a lawful form of expression (not causing undue harm; yelling "fire" in a theater, slander, etc...") it would simply cross the line into totalitarianism and make anonymity that much more desirable. The government is just a group of loosely associated individuals following orders from somebody higher up the chain; it's not likely the government would be able to enforce the unconstitutional law without weakening itself...
Agreed (but not necessarily on government employees being disloyal since they won't bite the hand that feeds them). The government is much wiser to co-opt a popular trend than to attempt to ban it as they did with Napster (which only lead to more decentralized P2P sharing apps) or
state governments are trying to ban now sharing websites.
So the key is to make a crypto-currency popular and incapable of being co-opted. Bitcoin and Monero are not capable of this.
While the knowledge age will render obsolete many of the reasons for which we "need" any more than local governments; it cannot guarantee that State or Federal governments will never again be needed. It's for this reason that I prefer a very limited federal government without the power to impose law on the people but with the power to enforce a Constitution of "do not touch" specific liberties and resolve disputes between states. From an economic perspective it may not be needed, but from a strategic and/or defensive perspective it will always be necessary since the knowledge age can possibly revert into a dark age under the right circumstances.
Rather than to kill the dog for its fleas, we could just treat the fleas... We can abolish income taxes, cede many federal and state powers to local governments where the treasuries can face much tighter scrutiny, and reform the government to reflect a balance of liberty and security. Weakening the bonds between localities will open up a society to invasion, even if all the members of a local community are armed, what assurance do you have that the others will aid you in the event of an invasion? Even in the knowledge age war will be a possibility, it's a part of humanity...
I believe the government employees will stand with what's best for themselves, their friends, and their families for the most part. Sure, some are ruthless people, but I don't believe the majority is like that...
Luckily in this society we haven't degraded to the point where we follow our leaders as if they were living gods. Not too many government employees willing to sacrifice their lives on command yet...
Absolutely, it's only natural that society will develop an anonymous crypto currency as the noose is constantly tightening. Anonymity is something that I feel society will appreciate much more in hindsight, and the added utility of crypto is just icing on the cake.