"Responding to (and largely agreeing with) Nathan Schneider [@ntnsndr](/user/profile/ntnsndr) 's piece on blockchain governance and moving beyond financialization:"

"The main question that Nathan's piece is trying to explore is simple. There is a large body of intellectual work that criticizes a bubble of concepts that they refer to as "economization", "neoliberalism" and similar terms, arguing that they corrode democratic political values and leave many people's needs unmet as a result. The world of cryptocurrency is very economic (lots of tokens flying around everywhere, with lots of functions being assigned to those tokens), very neo (the space is 12 years old!) and very liberal (freedom and voluntary participation are core to the whole thing)."

Vitalik does a fantastic job applying political and economic theory to thinking about governance in a financial world. This is better political theory than most of my former academic colleagues provide. "There is one key difference between blockchain political theory and traditional nation-state political theory - and one where, in the long run, nation states may well have to learn from blockchains. Nation-state political theory talks about "markets embedded in democracy" as though democracy is an encompassing base layer that encompasses all of society. In reality, this is not true: there are multiple countries, and every country at least to some degree permits trade with outside countries whose behavior they cannot regulate. Individuals and companies have choices about which countries they live in and do business in. Hence, markets are not just embedded in democracy, they also surround it, and the real world is a complicated interplay between the two." (...) "Blockchain-based contraptions have a lot to offer the world that other kinds of systems do not. On the other hand, Nathan is completely correct to emphasize that blockchainized should not be equated with financialized. There is plenty of room for blockchain-based systems that do not look like money, and indeed we need more of them."