Law shapes the acceptable bounds for culture, yet culture is a leading indicator for law.
How does Law shape Culture?
- Criminalizing (or even making hard) certain activities pushes them out of the mainstream. Eg:
- Europe’s red tape has dampened the entrepreneurial culture there.
- US’s soft criminalization of cryptocurrencies has led to strong decentralization in base layer.
- Laws also attract (or repel) people that share the the culture the law promotes.
- Silicon Valley is not a place, but a people.
- Taxes, extradition push people to places.
How does Culture shape Law?
- As the culture becomes mainstream, politicians supporting the culture eventually rise to power and laws are shaped based on the culture. Eg:
- UBI, stimulus, drugs.
- Bitcoin’s culture determined the winner of the blocksize wars. Ethereum’s culture determined the outcome of the DAO fork.
Culture Instead of Law
- Law should lay down the bare minimum needed to thrive.
- Guiding principles should come from culture instead.
- Law should be flexible enough to enable innovation but rigid enough to prevent malicious abuse.
Metadata
- People:: 0xfoobar
- Related:: Culture
- References:: https://0xfoobar.substack.com/p/conserving-crypto-culture
- Status::understoodagree
- Created:: 21th Oct 2022
- Updated::
$=dv.el('t', dv.current().file.mday)