Home Forums Principles of Economics Spontaneous order: Esperanto Vs Bitcoin Reply To: Spontaneous order: Esperanto Vs Bitcoin

  • Max

    Member
    March 7, 2021 at 01:17

    Hi there, Claudio. I liked it the way you subsumed it. Your question made me think deeper about the whole thing. To me, first, Esperanto was a great example of the exact opposite of spontaneous order. And I think I was right, and that’s how I read Saif’s general point, since he is talking about the economy as a whole. But when we think about Bitcoin, there’s a twist. BTC was invented by a person (or small group of people) to play the role of “perfect money”. at first, it looks very much like central planning, doesn’t it? The key point, however, is that, after BTC was invented, the creator no longer had control of it. BTC became decentralized right after its birth (which, by the way, was the Nakamoto’s intent to begin with). So, BTC is a great example of spontaneous order because its adoption is a consequence of many decisions of the agents in the market. With Esperanto, however, people have decided not to use it, for many reasons. But let me add this. I think that the failure of Esperanto is not due to people’s choices only. On top of that, there’s the fact that the very nature of what a language is and what it is used for is something that makes Esperanto a “bad choice”, a choice that is very hard (even impossible) to be made all the way exactly as planned. Esperanto’s design is such that it is doomed to fail. When it comes to BTC, its inherent properties make it “the hardest money possible”, which, from the outset, makes it very likely to succeed. Of course, “great design” helps a lot but it’s not enough. Human action must go into that direction. It looks like we are really going (gradually then suddenly) towards mass adoption. But history could have been different in the past 12 years, and we don’t really know what’s coming. In the end, it’s all about Human Action. And that includes Nakamoto’s action of inventing BTC and making it available to everyone, so that we could chose whether to play this game or not. Cheers. M.