The real-world limits of order
The limits of a decentralized order of right are clear: it can deal only with a bounded range, the stakes people put up in advance to carry out their cooperation. Safety in the physical world still has to be provided by someone, except that the provider now becomes a service that can be chosen and compared on price, like any other kind of service provider.
The Icelandic Commonwealth of the tenth to thirteenth centuries had its assemblies and its courts complete, while the throne and any public force to enforce judgments stayed empty throughout. Once a judgment was given, the winning side enforced it themselves; a victim too weak to do so could transfer the claim to a more powerful chieftain, who would then go and obtain redress. There, the power to enforce a judgment became something that could be transferred and bought.
The boundary drawn by the decentralized order of right is narrower and clearer: in this system an escrow contract can move only the sums staked in it, the payment, the deposit and the arbitration fee; property and persons beyond the deposit lie outside its reach. Safety in the physical world still has to be provided by someone, except that the provider now stands outside the fence, as a service that can be chosen and compared on price.
Under the system of sovereign states, people flee in numbers to the states that can still provide a sound guarantee; a decentralized order of right, however, will first show its competitive strength where state sovereignty works poorly: where democratic institutions cannot reach, where state governance has failed and collapsed, where the social contract has been torn up entirely.
Where a Leviathan still underwrites everything, paying for one’s own trust hardly seems worthwhile, and the case for using it is relatively weak; where that underwriting can no longer be relied on, it will be the first thing people need.
Any particular implementation of it may fail, and the idea will outlive every one of them. Enforcement handed to mathematics, order freely priced: once this is shown to work, people will keep implementing it anew until it is done well.
