An unpopular opinion on governance and taxes

February 25th, 2023

Crypto’s continued dedication to decentralized governance has been vital, necessary, and enduring. But the over-emphasis on voting and proposal systems borders on obsessive, causing us to ignore a vital part of world building that’s as important, if not more in our current bear market predicament: taxes.

All around the globe, we find taxes. There are as many tax systems on Earth as there are healthy, functioning human societies. We are a world of worlds made up of hundreds of independent states with billions of different people and almost as many ways to tax them. World leaders may disagree on how to create a society that serves the greatest good, but there is one thing that they all agree on: the power to tax.

Taxation is the oldest system known to mankind. Before humans knew how to write, they learned to count. Grains of rice. Bales of hay. Ten commandments. After consciousness came counting, and after counting came the tax collector. It's fitting then that the most radical technology we've ever invented is simply a new version of the stone tablet - the eternal ledger in the sky otherwise known as the blockchain.

The world may change, but taxes are forever. Now we count money, and wherever there’s money to be counted, there’s a system to tax it. If the dollar was a money app, the U.S. tax code would be moneyOS. If the United States economy were a world game, the U.S. tax system would be your favorite console. Death and taxes - the only guarantees in life, amirite?

So how is it that the crypto world has given birth to so many new tokens and ways to govern them, but no new systems of taxation?

Because crypto hates taxes, duh.

Crypto moves to Lisbon or Puerto Rico to avoid paying taxes. DAOs incorporate in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying taxes. DeFi would rather burn its own monetary supply to create demand for its currency than pay taxes. It makes sense then why we’d spend next to no time at all thinking about taxes. Nevermind why they exist, how they work, or why something so reviled the world over is somehow still more popular than Bitcoin, Bored Apes, Elon Musk, Kim Kardashian, pepperoni pizza, Al Pastor tacos, K Pop and Jesus Christ combined.

Or maybe crypto people simply don’t understand them. Perhaps if they did, they'd see why tax, or the next version of it, could be the missing piece to the puzzle of global coordination.