Farewell to Westphalia: Crypto Sovereignty and Post-Nation-State Governance

In 1648, the Peace of Westphalia marked the end of the Thirty Years' War – an event in which Catholics and Protestants had clashed across Northern Europe. The settlement not only ended the conflict but made sovereign nation states a permanent fixture in our world. It was a solution in which everyone agreed that what nation states do internally is their own business. Sovereign nation states are human technologies that were designed to facilitate the peaceful organisation of human beings, solving for their ideological, political and religious differences. However, they are technologies that are almost 380 years old and, like all technology of that era, perhaps not the optimal solutions available today. Can we not do better? We believe that we can. Our solution will involve taking a deep dive into developments like blockchain technologies and smart contracts and showing how they can be productively applied to the project of cooperative human governance.