Re:Status – A Mobile Ethereum OS
by cookiecaper on Friday April 21, 2017 @12:12PM
(#14166820)
People don't realize that bitcoin is small-scale. If a powerful government had an interest in overtly or aggressively disrupting it, it'd be dead overnight, on both technical (51% attacks) and practical grounds ("rubber hose cryptanalysis"; large portion of mining power is China-based, where they already have a massive network censorship appliance).
The blockchain is not an effective "insurance against state actors" on the macro scale.
Network-based trust decentralization, even with limitations on its effectiveness, does provide somewhat provable insurance against state actors. Currently, state actors and state actor based monopolies are the biggest barriers to financial service innovation and essentially seek a continued global monopoly on financial systems access and financial systems derived intelligence feeds, largely self-justified with 'four horsemen of the internet apocalypse'[0] FUD[1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt