I think the cream here is if the underlying network is decentralized and I disagree with my centralized provider, then I have the power to change providers. Its comparing email to facebook, if my email provider does something I disagree with I'm free t take my data to a another provider without losing all my connections.

The same for open currencies. The promise of open currencies with decentralized exchanges is I can now hold my value in a currency I trust a long a there is a path of exchange between my value and the value of the party I'm paying for or recieving from. And now its my decision which currency I hold and I'm free to change.

yeah, and if you don't like the law [1], you can leave the country, except that there's no where to go. People are basically telling each other to kill themselves. It's really sad. Oh what's that, you can just try to change the law? What if laws concerning access to law making are concerned, for example? Right back to begging "your local congress man", which is a joke in my opinion, because there's no accountability. That's not just an analogy, there might be laws concerning your provider. For some, there is just one provider available and the law might enable its monopolistic position.

>That doesn't work when you (or your small community) face thousands or millions of spammers or abusive users.

Umm... yes it does. That's precisely the role of a whitelist.

Last time I checked whitelists don't work in permissionless networks (and no real identity).

Do you have a fix to that?

I'm not sure what you mean. Why do you say whitelists don't work in a decentralized context?

I see maybe, I misunderstood. So do you mean whitelisting messages (tweets, posts, any other atomic units) based on content? I think white listing based on content may be hard, especially say images or videos, in a decentralized network. So I thought you mean whitelisting based on identity/id which is useless in mostly-anonymous permissionless network.

(But actually content-based filtering may not be too impossible now that I think..)