Of course, because it's a CENTRALIZED service. I can make a centralized transaction settlement service with a completion time in milliseconds. But it will not have the security and freedom of a decentralized service.

The security of having an audit trail with no way of reversing the transaction and the freedom to get ripped off by a shady exchange?

... with the solution being an externalized centralized government with centralized accountability, justice, and enforcement organizations - also left to deal with the bad actors who will freely use the system without the centralized (hopefully in place via democratically elected government with integrity) tools of things like Magnitsky Act to dissuade bad actions of bad actors.

Any system powerful enough to give you everything you want (perfect security) is also powerful enough to take everything away.

If I send you a signed message from a trusted key, your "audit trail" is to save that message. Super simple. And if I have a message ID in each you could even show that there aren't any missed messages, if you wanted.

A blockchain is just an incredibly inefficient way to store those messages, giving them an explicit ordering in case they don't have internal IDs, and to establish ordering between users. All of that can be done with a simple 'index server' that doles out ordered message IDs, without the blocks, the mining, etc.

Banks don't even need the currency. Banks just settle their debts in their local currency and they trust enforcement to the courts and bailiffs. This is what Ripple had right, in the beginning. They only need a messaging layer.

One man's inability to reverse a transaction is another man's security.

The freedom to get ripped off by a shady exchange is the same as the freedom to not have your money stolen by the government. Worth it, in my opinion.

Except you can, through effort and organization (none of this "trustless" mantra non-sense/propaganda), get in place a competent democratically elected government with integrity via accountability and oversight - perhaps even running for elected positions yourself if you're passionate and strong enough.

Or you can ignore the nuances and complexes, say fuck it, and support a system that disables power that good organizations do need to manage bad actors - instead of turning the clock back and making the world a "free for all" - making tools like the Magnisky Act unenforceable, along with other unavoidable pitfalls that pro-Bitcoiners ignore, scoff at without rebuttal, or glance over without serious thought. Regulatory capture is real and it needs to be addressed always - and if you work from founding principles and are honest with yourself you'll come to the conclusion that centralized organizations are a necessity to fighting "evil"/bad behaviour with good, responsible, trustworthy people

The argument then goes into nuance of where the debate continues as to how conservative or liberal you are - how "small" or "big" the government is, e.g. what decision making power or function does or should government have, e.g. Universal Basic Income/UBI - the Freedom Dividend as Andrew Yang calls it - would arguably be more of traditional Conservative/Republican leaning - giving $1,000/month to individuals for THEM TO DECIDE what to do with the money vs. some bureaucratic government agency spending that money themselves making broad-vague decisions, almost always influenced by regulatory capture and industrial complexes manipulating the system via influencing politicians and the population via propaganda of various forms: "tobacco is good for you" - says your doctor, "fat is bad for you" says the sugar and health industry, "MDMA/mushrooms are bad for you" - says big pharma industry who can't patent those medicines, etc.

Edit: LUL - imagine a person actually had to put the effort into writing a qualitative response instead of getting a dopamine hit from a single click to ignore/avoid engaging.

> you can, through effort and organization (none of this "trustless" mantra non-sense/propaganda), get in place a competent democratically elected government with integrity via accountability and oversight

No, you can't; that's rather the problem.

You can. It's not a fixed state - where it is or isn't competent. It's complex, dynamic, with many moving parts - and it's evolving. You put a system in place and then you see how bad actors will take advantage of it, then you once you have enough of the population educated, understanding, pissed off - the impetus occurs - they will vote for change that adds policies (or undo bad policy most likely stemming from regulatory capture of industrial complexes) that will correct to prevent or limit potential harmful behaviour that will cascade from bad policy.

In my last comment I highlight the main policies necessary for a big shift to be able to occur:

"Until there's a strong enough impetus and they start to learn the game to understand it: I'd considered Andrew Yang a normal person, who published a book called The War On Normal People before running for President this last election.

More people like him will come to light, especially once policy proposals he's made like Freedom Dividend/UBI, Ranked Choice Voting, Democracy Dollars, Journalism Dollars get implemented to break apart the two-party system." - from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25509841

Normal people don't run for political office. Not from any of my life experience.

Until there's a strong enough impetus and they start to learn the game to understand it: I'd considered Andrew Yang a normal person, who published a book called The War On Normal People before running for President this last election.

More people like him will come to light, especially once policy proposals he's made like Freedom Dividend/UBI, Ranked Choice Voting, Democracy Dollars, Journalism Dollars get implemented to break apart the two-party system.

ALGO/Algorand does that now...at least until ETH2 if the latter hits it's promised transaction rates.