I think it is more accurate to say that we know some of the people who have power, but influence, money, and violence are also major vehicles for real power, and we mostly don't know who has and uses them throughout the world.
The evidence you gave, that some entities out there expend billions to influence the visible power-holders, only actually shows that spending money has a good ROI for the actors doing it. It does not show that all power is in the hands of democratically elected government officials, nor does it show that power cannot be expressed or utilized in other ways which may be far less visible and more difficult for common persons to direct.
I want to be clear that I'm a fan of government, and I think it has a lot of power and should! Also not a big fan of crypto for solving nearly any problems -- just a drive-by reader on this topic right now. But it does not help any normal people to be naive or optimistic about what power is, who has it, who uses it, or why.
this is intentional. this is why I said pretend to be democracy. like you've pointed out, there's a contradiction, but it's resolved in accepting that we do have an accountable group of people, however they are also being manipulated, but we don't know who the manipulators are. hence, we're being (indirectly) controlled by pseudo-anonymous elites.
in theory there should be a stable equilibrium between the (corrupt) representatives and the population as they are identified.
at least with democracy we can punish the puppets.
Crypto doesn't replace elections or government?
Some conspiracy theorists would like to disagree
Applies to nearly anything. Listening to conspiracy theorists is a very low rate-of-return activity; nearly tautologically.
Also, they think anonymous unelected people running cryptocurrencies will somehow be more transparent?
> as long as people are involved it is impossible to not have a government, in one form or another.
That's essential: The power is conserved; the question is, who controls it. Every time someone talks about smaller government, they really are talking about shifting the power elsewhere - to whom? It's not necessarily bad, but shifting power from democratic government, however flawed, to a powerful elite, who are more flawed and have no accountability to everyone else, is not a good deal IMHO.
> The ultimate irony, though, is that even with proof-of-stake, the entire crypto-economy becomes owned by a bunch of pseudo-anonymous elites. The end result is the exact same as our current system.
This section seems to contradict the rest of the comment ?