The problem is that there is a bunch of people out there that don't want others to be able to do this and will constantly shout about perils of permissionless DLT systems without acknowledging such (or without mentioning the many ways which permissioned non DLT systems have and continue to fail for increasingly more people [or without having any ideas on how to approach solving such problems in general that individuals can adopt for themseleves], which is really fine to me, because those people can't really stop what has been underway for the past 13 years [and often want somebody else to stop it for them, without even understanding how the systems they want to stop work, or putting any work in themselves to stop it beyond open throat/think piece operations])
There is no reason that bank of america or visa couldn't run their own rollup and implement their own fraud system. In fact, visa is likely working on tools like this.
It's computers. Shit happens.
I think this is a tad overrated, honestly. The DAO was open-source and that didn’t prevent it from being hacked and ETH hard-forked. I’m not against this kind of transparency, but DAO proved that it’s no silver bullet because the rate at which they shipped code made the whole transparency point moot.
In the past Robinhood has done questionable things like halting trading on a specific stock (GME) that other platforms didn't halt. I've also heard horror stories about people getting margin called due to bugs. I'm not saying smart-contracts are immune to these issues but the transparency of the bytecode being public is huge IMO.
This is just a single example of course. Imagine for a moment that we have a decentralized facebook-like app. Wouldn't it be great if we could fork it if they did something we didn't like? You might think that's a pipe dream but my argument is that this becomes less of a pipedream the more we educate people.
> That crypto and decentralization is "the right direction" is absolutely not self-evident. Can you substantiate that position?
My position is that crypto and decentralization give people options and put pressure on existing institutions that IMO have become too powerful. My goal isn't necessarily to destroy Bank of America, Visa, or Robinhood but to inject some real competition into the system. That includes institutions like the federal reserve.
I want there to be a spectrum of centralization <-> decentralization and let people choose what they're comfortable with. I want people to be able to say "Fuck bank of america, I'm going bankless". Or people can stick with what they know. Either way I think competition is good.