Organisation of systems of humans is _hard_. We’ve been trying many different systems of governance for thousands of years. There are appealing ideas, many experiments but no easy answer. Does currency decoupled from local governance work better or worse for the interests of humanity? The answer is not obvious and we should be careful saying we have clarity. It’s worth the experiment. I’m curious to know the result and watching the evidence carefully but my reading is results don’t support the suggestion that crypto is a force for good overall. It’s not even clear crypto stays trust-less and decentralised in any practical sense once it begins to collapse into more efficient structures of big players (coinbase and friends)
It doesn’t solve that information bottleneck problem, but I think the more efficient structures that lead to transactional bottlenecks and are necessary in things like Bitcoin are technical problems that can and I think have been worked out in currencies like Monero. Monero has quite successfully resisted the same pulls to centralization that Bitcoin and Ethereum have succumbed to for the sake of efficiency. It is smaller, but still quite large.
That does not necessarily mean it is good, and while I’m optimistic, I understand where the caution comes from. At the very least it’s extremely interesting, both from a technical perspective and a social/political perspective.
At the end of the day I am more and more convinced that all of this money and power stuff is downstream of relationships, culture, and ability to communicate and cooperate across differences. That’s what’s really important, and can be either encouraged or discouraged to move in a direction that helps the most people with all kinds of different tools, of which money is just one, and which could happen all kinds of different ways in different systems.
I wish it were easier to know what helps and what doesn’t so we wouldn’t risk making things worse. But I think the only way to know is to experiment.
That might be true, but the structure doesn't appear to have any technical considerations behind it. Following this comment:
>At the end of the day I am more and more convinced that all of this money and power stuff is downstream of relationships, culture, and ability to communicate and cooperate across differences.
If you ask me, the conclusion to this is that Monero has not actually "resisted" centralization, what it's actually done is become centralized around a group of criminals who all refuse to snitch on each other, and use the token as a means to do that. The key part is that "refuse to snitch on each other" comes before everything else including all the blockchain nonsense. These people are the only group who have any reason to bother using this token. Attacking the Monero network itself is orthogonal to what is typically done to break up these groups.
The actual people using Monero are unknown. That’s the point. To say it is centralized behind a group of criminals is incorrect. It has been extensively used to get money into places like Venezuela where the state is hostile, and for all kinds of positive services where people simply value privacy. See http://monerica.com
The fact that criminals also use Monero is a feature, not a bug, and proves that it works in the most hostile environments. The fact that it enforces the fourth amendment is a good thing, and it forces law enforcement to target criminals specifically rather than enabling blanket surveillance.
Anyone who wants tools to prevent the state from abusing power has ample reason to use Monero, and given the way politics has been infringing on banking rights in Canada, that is bound to be a growing number.
Regardless of what you think of the Canadian protestors, the real question is what do you think of the right to privacy and our ability to ensure our rights in the USA, given our constitution. If we do not trust people to transact privately then lets just repeal the fourth amendment and be honest about what rights we do and don’t have.
I happen to believe the right to privacy is fundamental and that to remove it is to create a panopticon. I believe law enforcement has ample means to go after crime without violating financial privacy, and believe it is equally if not more important to prevent abuse of law enforcement powers given the tendency for corruption, political use, and lack of effectiveness that has plagued all of human history.
Transparent systems in which transactions are screened do not trust their people.
North Korea would never allow their people access to a truly private cryptocurrency (which Monero does better). It would become easier to funnel money internally and create opposing factions.
This discussion is no different than a discussion about just rulers. If the person in charge of a monetary system has good intentions, or is informed by a democracy with collectively good intentions, it is better for them to dictate who can have access and who cannot.
Crypto forces those on the network to trust in the free decisions of the collective. If you think more people would transact with a large criminal psychopathic state like North Korea than they would with people who oppose North Korea, that is a collective choice. In a truly decentralized system, where everyone had access (which is not the case, and complicates things), the real, in practice will of the people comes out.