Suppose you're a journalist in a place with an oppressive government. You have information about government behavior that you expect will cause protests. You're not an activist though, so you don't want to actually plan those protests.
Suppose I'm an activist in the same country--I'll plan the protest--but we don't know each other. We've got a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend... kind of relationship.
Ideally you could post the information somewhere, and then our mutual friends could post annotations which validate it. They'd be attaching "I was there and I saw this happen" kind of information. I would then see this information because I explicitly trust people who have validated it.
The government will find us and hurt us if they catch three or four of us coordinating in this way. But if there are thousands of us, it will be a different story. So we need to collect a critical mass of validations, and we need to plan the protest, and we need to do it in a way that the government can't prevent (this is the kind of thing I mean when I say "coordinating").
I'm working on this app, by the way. I intend to have pluggable backends so it won't be coupled to a specific blockchain--you could use it over ssh for instance--but it's the blockchain backends that I expect to be most useful in situations with many stakeholders and truly aggresive adversaries because it's not realistic to expect users to maintain the system of ssh connections necessary to ensure that the annotations dataset converges in a way that gets the message and its validations from journalist to activist.
Sneakernet / file transfer / scp will be the first backend that I support. What should I support second?
What is both tamper-resistant enough that the government can't delete it, and also public enough that all parties can access the data, if not a public blockchain?
But there are myriad ways of coordinating without relying on a systems that involve implicit custodial trust. More so now than ever.
But I get the sense we're talking about different things here. I was talking about coordinating activities with groups of people. You seems to be talking about payment systems.
> If the leader of a movement gets apprehended or incapacitated and they don't check in after a certain number of blocks, then a contract moves the leadership token to their successor.
You could use blockchain for this, but equally you can use any of several other methods to achieve the same effect.
> For me it comes down to whether you think dissent is more important than preventing all of the shady business that goes on in secret online.
For me, this doesn't enter into is. I do think dissent is critically important. I don't see how blockchain is essential to doing that. Why bring in something as tainted as cryptocurrency when there are other options?