Is Blockchain Technology Going to Disrupt Our Political System: We Hope So

Query what the dissolution of national identity does to the modern welfare state. Can we maintain that when people feel more allegiance to their social class or profession than to their countrymen?

My family emigrated away from the sub-continent, which has a deep-seated culture of elevating class bonds above national ones. And in places like India you see wealthy people living in enclaves treating the working class around them like a different species. I'm frightened that a decline of nationalism and populism in the US could see a move in the same direction.

The wild west no existing power structure idea is great until some entity inevitably comes along and controls it and its not so decentralized anymore. Decentralization exists when a small enough community can be self-policing and actors have noble goals. That all changes when you get a single bad actor who takes advantage off their weaknesses and well-meaning nature and controls the new system (see Mancur Olson's 1993 article on roving bandits). Or look at Gilded Age America or numerous political leaders who have consolidated power out of chaos, or the Bitcoin mining system which is controlled by a very small set of miners.

This is even worse in the blockchain system because it's so intrinsically tied to wealth. It makes the entire community centered around making money. Goodbye, critical thinking? And despite all the emphasis centered on democratizing democracy, overly simple systems have been manipulated and argued against since at least Plato. But here we are 2500 years later building systems that are just as simplistic in their assumptions about human nature.

Ethereum is the defacto dictator of their ecosystem and they've exercised that right several times. So how free is it?

1. Governance will be happen in the old-fashioned way.

There are brief, isolated attempts at making state IT systems better, but they're swimming against the tide of low-effort regulatory capture "enterprise" shops.

2. National identity will increase in importance.

Marine Le Pen will probably win the French elections. National identity will be asserted against transnational systems that are percieved to have failed.

Increasing levels of national borders and state control systems will be imposed on the internet for various reasons, such as the UK "Digital Economy Bill"'s censorship.

3. Legacy voting will continue to deteriorate.

Questions about the reliability of voting in the US are becoming more urgent.

4. There will be incentives to maximize corruption and suppress whistleblowers.

Too many to count, sadly.

Did you just put nationalism in a good light by comparing it with classism? First of all, the two are not necessarily opposed and often go together.

Also this is a false dilemma. Humans can live without a group identity or identify as living beings instead of being a "proud $skin_color $religion $nationality $gender".

It's not far-fetched to say that this could prevent a lot of social conflicts and wars. Can someone prove me wrong?