Decentralized Woo Hoo

Perhaps those who have disproportionately consumed libertarian ideology, but those who've studied the longer arc of history know that power abhors a vaccum, and understand destruction and decentralization of institutions as a step on the path to setting different centralized institutions that prioritize a different vision of the world, whether that is ethno-nationalist, theocratic, communist, whatever.

The pure crypto enthusiasts are just helping them along, greasing the skids if you will. Once the increased social entropy weakens institutions enough to reveal a takeover opportunity, all ideas of decentralization will be cast aside because centralized power is too effective.

This attack on existing institutions in order to pave the way for replacement institutions one prefers is omnipresent in history, including the American Revolution and the Bolshevik revolution, both of which fought against the centralized monarchical authority.

The current one is instead fighting against globalist institutions and the multiculturalism and economic leveling they have brought on, which have had very distinct sets of winners and losers.

Are you familiar with any methods to achieve the same characteristics of Bitcoin but without PoW? Perhaps the energy is not the issue, perhaps it's your view to the importance of it.

1. Real law is not executed by a computer, but by a highly educated judge that can actually interpret the law and contracts, and reject attempts to exploit them. Smart contracts are easily exploited. 2. Real law has a process called "discovery", which is how the legal system gets to determine the facts of the case. This works specifically because of coercive force[0]. Crypto "law" is entirely at the mercy of trusted oracles to inject facts onto the blockchain so that smart contracts can execute correctly. 3. Impersonation is far harder in real law than crypto. In the crypto world, your identity is merely a collection of private keys. These are easily copied[1], and it is common practice for criminals to automate the theft of cryptocurrency because crypto identity is so fragile. 4. Crypto "law" is immutable, which means that if it gets things wrong (very likely because of the above), there is no recourse to change things[2]. In real law, transactions can be reversed and bad rulings appealed, at least for a little while.

Until you can make crypto law that can actually do the above things, I will continue to consider it untrustworthy, if not outright unethical to promote. You may have noticed that a lot of those things run counter to the spirit of decentralization... to which I say, that is the point. The financial system evolved to be a centralized one because centralization is more efficient. Central authorities can prosecute frauds that decentralized crowds cannot.

For example, Bitcoin has no protection against someone making their own fork of the software and minting another 21M coins. This has happened many times over; some of those forks are even branded the same way as Bitcoin[3]. You may argue that this constitutes some kind of fraud, but... you can't really stop it with crypto law; and people fall for them all the time. Hell, some of those altcoins are actually somewhat viable. How is this not a form of dilution or debasement?

[0] Specifically, an escalating scale of sanctions and punishments that make refusing to participate in discovery a very bad idea.

[1] I am aware of the existence of hardware intended to prevent the theft of shining keys. I personally find it offensive that the best argument for using crypto is "lock up your keys with the same DRM shit copyright maximalists use and you'll be fine".

[2] The closest thing we've seen to crypto actually adjudicating crime was the DAO hack, which more or less only worked specifically because crypto is NOT actually decentralized - the developers still dictate the protocol.

[3] Examples: Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, Bitconnect, Bitcoin SV.