> Almost every single person on Earth benefits in some way from the current systems over not having them at all. Yes, they tend to let power and resources accumulate with a select few, which is not necessarily the best or most moral outcome. I'd be interested to know why you think this wouldn't be the case with the alternatives -
I'm not suggesting a complete replacement of the current system (for now). I want an alternative, accessible to everyone, even the people in the walled gardens. In other words a system that is open, public, borderless and censorship resistant. A. Antonopoulos summarized these properties and couple others with an acronym: RIPCORD systems (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NG4u55e3SYo). One of the goals is to include the 1.4 billions of unbanked adults (out of about 5 billions of adults in the world) and give them the same means you and I share to participate in an economy, I believe this kind of access should be a basic freedom and the systems they rely on should be public goods (this obviously disqualifies a lot of "crypto" projects).
> regardless of the intentions of well-meaning ideologues, the powerful tend to get what they want in the end.
Obviously if this was considered nothing would ever be tried, but the purpose of choosing decentralized systems that cannot be taken over and controlled by these few is to go past this consideration. For example, Bitcoin still being verifiable on low-end hardware with limited bandwidth is mainly driven by this idea, if the attempts to take over it and increasing block size had been successful I would have considered this experiment failed and moved on to an other idea.
> I could flip it and ask "why abandon regulations that limit how capital can exploit labor and
You'd have to prove they are in place to this effect... and considering that many industries rely on this exploitative behavior currently and they usually do well within these regulations, I would think you'd be in a pickle.
> prevent criminals from evading laws"?
Criminals are barely hindered by KYC/AML procedures. And banks often accomodate them anyways: https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/global-bank... . The answer of governments is to either ignore it, or take part in it by taxing this laundering (I believe they call these "fines", but in my book when the profits taken with the fraud outpace the fines I consider that they are just taking their cut). So I am in favor again in providing an alternative that give these means to everyone, currently only a select few individuals can do this with near impunity.
> What line of thinking is this?
The one that attempted to not derail the discussion into a technical debate on which decentralized system works the best for this task right now and rather explore what our goals should be for a freer society. And that does not mean I am against work related regulations, my idea is to level the playing field though, the current system hides this exploitation by excluding the same people it exploits (and they benefit of no regulation we put in place usually, companies find ways around regulations as long as they aren't uniformly applied).
> Of course the reasoning behind preserving the current status quo, which is a known quantity, over something new, could well be that you don't yet know if or how the alternatives work?
The issues of the current system are known though, and there is work done to bank the unbanked (the World Bank shows progress in this) but it's been a pretty slow process... mostly helped by technology and not better regulations or a desire by governments to include more people.
> That doesn't mean that they can't be better or shouldn't be implemented at some point, but it's totally valid not to want to run head-first into something unknown and potentially detrimental, just because what we have now is imperfect.
It is a valid point, and I don't have a strong argument against a conservative approach... but the fact is the ideas behind effectively decentralized cryptocurrencies are not really stoppable. You can hinder them at their edges (mainly fiat bridge/ramps), but if they develop parallel economies you will have to deal with them anyways. There will always entities acting as bridge between those systems, until they either collaborate or merge.