Earlier quoted context omitted.
> One of the goals of Web3 is to enable direct commerce without trusted intermediaries That's the sales pitch, but the implementations all require basically anonymous, unaccountable intermediaries that are trusted.
So let’s just stop trying all together then, since things haven’t worked out well so far. That is in effect what your statement is implying. I’ll preface this by stating: running financial experiments on retail investors is immoral and likely criminal. That being said, how many failures did Goddard have before his first successful liquid rocket? A lot! He was ridiculed in newspapers, touted as crazy, and seen as a fa…
Crypto isn’t actually trying; the intermediaries that need to be trusted are fundamental to the concept, despite the sales pitch.
If you want to direct commerce without trusted intermediaries, just do that, it’s called barter and it works in certain circumstances.
The “problem” crypto pretends to solve is that turning that in to monetary exchange that is, replacing at least one part of that direct exchange with a fungible token traded not for its own direct utility but instead optimized for use in exchange with third parties for other goods and services, makes it suddenly rely on trusting external actors and social systems, but that isn’t a solvable problem, it is unalterably inherent in the very concept of monetary exchange. All any system can do is obscure that, reducing the probability that the trust extended is warranted.