I believe decentralization and privacy are very much things to promote and 'fight' for in the emerging digital age.
If your assets are not protected by cryptography and privacy, what is to stop ANYBODY (person, organization, GOVT) from digitally bankrupting you?
Title to your home, your car, your bank account balance, your credit card transactions.. these can all be erased, or stolen.
Furthermore, it isn't really anybody's business what I buy with my money, how much I spend, and who I buy from.
Decentralization also prevents the loss of connectivity to your assets in the case of a net failure. Peer-to-peer ad hoc wifi can get your coins from your phone wallet to your vendor, even if the actual banking system suffered a DDOS.
I think current bad laws and bad governments are the sources of value of decentralization, which is why it's currently overvalued.
Ideal government is as much decentralized as any crypto currency, just because it is controlled by voters just like any crypto currency.
Just give voters who pay more taxes higher voting weight and let voters vote on specific laws instead of representatives and problem solved. Those who only consume public benefits will have 0 voting power. Billionaires who already made their money and make no more money will have 0 voting power too.
This effectively solves welfare state problem. Those billionaires who want to have some voting power can voluntarily donate more tax, no problem here. Voluntary donation of tax is something unheard of right ? Why ? Because everybody believe tax money are used for evil things - that's why everybody who want to donate to society always choose to donate to some charities or non-profits. Everybody seem to agree that tax money goes into evil things, why aren't they putting pressure to fix this so that any good and rich person can honestly put a sticker on own car - "proud tax payer paid 10% extra tax last year".
As far as privacy, I don't advocate to have all payments data open to public, I only advocate to allow government agents to be able to decrypt them if they have a warrant to do so. Also those public servants who have more power than money will have to make all their transactions auditable by other government agents for the rest of their life.
My point is - if government stops doing evil then it's ok to have regulations and centralized solutions to things like identity, credit reputation, travel safety, public roads, etc.
As soon as society acknowledges that giving the same voting rights to people who consume public benefits and people who pay tax leads to unsustainable self destructing society, centralization problems will be solved.
Crypto currencies and businesses are efficient and successful because they give voting right proportional to ownership or some other merits.
Society where all voters have equal power creates destructive disbalance of power which is the source of all problems.
Voters should be allowed to cast their vote directly for any law instead of relying on proxy (representative and senator). Voters should be allowed to pick any proxy they want, not just the same proxy based on territory where they live in. Why people who vote to lower taxes are forced to waste their vote or not vote at all if they live in a city where majority votes to raise taxes ? That territorial packaging of voters is ridiculous and obsolete. It was necessary only 200 years ago when there was no internet.
@alpav
direct vote = mob rule -- the 49.99% have to live by the fickleness of the 50.01%
decentralization is better than centralization in all sytems that need redundancy.
Imagine 1 ATM, or only 1 power plant
Decenmtralization provides network security, accessibility, redundancy ...
@shugenja, why is direct vote = mob rule ?
All crypto currencies work through direct vote. Do you imply that they are all controlled by mob ?
Indirect vote is more prone to mob rule because it creates dis-balance of power when proxies have more power than money and offer their power for sale to mob. With direct vote it's too expensive for mob to buy all voters power.
Also each voter should be able to override some proxy votes in case of disagreement with proxy. That will combat corruption as proxy cannot sell and guarantee his vote for special benefits.
Decentralization of voting proxies should be sufficient to combat mob and corruption.
It's ok to have decentralized power that controls centralized systems. Those systems that need redundancy will have it because voters will vote for it.
because direct vote = % that means no other checks and balances matter.
A representative republic, with a bicameral legislature, and an executive with veto power is the best.
And you are wrong about indirect vote -- dead wrong.
You apparently want a referendum on every single law.
This is a very dumb idea -- 80% of humans are stupid.
No, I don't want referendum on every single law, I want voters proxies vote for most of laws, but voters to have an option to override the vote of their proxy on a single law if they disagree.
Do corporations have bicameral legislature ? Should they ?
Currently bicameral legislature does not work well in the US if it passes omnibus bills that proxies don't read and can't pass budget without government shutdown drama.
Why am I dead wrong about indirect vote ?
"decentralization is better than centralization in all sytems that need redundancy"
I can say that centralization is better than decentralization in all systems that need speed.
Since crypto currency needs both, how do we pick which one has higher priority ?
Government corruption is just rebalancing of power disbalance that was created by bad laws, so instead of fighting corruption or complaining about it we should abolish laws that created such disbalance.
And one such law is equal voting rights.
Another one is mandatory geographical packaging of voters power and proxy assignment. Try to do it with any company or crypto coin and see where it leads to - corruption and eventual failure.
Re: @shugenja: "If your assets are not protected by cryptography and privacy, what is to stop ANYBODY (person, organization, GOVT) from digitally bankrupting you?"
There is nothing to stop GOVT from banning all crypto conversions into fiat making sure that you can't make any significant purchase with crypto. Of course, you can keep your millions of wealth in Monero and pay for small anonymous services for the rest of your life, but your life will still be in poverty.