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Comment by bachback | Hacker News Reader

Mike, thanks for your work, in particular on contracts. I believe you're drawing the wrong conclusion. Yes, Bitcoin is very imperfect, but developer power was never a problem addressed in the system. The crux of the matter has to do with imperfections in PoW itself. There is no reason whatsoever why a better system should not exist, which gives users more control (again) and also has more use cases. And there is no law which says Bitcoin has to succeed at massive scale. It is high time for a realistic assessment of the amazing invention of Bitcoin, and then start working on better systems which address its short-comings. Let's face it - CPU power as a proxy for users is just not functional anymore. And yes, solutions for stopping developer coups will be need to be found also, but those should be actual protocols.

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I agree. A few years ago I gave a talk in which I described a theoretical scheme called "zero knowledge proof of passport". The idea was to combine new zero knowledge SNARK algorithms with the digitally signed certificates that can be dumped from modern passports with Android phones to try and get closer to 1-(anonymous)-man-1-vote. The personal details on the passport would be anonymised using a salted hash function performed under ZKP. Of course, as an idea it has its own flaws (not everyone can get a passport, not everyone has Android phones, some people have access to lots of passports temporarily, etc).

Additionally, none of the zero knowledge proof systems on the market are fast/flexible enough to do it well. Perhaps if SGX were to be one day liberalised, it could work better. So it's not easily implementable today.

However, given that PoW definitely hasn't worked, people should have open minds to alternatives.

Even with the best protocol in the world though, you would still encounter this:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2016/02/12/chinas-role...

(the last sentence is especially telling)

Bitshares is trying to do something like that. Because we can not yet make practical passports, they copy the model of a company. The biggest holders of currency have the most voting power.

Votes can change a lot of the parameters in the system, and you can vote on where the "profit" goes. So you can vote on how many positions get a share in that profit and who should hold these positions.

This Forbes article about the cultural influence is an interesting read! I wasn't aware of how investments into mining are that agnostic of the underlying technology.

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