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Comment by deif | Hacker News Reader

I think electronic non-regulated centralized payment systems are worrying. However if they are de-centralized there are less things to worry about. As long as the community is verifiably in control of the validators/nodes then a central authority cannot impose and block your account.

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communities only stay in control through active intervention by some strong enough authority. This is the problem with the 'law of the jungle' logic of crypto currency, not having any authority doesn't imply that the system doesn't move towards centralisation, it simply builds out informal hierarchies, and those are usually a lot worse than formal and legitimised ones because they are based on resource concentration and have nothing to reign them in. Well functioning markets are constructed and reconstructed through social interaction and institutions, they don't predate them. That they simply exist in harmony and tend towards some magical happy state is essentially religious thinking.

The Tyranny of Structurelessness (https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm) is a great and pretty timeless piece on why decentralisation does not lead to some sort of greater freedom or community control.

Could that one not have rules without rulers, if the protocol and incentives are properly structured?

Only if you never, ever upgrade the software. As soon as you need to make changes, that unavoidably hands control to those doing the changes.

(This has become very apparent among all the bitcoin forks; the "default" fork has won every time because hardly anyone can be bothered to pick a specific one and it's far better to be on the majority one)

Exactly, and you can see the extremes people with go to, in order for them to control and enforce their views ie Bitcoin cash.

But the Bitcoin Cash devs can't force anyone to use their fork. Users are still free to run the software or not.

Yes, but it shows that people will do a lok of shady things in attempt to capture the reins of control. At the moment you have rather educated in crypto people using crypto. You don't have to think hard as to what happens when majority of people have their say on things they have no idea about (appeal to emotion /emotional manipulation).

Except that there have been multiple upgrades on the original Bitcoin chain. The software is on version 0.18. While preserving backwards compatibility, today bitcoin includes Segregated Witness, which separated the constraints on unspent transaction outputs from spending transactions (this also solved the transaction maleability problem). That upgrade alone showed us that changes the majority of network participants accept can be upgraded, but even when a strong consortium of powerful merchants or mining groups tried to force change, no one group could---though folks argued and tried to change it for more than two years. There are multiple stakeholder groups who have to form consensus for upgrades: protocol developers, application devs, network security folks(i.e. miners), full-node users validating transactions, merchants accepting payments, and users choosing wallet software; thus, upgrades are hard but possible when really necessary.

Network forks simply show that the entire system is voluntary and non-coersive: if you disagree, you're free to built an alternative with like-minded people. But if the economic activity doesn't follow you, you're left with a not much more than a free software project.

Nit, but the key point is that it preserves forwards compatibility.

Rein; not reign.

Unfortunately any such community tends to start out with starry-eyed tech idealists but converges towards a teeming hive of the least scrupulous market manipulators, pump'n'dump bot army generals, ICO fraudsters, etc.

And of course at the fringes of the community with no power are the retail investors who bought the thing during a bubble peak 10x higher and now spend their days harassing critics on Twitter because all the promises of the technology are coming true Real Soon Now.

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