However, there are a number of things right, and a number of things wrong in this article. I will use my experience as an example. But note, while I use Bitcoin Cash as an example for my response, I do not ideologically support it for a number of reasons outlined in this article. Although, I do still hold Bitcoin Cash for the time being.
> Who governs the blockchain system and issuance? > Usually this is an open-source community of developers. Note that I say that developers control the cryptocurrency issuance because despite the issuance is (usually) determined algorithmically, developers have the power to change these algorithms.
This is completely true. However, they still only release code/binaries. The users must run these binaries, and there is no "Nakamoto consensus" for doing so. This results in huge internet political battles where people launch propaganda campaigns to vying over whose code is ran. Take Bitcoin Cash as a primary example:
The people who moved to Bitcoin Cash from Bitcoin Core are ideologically opposed to the Bitcoin Core Team's roadmap for Bitcoin. There was a huge online propaganda war between r/Bitcoin and r/BTC with large amounts of disinformation being produced on both sides, as well as banning and censorship on these forums. Ultimately the "big blockers" lost and moved over to creating their own blockchain in 2017.
This kind of political warfare happened again when Bitcoin SV and nChain's development team was ousted off onto their own blockchain.
And then in 2019, when Bitcoin ABC -- the development team who launched Bitcoin Cash in the first place -- decided to change the issuance rules to send themself some funds out of the block reward, they lost the political battle and were kicked off the network generating another fork called Bitcoin ABC.
Ultimately the users and exchange determine what code represents the ticker and naming of the coin they trade. This is the stalwart to developer control.
> Also, I suspect that most cryptocurrency developers have big portions of their net worth stored in the very currency that they develop. The developers are biased when they make decisions regarding the project because the relative value of the cryptocurrency can change a lot as the result.
This is a good thing. It means the developers must be very careful with the thing they work on, and it aligns their incentives. You can see other Bitcoin Cash development groups (such as Bitcoin Unlimited) who do not hold their treasury in Bitcoin Cash constantly propose questionable ideas and attempt to push for them to be included in Bitcoin Cash.
> How the agents verify that the their counteragents transferred them some money?
This is a valid concern. In fact, Bitcoin Core is largely run by engineers who work for Blockstream. They took VC investment from PayPal and other companies who demand a return-on-investment. The product they pitched is called Liquid. Liquid itself depends on Bitcoin not processing very many transactions on-chain.
Common wisdom is that it simply doesn't work to do so. However, A quick look at the contingent of Bitcoiners who launched Bitcoin Cash, and their reasons for doing so will tell you this is false. Bitcoin Cash can easily process hundreds of transactions per second -- and can be scaled up to do quite a bit more -- using almost identical code to Bitcoin Core.
We fixed a number of quadratic scalability problems with how BTC operates at the protocol level that enabled this. Why do people still pretend that on-chain scaling doesn't work?
> When people say that blockchains are “decentralised”, they often conflate the computing operations structure and the logical structure of the system. Blockchains rely on distributed computation, but they also represent a singular logical stream of transaction history.
This is 100% correct, and I have written on it multiple times. There is no such thing as decentralized development. Decentralization is a network topology.
> In effect, blockchains are totalitarian algorithmic systems. They anticipate the rule of soulless machines over people described in many dystopias and that can very realistically come true if we as a society keep being as excited and mesmerised by the developments such as cryptocurrencies.
100%. The monetary policies of most cryptocurrencies are antithetical to functioning societies. The wild volatility in cryptocurrencies, in large part, is due to the issuance. Most cryptocurrency enthusiasts are ignorant of how money operates, or are attached to a particular ideology -- completely ignoring modern observations about how money (when functional) as always operated. The volatility makes them useless for denominating business contracts.
Ultimately, cryptocurrency is in its infancy. I think that eventually it will "work." But right now, it does not work for what people ultimately need it to be doing. As far as I am concerned, people are currently trading pogs or magic cards.