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Comment by pphysch | Hacker News Reader

If you have a "clear leader", that is, a trusted authority, why do you need a Bitcoin-esque cryptocurrency and other anarchic blockchain/DeFi/"Web3" technology? Just use a central database, man. Cut out the tremendously wasteful PoX nonsense. The President could even be the DBA-in-Chief.

Some of these ideas of 21st century techno-nationalism are great, but falls short when trying to shoehorn $techfad into it.

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Network states can fire their ‘clear leader,’ which is not true for all democracies.

Centralizing the database introduces key trust vulnerabilities that can be eliminated in a decentralized trust-less system.

No, "trust" cannot be eliminated. You can smear it around, like pretending that 51% attacks are impossible, or pretend that no one will ever put fraudulent data on the blockchain.

Frankly, it's less trouble to trust a transparent central authority that can be held accountable rather than trust 100% of the population to always obey the rules.

This is the fundamental truth that creates the isomorphism between cash and crypto, something a younger me didn't understand. Fundamentally there is no hard "truth" in a crypto system anymore than there is one in a fiat system. At the end of the day it's just one particular reification of a useful societal construct. Or to put it more succinctly:

We live in a society.

That, and war is not only a real-life phenomenon but states are are nothing if not monopolies on violence relative only to empires. Competing with either is going to require either overtaking it or cooperating with it. The common case is both at the same time, i.e. a terrible plan that has failed before it began. And mere cooperation is not competition at all.

Yeah when you just have the blockchain tracking just itself like bitcoin it's pretty easy because the additions and movements are all internal to the system so you don't have to verify and trust an external authority. When it needs to start tracking things in the real world though it doesn't work nearly as well because you have to trust the person adding things to the blockchain isn't lying etc.

The person you are replying to said there are key vulnerabilities that can be eliminated via decentralization, which is true, not that all vulnerabilities can be eliminated, which is self evident.

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