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Comment by TrapLord_Rhodo | Hacker News Reader

Mr. Gensler put it succinctly; Every large system trends towards centralization.

The crypto economy has slowly started to work its way into the traditional finance system. The only thing that crypto is really good for is having an auditable system of account, which isn't possible in the current financial system with centralized creation of debt.

>where all they have to do is prove who they are to access their stuff.

My prediction is that crypto does indeed become centralized between a few wallets & those centralized wallets can have some form of 'Verification' for reinstating lost keys.

> it's publicly available and non-identifiable,

Because they can combine it with their massive databases and make it identifiable is my guess.

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>>"The only thing that crypto is really good for is having an _auditable system of account_, which isn't possible in the current financial system with centralized creation of debt."

THIS is the reason the central banks are anti crypto.... is it will provide an auditable ledger (irrespective of anonymity) which threatens the money laundering currency. There are other levels of currency laundering that have been used for eons ; 'Art' and 'Humans'. (and the currency used at the even higher levels than that)

In a fantasy world where all currency/transactions were on a bitcoin ledger, the average citizen could analyze the data and find all the government black ops funds. All those transactions from the CIA to terrorist groups or whatever would have a spotlight on them over night.

Kinda like a swiss bank account?

agreed, but consolidation in this way is a property of _capitalism_, not of tech

I would disagree tremendously based on the centralization of tech in search, storage, social & hardware.

What about JP Morgan and the Railroad Trusts? The big 4 accounting firms? Big pharma? The Magic Circle of Law Firms? I could keep going.

That all of those systems are extremely centralized? i don't get your point on this one as it seems to reaffirm my comment.

The centralized nature of these oligopolies is a property of capitalism, i.e. capital consolidates power. You are saying that search, storage etc are centralised because of the tech? Why are they any more centralised than the other (pre-internet) examples I mentioned?

ahh, i was looking at those company's 'as tech'. In the sense of technology, not internet company's we see today.

To be honest I think we agree, we are just getting caught up in semantics. Whether it is capitalism or tech that's doing it is irrelevant because we have the development of technology in a capitalistic world order. In other words, it is impossible to differentiate when the two are so intertwined.

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