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Comment by todd_whitehead | Hacker News Reader

The democratic recourse is that you stop using it. You can opt-in and opt-out; there is no institution coercing you into using it.

Why should we expect that 99/100 people have anything insightful to say about currency? Even the person who is college-educated and took maybe 1 or 2 economics classes is way out of depth talking about it. There are maybe a "handful" of people who could give a meaningful evaluation of bitcoin or some alternative currency... similarly the requirement that someone be code-literate and have algorithmic "chops" to change bitcoin is good -- you don't want a person who doesn't even know what a distributed system is trying to make changes to something they don't understand because they read an article on huffington post about it and decided it was "problematic" because it didn't fall quite in line with something they believed rather strongly but without good reason to be true.

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Actually, I do want everyone to have a say in their government, even if it's as simple as voting for a politician who listens to those policy experts and makes decisions.

I'm not saying, "everything must be direct democracy."

I'm saying, "people have a right to access political power."

I've never been ok with "you're too stupid to know how this works, I'll take away your ability to decide," even though there are lots of things where I'd consider myself better-informed about stuff than the typical dumb idiot on the street.

(Yeah, even those typical dumb idiots, I want them to have a say in how society is structured too. That's how strongly I believe in democracy as a human right.)

Right now, bitcoin is totally a choice, and one very, very few people are making. If bitcoin ever spread beyond this very fringe state, to where people would be compelled to use it for whatever reason, that's where it's important that those people have a say in how it's designed and how it operates.

I empathize with your concerns for civic engagement, and I encourage you to read some of the other comments responding to your original point as I believe you will find an idea there very much in tune with your democratic ideals: namely that bitcoin is not the only digital currency and that in a hypothetical future of widespread adoption these currencies would compete for a share of the total transactional manifestation of value. It doesn't necessarily make sense to alter an existing digital currency as democratic control takes place through popular selection of currencies based on their ruling mechanics. This offers much more democratic control of our currencies (emphasis on plurality) than any illusion that central banking falls under any shred of democratic influence.

I appreciate your attempt to bridge the gap between democratic governance and the contemporary digital currency.

I am sympathetic to the idea of "let the people decide and let the best ones fall out of the mix," but the problem I see is:

Having multiple "competing" currencies defies the usefulness of currency at all. If, as a medium of exchange, I have to keep several around to do business with you (because you accept dogecoin, kanyecoin, and I'm carrying dogecoin and Frondocoin), then I don't think that's a very good situation.

And say Frondocoin wins out; for whatever reason, it takes over and 90% of people accept and carry some with them. Well, great, right? Except for the people who are growing up in the Frondocoin regime, whose economic lives are now dictated in some ways by the Frondocoin design goals.

Telling those people, "well, just start your own, and then persuade enough people in your local economy to start using it, and then maybe it'll grow enough to let you do interstate trade..." gets us right back to the start. Now people are once again stuck using a currency they didn't ask for and have no say in the operation of.

You might say "vote with your actions, your actions will help pick the winner."

I say, "vote with your vote, you have a right to periodically refresh your government by a well-defined, accessible process."

So, I guess I just still don't see how what you're proposing is either effective as currency or as democratic governance.

The points you raise here are where I think this topic gets potentially very interesting.

The idealism of common currencies emerged largely as the result of rapid globalization among hard currency regimes (case study: the eurozone). The obstacle of exchanging currencies in that context makes sense. I think this obstacle is / can be largely removed however in the context of digital currencies. I don't see the competing market of digital currencies as a king of the hill scenario seeking currency monopoly (as centralized national currencies current do), but rather as a continuous plurality more akin to one's stock portfolio. The key here is substitution of software processes for physical processes in transactions, and the inherit flexibility that such a transition results in. Now if you're thinking that trying to figure out how to manage a complex portfolio of competing currencies for every day financial transactions seems incredibly confusing, I'd agree with you! But simplifying that process is precisely the role that software enabled currencies can address.

In this respect, electing new currencies is analogous to electing new governments, consistent with a well-defined accessible process. The difference is that the election of (multiple) currency regimes is now decoupled from the election of representative intermediates. It's nice to think that our political institutions provide us democratic control over central banking, but who actually takes the nomination of the next Fed chairman into account when that consideration must share the collective attention span with so many other issues de jour?

Why should we expect that 99/100 people have anything insightful to say about government? Even the person who is college-educated and took maybe 1 or 2 government classes is way out of depth talking about it. There are maybe a "handful" of people who could give a meaningful evaluation of government or some alternative governing system... similarly the requirement that someone be literate and have the "chops" to change government is good -- you don't want a person who doesn't even know what congress is trying to make changes to something they don't understand because they read an article on huffington post about it and decided it was "problematic" because it didn't fall quite in line with something they believed rather strongly but without good reason to be true.

We shouldn't. I don't vote because I don't delude myself into thinking that I'm informed, or that it's possible for me to be reasonably informed.

We should minimize the amount of decisions people make about government. The best way to do this is to mostly do away with the federal government and maybe the state government, deferring as much as possible to small, local communities where it's possible for people to be reasonably informed.

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