Yet the apparently decentralizing technology of the internet led, in some ways, to greater centralization. A searchable record of each person's statements turned out to make it easier to coerce people into conformity.
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Many of us found this plausible in 1996: "We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity."https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence …
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IT enabled a few companies to become communication chokepoints, such that private censorship now has greater scale than previous public censorship. Connecting all to all created both uniformity and extremism (loudest wins) rather than accuracy (rightest wins).
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From this we should be drawing lessons in how naive projections of tech effect can be very wrong. I find it interesting to consider all this in the context of crypto and wonder: what are the equivalent plausible but unexpected futures?
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Perhaps a complete immutable transaction record enables much greater govt control of citizens and their economic interactions. Or private coins threaten govts to such a degree they are brutally repressed (and we use gold instead).
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What if the ease of creating new currencies leads to constant churn where many lose more value from their crypto holdings than they would have from mere inflation? What if PoW causes massive economic centralization because energy generation has high economies of scale?
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What if the banks and Wall Street turn out to be the best at value capture from crypto and instead of empowering geeks it ends up being a new way to make the suits rich? Please join in - what are your weirdest, most counter-intuitive, yet plausible crypto-enabled scenarios?
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End of conversation
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