This is a strong critique. If voting inevitably drifts toward factional reinforcement, is there any interface you’ve seen that resists that drift? I’m curious to know which product or feature you think solves this the best.
Thanks for sharing that. I hadn’t heard of Zest before and it mirrors some of the user interface designs I’ve been working on.
Did you use Zest? What aspects of it worked well or failed in practice? It’s cool that some of the work ended up in Google Wave. I always thought that was an amazing product, I was so sure it was going to replace email and then it ended so abruptly.
I can think of a few other examples that critics use, like illicit purchase on Silk Road, money laundering, or anonymous funding of evil (terrorism or organized crime).
It would be awesome to actually try and quantify what the effect might be if decentralized systems are in place to facilitate them.
All of these things happen already very successfully within our old world economy. So to take your argument a step further, is there any way to calculate the potential increase in this type of criminal activity?
I am really upset about this acquisition.. And equally or more concerned with centralized power points, maybe to an extreme that is too radical. But I do believe at it's core, crypto is different because it's core ethos is to reject that notion. So while the internet disrupted centralized broadcasters with a decentralized protocol for content distribution, it wasn't baked into the technologies ethos. So in my opinion, this difference of core mission, along with the ability to launch dApps (anonymously even, if you'd like) without fear of being shut down, will be a differentiation that protects this technology's fate from creating new centralized choke points.
Ie. if Sean Parker was driven by the mission/ethos of crypto, Napster couldn't be taken down, people would still be using it today, and the traditional music industry would be dead (as well as traditional tech companies like Spotify).