Cheers! It's not wasted time to have a sane and level headed exchange with someone who is interested in actual discussion. Usually it's just people looking to dunk on those dumb cryptobros for le epic upvotes, so this was a nice change of pace. Thank you! I enjoyed the talk, it has been a while since I geeked out about it.

>E.g. members of the CCP must be subject to the Chinese "social credit" system. It seems to me that if everyone is subject to the system then we still have a techno-tyranny but it's ruled by Mrs. Grundy. Otherwise, if there are privilege levels to the panopticon, you're going to wind up with masters and slaves.

The problem with this, panopticon aside, is that someone is bound to have these rules bent to their will: if the system is centralized then someone will inevitably have more power than someone else, and that someone will inevitably abuse that power. Bonus points if they create a narrative that convinces the public that the abuse was a good thing(tm) and is therefore accepted, swept under the rug or even considered the system working as intended. You know, as it already happens on a daily basis.

In an ideal decentralized system, everyone watches everyone. There is no one who has more power than any other, and everyone is bound to the same system with the same rules with no room for abuse. Of course, this is a utopia and not at all appliable to the real world, but it's an interesting thought experiment: how would such a system work if applied to humanity as a whole and no trust is required in your fellow human being anymore, as that trust is guaranteed by The System? It's not necessarily a good thing, mind you, as we'd have a different kind of panopticon: it might not be abusable by a single person, but it can be abused by the masses... and as we've seen lately that might be even worse.

>I don't think we can avoid solving that problem, I think ubiquitous surveillance is unavoidable due to economic factors (e.g. the fleet of self-driving cars is a de facto surveillance network. See also "sensing for wi-fi": your router can see you.) It's already happening, eh? Our cell phone track our locations, etc.

That's exactly why we need to solve the problem! We can't escape ubiquitous surveillance because it's here, and as long as we have the internet and electricity it will be here to stay. What we need to ensure is that it cannot be abused, bringing us back to my first point of watchmen all the way down.

>Here's where I strongly disagree. I don't accept the "it's human nature" argument against our higher values. I've lived in high-trust and low-trust enclaves and high-trust is just better. It's more efficient, but more importantly it's just fantastic! It feels great! It's just as natural if not more so to love and trust each other as it is to hate or fear each other. The best course of action, IMO, is to foster the higher human values and establish and grow trustworthy regimes within the chaotic larger systems and eventually establish a kind of techno-utopian Golden Age. :)

It's understandable that we disagree on this point, because doing away with trust is to reject part of what makes us humans in the first place. Trustless systems cannot be applied to all aspect of our lives, lest we become meat automatons bound by The System, but it can be applied to critical pieces of societal infrastructure to make lives better for everyone and distribute resources in an efficient manner. How? No idea, because such systems don't exist yet. I often see detractors parrot the "cryptocurrency is a solution looking for a problem" line, and that is partly true. We can fix some of the problems that plague society with cryptocurrencies (or better, tokenized decentralized systems), but we need to analyze these problems first and then create decentralized systems to fix them. Again, I've seen plenty of attempts at tackling such problems in the space; some turned out to be scams, some died, some are currently being worked on, but hopefully, eventually, some will see the light of day and bring some much needed positive change in our life... should it take years, if not decades.

In the meantime, we must do our best to improve society with the tools we have at hand. Even if those tools are often broken.

See you!