People want a certain ammount of top down control by a cantral authority.
I wish people would refrain from making statements such as this one. It would add much clarity to discussion.
You don't know what people want. I for one don't desire any amount of top down control and I suspect there are others like me. You can guess, suspect and you're welcome to back it up by anecdotal or statistical evidence. But be clear about what you're actually saying. Try saying "I guess that many people want a certain amount of top down control, because of anecdotal evidence xy or because of my beliefs and convictions." or outright say that YOU want a certain amount of top down control and maybe try explaining why.
I look at it much like BitcoinAshley: we have unprecedented amounts of central control in many aspects of our lives and yet the proposed solutions to systemic problems (many caused mainly by said central control in my opinion) always seem to center around more central control.
The way I look at it, there is not much control that Gox can exert over the bitcoin economy. They may try to influence it with their policies or try to abuse their dominant position as an exchange platform, but I don't think there's much they could do and if they found ways how to exert negative influence, competition would soon grow and overtake them. I'll admit here that I haven't thought about this very much and don't know very much about Gox and the bitcoin market in general.
You can think what you think. You are not the people. The people is a mean of the population. They are the ones doing most of the hard labour, they have the shittiest lifes and they have very little to say about their current situation.
People want food and security first and foremost. They want to be able to feed their families and they want to be protected (within reason) against agression. That is what most people want at the basis. The rest is luxury.
I agree that the current situation is becoming problematic but i refute that less control is the best solution
per se.
I propose that we need the
right ammount of control, whatever that may be. Also it needs to be structured right. And propably needs to be less than it is now but more effective.
The problem is that society has become incredibly complex in the past few decenia. It was
never like this before in history and we are facing lots and lots of new problems. For one, things are changing faster than society including (or maybe especially) institutions can keep up with. But at the same time society relies on these institutions to function properly.
The push for development has reached most of its goals in the western world and resources need to be allocated precisely to maintain a status quo and not make the whole thing collapse under its own weight. But at least we have relative stability, food, healthcare etc.
This technological changeover makes any long-term plans more and more futile. What we see is that the whole world starts to bend to these technological changes by becoming ever more short sighted.
This is definitely a destabilizing factor in society and the institutes that gave shape to society start to crumble in unexpected ways.
The long timescale structures that held society together start to lose grip on how society develops.
No one wants to invest in something that will become obsolete before they can get their investment back.
The only short term option is to increase control.
But you must realize, like the issuers of this control, that this is a temporary situation because it will escalate if pushed through far enough.
There is no long term solution to this porblem (except slowing down the technological revolutions and stop saturating the world with useless crap that nevertheless takes heaps of energy to produce) so in all propablility this western civilization will eat itself up and be replaced by something else (Bitcoin won't be part of it tho, because bitcoin requires the current economy to function properly).
I want to remind you of the universal fact that any usefull system has both static and dynamic parts. It is an entropy thing.
If a system is too stable it cannot interact. If it is too unstable, it will be eaten up by its environment.
So any practical system needs structures that provide it with stability and it needs structures that are free enough to interact with the environment but not so free that they lose coherence with the stable part.
So the question is, and always has been, what is the right ratio of stability and instability for a given situation.
An that is why i can say that people seek governance without misrepresenting the truth.