Cryptocurrency is on the way being managed by govt. So it's correct to say cryptocurrency did not fail, but certainly the original libertarian vision behind it is dead.
The libertarian vision was not behind it. It was projected onto it by adopters who thought it was something that it never could be.
Any currency that has any political ideology would require some form coercion to be used by those who do not share that ideology. Fiat currencies carry that coercion implicitly, people who don't like the government generally still use their money because they have little choice.
The underlying principle of Bitcoin was consensus. Agreeing to operate on whatever principles the majority of miners are using. Forks are an integral part of that, people choosing a different path and those who agree with them going that way. The perceived value coming from those who accept whichever fork they chose and what they think it should be worth.
The only real "Stick it to the man" kind of philosophy that came with it was as a rejection of unilateral monetary control. That is the antithesis of consensus.
In an ideal crypto world governments would be the majority of the miners. They would negotiate amongst each other to decide on monetary policy by consensus. That's a long way from happening, with no clear path towards that end in sight.
In a sense that too, is an ideology, the distinction is that the ideology doesn't want to do the thing that it can't. It presents an option, instead of forcing people to use it.
Yes. There are tons of different proposals, but generally speaking the common thread is that the banks (possibly The Central Bank) will keep the keys for you. They will still be middlemen in all transactions so they can harvest data and make sure you aren't buying anything the government doesn't like. They can also do tax enforcement a lot better that way
A key is just a 256 bit number. You can literally create one with paper and dice rolls. They will no sooner figure out who is holding most of these than they will figure out who is holding cash, or the identities of the 25m+ people downloading pirated media right now.
At best they can ask the public to please turn over their private keys, which will go about as well as efforts to stop piracy.
They can prosecute transactions with unregistered keys as money laundering. They may not have the resources to get everybody but they can collect a few scalps pour encourager les autres.
Yep, they can also prosecute merchants who accept payments that don't go through "approved" middlemen (banks, etc), or even ban/regulate crypto that allows users to make their own keys.
At one point the US gov was building their own crypto currency, and I'm sure it wasn't because they felt the existing options weren't private enough from oversight.
> key is just a 256 bit number. You can literally create one with paper and dice rolls
Well sure, but if you want to actually use it you need the whole keypair. Unless you're really good with you elliptic curve abacus you're going to need a computer for that l.
How does the state prohibit illegal drugs? They will never be able to eradicate it, obviously, but the state can make it incredibly hard to acquire and use cryptocurrency.
