> The fundamental political issue with cryptocurrency is now you've created some amorphous group of oligarchs whose power cannot be really removed by traditiona

> The fundamental political issue with cryptocurrency is now you've created some amorphous group of oligarchs whose power cannot be really removed by traditional means. It's just a regression. If you're worried about currency falling under the control of an unaccountable group of oligarchs who can't easily be removed, I have some bad news for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Board_of_Governors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Board_of_Gover... The most traditional means of removing oligarchs is for an angry mob to murder them and their entire families. Does cryptocurrency prevent that? Maybe if you don't know who the oligarchs are. But cryptocurrency also doesn't really require that, either. A currency is only valuable when enough people believe that it is valuable. If there's an actual problem with a particular coin, people can switch coins--which they can't with fiat. Oligarchs, or at least powerful elites, are more or less a human universal in cultures of a sufficient size and complexity. The main difference with democracy is that democracy makes it far easier to gain power through demagoguery and propaganda. > Even if what I'm saying doesn't come to be, at a minimum you've introduced yet another layer to our financial systems for no benefit - our current system isn't here by accident. It's here due to learnings - learnings about human nature, markets, and so forth. To what ends? Among other things, fiat currency makes individual human beings more governable. Cryptocurrency makes individual human beings less governable. The more governable the private individual becomes, the easier it becomes for an oligarchy to oppress him.