[ac29]

"Furthermore, the Reserve network is, in a sense, a new kind of government. We are supplementing - and in some cases wholly replacing - the government function of money"

From their Ethics page. Should go over well with regulators.

[CryptoPunk]

Regulators work for us, and should be answerable to the people through their democratically elected representatives. Their job shouldn't be to protect and expand the control the state wields. It should be exclusively to further the public interest, whether that is through expanding state power, or relinquishing it to make way for new non-governmental mechanisms of socio-economic coordination.

I understand your point from a practical perspective, but I think it's important to point out how far the situation of needing to worry about how regulators will react to decentralization technology is from the ideals of democracy.

[TheColorYellow]

What proof do you have that decentralization technology furthers public interest?

I'm sorry, but the institutions are in place today precisely because it is society that upholds them or tears them down. The gears may turn slowly when it comes to implementing change, but they very much are answerable to the public in democratic societies.

[CryptoPunk]

My point is regulators shouldn't be reflexively opposed to decentralization and the retreat of state power. Their agenda should be exclusvely to advance the public interest, and it's by no means established that centralization and state control is always and everywhere in the public interest.

>>I'm sorry, but the institutions are in place today precisely because it is society that upholds them or tears them down.

That's one theory. Another is that the institutions that are in place are there because that was the best we could do with the technology of the time. Representative democracy combined with a market economy was as decentralized as we could go 200 years ago with the communication/coordination technology available at the time.

Another theory is that institutions are a trial and error process, and when they start to fail, people naturally form alternatives.

A reflexive anti-decentralization position by a party wielding regulatory power is reckless and not in the public interest.

And society holds up decentralized institutions just as much as it holds up state-based ones. The former could be argued to be an even more direct expression of society's will, as the maintainers of decentralized institutions are the users themselves, rather than delegates that form their own insitituonal interest groups.