A digital currency where transactions are not blinded and transaction validators are designed to centralize can be considered nothing more than a 1984 slave system. The same system described by Aaron Russo where you're required to worship the communist govt and do everything they say, and if you don't, they simply refuse to process any of your transactions and your money is essentially turned off/ceases to exist/confiscated.
This is why people say the existence of physical money is a basic human right in comparison to a "cashless society". Through the attempt to try and minimize hops and channels constantly open, the Bitcoin Lightning Network will obviously evolve into the typical hub and spoke model like all critics suggest. Instead of having transaction validators (aka miners) in the normal bitcoin model that can go under, fail, or be replaced, this converts bitcoin into the traditional "too big to fail" banking model where those hub and spokes will be run by people like Goldman Sachs and never be replaced.
As you can see, the evolution of bitcoin is complete dogshit no matter if you use the base protocol or LN. This is why anyone who supports digital "money" over silver and gold is a complete idiot and the enemy of humanity. Nothing about this stuff is "money", it's all just a permissioned ledger control grid.
edit: see my post in the comment section as to how you would attempt to fix this, and why it's not possible to fix.
Gonna go ahead and disagree with you on that. For 1000s of years we have been using things to barter. Goats is the same thing as a dollar bill which is the same thing as a BTC. Anything that we objectify with a value is currency regardless of what banks say about it.
We use things to trade value for value same goes with digital currency. One can argue our current fractional reserve system is nothing more than digital currency that's printed on plastic.
You do not seem to comprehend the only way for a digital currency to not be a permissioned ledger slavery system is if everyone processes their own transactions (like standard email PoW). In order for transaction validators to not completely centralize through economy of scale, compounding stake-interest, or other means, you would be required to use unprofitable PoW.
Unprofitable PoW I'm 99.9% sure is a completely unworkable system. IOTA (AFAIK) is the only real attempt to do that so far, but DAGs are also unworkable without artificial, forced convergence, so IOTA doesn't actually work.
As for Dan Larimer's creations, I don't really consider any of Dan's creations as "decentralized" per se, more like he already knows it's not possible to create a decentralized cryptocurrency and instead just created governance systems instead that you would use in place of something like a senate or whatever...
If you wanted freedom from government, middlemen, counterparty risk, or other actors attempting to govern what you can and can't do with your own money at any given time, you would have to use a physical commodity currency like silver or gold.
But you have not yet seen my solution. It’s coming … “CRED” is probably in the name (c.f. also), not Bitnet.
Btw, username CRED.me (which was also the domain) for the project was banned at BCT, so there will be no ANN at that shithole of a forum (which is going to be replaced as the primary place to have discussions).
Btw, I agree with your assessment of Daniel’s EOS design.
So, in the light of the BCT ban, will any announcement(s) regarding the project be made here (or Medium) instead ?
We haven’t decided yet. Probably. I don’t want to commit to anything at this point.
Since there hasn't been a single decentralized coin yet, and it doesn't look like creating one is even possible, I vote that you name it ADP - Anonymint's Digital Prison, then not tell anyone what the abbreviation stands for. If it actually was decentralized, well, more power to you. If it completely centralizes, you can't say you didn't warn anyone.
Well I think initially you’ll be able to claim that our project CRED (actually that’s the enforced utility1 token name but not the exact project name) is exactly a permissioned system when the open source is not revealed. But there’s a surprise that comes later when the open source is released. So you and others will presumably have fun characterizing it as a farce at the start.
We will discuss/debate/analyze the technological specifics later when the open source is released.
1 No ICO securities will be issued
P.S. I suggest readers revisit the Verify AMA to read my (username iamnotback’s) comments there, specifically w.r.t. the naming conflict over the CRED token name. I also made several comments there pointing out that Verify seems to be (IMO and analyses) yet another in a sea of ERC-20 pointless projects and an ICO musical chairs money grabs. UPDATE: note Verifyas banned me from their subreddit(ard).