Guys, this thought made me like shocked, you know. Dtube is claiming that it is decentralised, and that it can't be controlled by the government and stuff. But..is it really like that?
how governments can control Dtube and Steemit?
So, I've realised a major flaw in the system. So, what stops a government from just buying Steem for 1 billion dollars and downvoting everyone else's opinions? Yeah, there is some hurdles with that, when they start to buy from the exchange the price will go higher and higher as they buy more, but still. What stops them? Nothing. Top people now have a couple of million $ invested, for any government this is just pocket money and then they'll just have more power then anyone else taken together.
capitalist system
As in any capitalist system, and Steemit and Dtube are it, the most power have the people with the most money. No one has more money than the governments.
I do not think they are able to control the system this way. First with buying such a huge steak they will increase the value of all other steemians. But also flagging does not delete a post, it just takes it off the trending category when downvotes are higher than upvotes. And seeing the steemit community, steemians notice these pattern and authors still have a voice outside steemit to raise the issue.
I do not think it is possible to control platforms on top of steemit so easily.
Steemit and Dtube not a opinion leader like youtube for example. So at this stage no one will interfere with our small decentralized site(small compared to giants like youtube).
Yeah, at this stage it won't happen. But basically at the same we are saying that when it'll become an opinion leader, then it can become corrupted and pretty much destroyed as a tool that it was originally in a matter of weeks and months.
The whole "decentralized" stuff doesn't really apply to much else outside bitcoin. All the others, including Ethereum, would not be saved by their "decentralized" nature if and when a government would like to crack down.
Take ethereum for instance, you don't need more than a couple of fun games like cryptokitties to basically make the network unusable for all practical purposes.
For steemit it is even easier: you just take down the first 20 witnesses, heck, you just take down the steemit inc.-run node, huff and puff a couple of times angrily and the network will experience a near-death experince. It will become clear that the 200 other witnesses have nowhere near enough computing power lined up to sustain a steemit with about 60 000 daily users. What it will be when the network will grow to 600 000 daily users ? Remind me how many daily active users FB has ?
That is to say that the best chance we have not to be "government controlled" is to ... control the government. Unfortunately if we take the US for instance, their brand of democracy appears pretty contaminated by money to a point where one cannot be sure that it will recover.
That is markedly less the case in many continental european democracies. Not that the "moneyed interests" are kept at bay but my personal opinion is that they wield significantly less power over the political process