this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2026
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We could lobby our governments to regulate the payment processors. Their job is to facilitate transactions, not dictate what they are. Governments could easily regulate them such that they may not do that.
Governments are centralized control. Just take a look at the current US administration, and the economic sanctions they pushed left and right. You trust them to keep their hands off transactions happening within their own country?
This is so naive it hurts, though. As if there weren’t literally thousands of years’ worth of tales of corruption and failed regulation to learn from.
I, too, desperately want to believe that democracy can still work despite capitalists having captured it. But I dunno…
Nobody has yet solved the "who watches the watchers?" problem. Because of that, I believe every system of government is doomed to fall to corruption and capture given time.
I know that there are a lot of mechanisms that can be put in place to mitigate that problem, such as adversarial branches and divisions of authority, but I haven't seen one yet that does anything more than prolong things and delay what seems to be the inevitable. Until something big changes, the pendulum seems destined to keep swinging back and forth.
In the meantime, I haven't seen any way to prevent companies from unethically exerting their will over the public that works any better than involving multiple parties in it that are not necessarily aligned and do your best to prevent collusion, like making the government a party to the transaction by way of regulating the process, though that's admittedly far from fool-proof, either.
I'm just trying to lay out the available options at our disposal now as I understand them.
So it's all Political Entropy, huh?
So it would seem! Entropy always wins.
This is just decentralization. This is literally what I alluded to in my root comment. Crypto solves these problems
That's just centralization with extra steps. Crypto is easily manipulated by whales and frequently is. At least with governments, I know the names and faces of the people robbing me.