this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2026
301 points (96.9% liked)
Technology
85095 readers
5811 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
As I see it, the development of anti-capture systems aren't about actually preventing capture. Rather, they are to delay the inevitable and to make it so that when a "reset" happens, the good parts of a civilization aren't too damaged when replacement happens.
Ideally, the next civilization(s) to arise from the ashes should inherit the best bits of whatever came before.
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.
manipulated by whales? are you talking about 51% attacks? censorship? Can you link some concrete examples of major crypto coins getting manipulated? I think there was a potential 51% attack on Monero but IIRC nothing actually happened.
I'm talking about making large transactions one way or the other to manipulate the psychology of normal investors en masse, causing them to move as a unit in a direction favorable to the whale.
Here are some links I found where they talk about it and largely admit it's a problem:
I admittedly do not understand a lot of the nuances of how it is done, since I have only used it for anonymous purchases, but that is primarily because I do not find it a safe place to put money. Its fluctuations are based on the whims of people I have no way of knowing, rather than any real-world circumstances that can be studied and planned for with the proper experience and education.
Furthermore, an economy cannot function using such an unstable currency. Its valuation can change by several percent while I'm on my way to the store to spend it. It is more of a speculative "futures" asset than it is money. Even the ~8+% inflation over the past 5 years in the USA has had grievous global fallout. An 8% swing in crypto is just considered a Monday morning.
I'm not at all telling anyone not to use it. It's fine; do what you want. Even I have. What I am saying is that it has certain intrinsic properties that make it not work well as the default regular money.