TPTB,
Fundamentally, currency is about trust and consensus: A sufficient amount of people perceive value by proxy in a token.
Regardless of how truth is constructed and protected, it's the consensus part that matters. While the implementation may or may not be decentralised, it's the decentralisation of POWER that's interesting.
As you say, it may very well be a delusion. All currencies are delusions. It's just that we all agree on the value of the collective delusion.
Please read
my upthread post and the post immediately prior to yours.
If all we accomplish is fooling ourselves in a "mining the investor" paradigm without enabling a real grassroots e-currency, then we are just furthering the collapse of the world into totalitarian China/Russia model hell. And we won't on average generate any increase in capital for ourselves (some may win and most will lose in this zero-sum greater fool game of mining each other).
We need a true paradigm breakthrough (
mostly technical challenges) that changes the internet and the world. Illusions/delusions won't suffice because they DO NOT SCALE GRASSROOTS ADOPTION.
The End-to-End Principle is fundamental property of the internet which enabled it to scale so fast (but is being removed by Net Neutrality, China/Russia/Obama/FCC/UK model of internet top-down control). It means that the individuals have all the control and freedom. In the End-to-End Principle, the network is just a dumb replicator of what ever it is asked to do and can't apply any control (because the protocol doesn't allow it, e.g. with TCP/IP we can route our packets around any malfeasance unless of course ALL GOVERNMENTS COOPERATE TO DESTROY the End-to-End Principle which appears to be what is happening now). Without this property, there isn't internet wildfire scaling and the avenues for increasing production will wither and everyone will be forced to waste their capital on delusion (e.g. putting a gas station every 200 meters in Davao because there are not enough entrepreneurial opportunities and the world has been pumped full of funny money debt).
This is fundamental. If you are just here to pump some altcoin and try to mine the other fools out of their money, then carry on (generally any business model that caters to fools is not successful one overall ... although some few might make out like bandits some of the time, it doesn't have good odds of being a positive outcome for anyone involved). I am too old to waste my remaining production on that. I was rich before. I'd like to be have money again, but if that is not my destiny then I have to accept it. More important to me is to work on something that I believe in (
and which can provide enough savings so I can eat as I get older without relying on the government because I hate social welfare conceptually as it leads this oligarchy crap I am writing about that we all end up suffering in).