Quote from: TPTB_need_war on January 14, 2016, 05:00:00 AM

Except your lack of formal training in computer science means you missed the major monkey wrench in your statement of the ideal goal at least as pertains to crypto currency. That is the technological fact that centralization of databases is the antithesis of trustless, redundancy, reliability, and high availability.

Any ideas on where to go from there?

I don't think this is a problem that can be solved but looking entirely at the technical level. All Cryptocurrency designs have a window of time before they can truly be systemically centralized and brought under direct government control. The fragmented nature of nation states gives some breathing room. However, as you mentioned above as crypto gains traction even fragmented government will be forced to consolidate and act in unison to regain control over money.

To succeed, cryptocurrency must retain its critical characteristics you listed above as trustless, redundancy, reliability, and high availability. Can these be maintained if the logic above is correct and all viable cryptocurrency designs are theoretically vulnerable to worldwide government?

The answer may be not technical but economic. Even though government may eventually have the technical ability to force consolidation of cryptocurrency back into centralized fiat equivalents the practical and political economics may make exercising that power impossible.

Cryptocurrency has several factors that may assist it in maintaining such an economic shield. Those that spring immediately to mind are the following.

1) Fiat failure: By the time government has the ability to exercise such control the failure of fiat will be much more obvious to a far larger segment of the population.

2) Development of Alternatives: Should a cryptocurrency be consolidated by the government there is tremendous economic incentives for commerce to move to some other more robust design. From the governments perspective it would be something like a game of wack-a-mole shutting down one currency would just set the stage for the rise of something even harder to control. It would be in the interest of government to act with a softer hand.

3) Vested interest: government is controlled by the oligarchs who need somewhere safe to put their money. Right now that safe place is typically stocks and bonds. Both of these seem like poor long term options if your theses of a coming knowledge age is correct. If crypto becomes a wealth storage device for the elite those elite will restrain government.