Please note I am humbled by your accomplishments in CC compared to mine and I noted that at the end of the prior post.
In short, those enforcers on this forum make me want to puke. Any one doing censorship (other than self-moderated threads for their own official coin thread), bullying by politik, or any other holier than thou crap will be on my personal shit (do not like) list (which basically means nothing so no big deal).
In other words, I am urging us all to stop the nonsense political control game. Let it run wild and free. Don't be afraid to not be in control. Don't be afraid. Just let nature be.
I tend to agree with you, but I also think that non-technical people are simply not in a position to fully comprehend the risks involved in poorly designed security software / consensus systems. This is evidenced by the Bitcoin block size debate, where a great deal of opinion has come from decidedly non-technical individuals.
Therefore, those that are technical, and I do not imply that I am included, have a right and perhaps even a responsibility to point technical and even ethical flaws out out in a way that is understandable to non-technical users. To this end, smooth has been consistent in his criticisms - he has even been consistent (to me at least) in his statements regarding Steem, effectively saying that the website is an interesting publishing platform, but the entire thing might be extremely broken, and he has not had the opportunity to fully comprehend how it all fits together.
A favourite post of mine, that I tend to go back to every time a criticism of mine is met with accusations of FUD, is this one by gmaxwell (emphasis mine) -
On Tuesday at a Bitcoin event I was still being harangued by Ripple/Stellar advocates claiming the absolute soundness of the system. I care about the whole cryptocurrency ecosystem since, in the minds of the public any failure is harmful to all of us, and I don't want to see anyone suffer losses not even the gullible... But it makes no sense for me to spend my limited time providing free consulting for the impossibly torrent of ill-advised, impossibility claiming, systems... especially when they're not thankful and/or respond with obfuscation that makes their work unrealizable or hand-waving without admitting their new assumptions. I don't want to see anyone get hurt, but ... hey, I spoke up a bit and people continued on anyways without asking the kind of tough questions they should have been asking. I'm certainly not going to spend all me time correcting everyone who is wrong on the internet, especially when altcoin folks have been known to play pretty dirty toward their critics. No one should assume that other people are going to go out of their way to beg them to not use something broken.
Perhaps in the future more people will ask the hard questions and demand better answers? If so, it would be worth more time for experienced people to spend time reviewing other systems and we could all benefit. Otherwise, perhaps those who aren't interested in standing up to some of the rigor we'd normally expect from a cryptosystem will stop calling their broken altcoins "cryptocurrencies". Those of us who actually want to build sound systems don't want our work sullied by these predictable failures, and being able to say "I told you so" is no consolation.
I appreciate your and gmaxwell's eloquently worded case for self-regulation, or
more accurately on the logic of why self-regulation is futile.
QED.
And my further point is that not only is it futile (you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink), but my prior replies to smooth are arguing that it is harmful, because if we remove the degrees-of-freedom from nature, it can't anneal. Then we end up with top-down driven grid lock of expert omniscience, e.g Blockstream's clusterfuck Troika of SegWit, LN, and Sidechains. I've mentioned my reasons for that stance on those technologies else where.
Gregory
seems to play the collectivist card, and I suspect he also thinks man-made global warming is not a hoax to tax carbon based on
his support for oppressive CopyLeft software licenses indicating he is for radical leftist style intervention. In short, I read gmaxwell to be an interventionist of a much higher degree than smooth. But interventionalism is also a groupthink effect and becomes a mania. Thus I am think we need to be very well grounded in anarchism and respecting nature, else we will slide into another Holocaust.
We need to allow all viewpoints and all experiments.
Nothing wrong with stating your case for example on the Monero documentation as to specific reasons why other systems are inferior. You should promote the advantages. And then it is up to the market to decide.
But creating a BCT/Reddit funnel that all speculators must pass through, wherein we try to control the process, is stomping on nature and will result in failure to anneal or the annealing will route around the Coasian barrier.
Quoting myself (the linked original contains some links which I didn't bother to copy over in this quote):
Knowledge Anneals
Unsophisticated thinkers have an incorrect understanding of knowledge creation, idolizing a well-structured top-down sparkling academic cathedral of vastly superior theoretical minds. Rather knowledge primary spawns from accretive learning due to unexpected random chaotic fitness created from multitudes of random path dependencies that can only exist in the bottom-up free market. Top-down systems are inherently fragile because they overcommit to egregious error (link to Taleb's simplest summary of the math). Given Kurzweil's sensationalized magnum opus is the technological singularity, it is surprising that he is apparently not well studied in the field of social knowledge formation.
Kurzweil states that the brain is composed of a finite number of pattern matchers and that humans train to be exceptional (unique) to think deeply about some subject matter. Whether Kurzweil is implying that computer brains could have more pattern matchers and/or process information from the environment faster thus obtaining higher levels of cognitive capability from more input entropy so as to attain the claim that computers will vastly outpace human knowledge, he fails to understand a basic fact that simulated annealing (SA) is the only known global optimization algorithm when the subject matter is not known a priori. SA requires many simultaneous, independent small (imperfect trial and error) steps. The free market optimizes better than top-down because the larger number of actors anneals better. So again, the computer brains at best can supplement the supply of humans, but they can't overpower the free market. Frankly I am shocked that Kurzweil didn't realize this, since my A.I. studies in the 1980s is where I first learned about SA.
The knowledge creation process is opaque to a single top-down perspective of the universe because to be omniscient would require that the transmission of change in the universe would propagate instantly to the top-down observer, i.e. the speed-of-light would need to be infinite. But an infinite speed-of-light would collapse past and future into an infinitesimal point in spacetime omniscient is the antithesis of existential. In order for anything to exist in the universe, there must be friction-in-time so change must propagate through resistance to change mass. The non-uniform mass distribution of the universe is mutually causal with oscillation, which is why the universe emerges from the frequency domain. Uniform distribution of mass would be no contrast and nothing would exist. Taleb's antifragility can be conceptualized as lack of breaking resistance to variance amplification.