Quote from: Portal_Network on July 11, 2018, 07:08:26 AM

If we want the whole world, include enterprising people in such countries, to have access to the powerful economic advantages of decentralized, peer-to-peer applications and business models, regulatory barriers to entry must be softened.

Sounds great, but realistically, the regulators are frequently corrupted by big players in the markets they regulate precisely to keep barriers to entry high. That's why there's so much bullshit to wade through in order to trade on the stock market; in the church of free market competition, no-one wants a truly free market because they don't really want to have real competition at all.

Let's not forget, Satoshi strongly hinted at why he created Bitcoin: this "regulated" financial system is highly corrupt. The banks in 2008 were insolvent, and central banks simply lent them all the money they needed to shore themselves up again at 0% interest. If there'd been a healthy competitive framework in place, none of that would have been necessary, as at least some substantial rivals could've helped keep the system working, albeit in a state of severe financial devastation. But the whole thing, that is every single institution, was part of the corrupt behaviour, and they all knew that each other were irredeemably bankrupt (which was the spark that set of the "credit crunch" headlines in the first place).

At the end of the day, the same thing is beginning to happen with cryptocurrency as what happened with p2p filesharing: they quietly gave up. Record companies started trying to become gig promoters instead, and the commercial music industry just became less important both financially and culturally (and music quality & diversity has arguably increased). Articles like this are the beginning of the slow acceptance that the financial industry is facing; either accept reality, or go the way the record industry did before them. On computer networks, the code is the law, get with the program