Then you can easily mine a block with fake commitment, for example:
Dave 4.00 BTC
Elaine 5.00 BTC
Frank 6.00 BTC
It is exactly the same problem as putting a fake sidechain commitment, and withdrawing coins from a sidechain to different addresses.
you'll probably say "for verification". verfication of what?
If you don't know the history, and you only know the UTXO set, then you don't know if "Dave 4.00 BTC" entry is fake or not. You have to locate that entry in some previous block, and validate it. Also, as you cannot trust the previous block either, you have to go to the previous block of the previous block. And by going recursively, you will end up in a situation, where to be 100% sure that all UTXOs are real, you have to verify everything from the Genesis Block.
Easily mine , how easy to say and how hard to do . Each miner can check the hash and find out that the fake entry is invalid , and these transactions will get rejected instantly . If what you say could happen , bitcoin was broken since the start . That's why the merkle tree exists , so that you can confirm if a transaction is valid even without having the entire blockchain .
But how the whole system is actually designed shows that it's not just a network for "peer to peer electronic cash" is it?
The system is designed to have electronic peer to peer cash into a visible ledger by using PoW consensus to prevent double spend . What other design do you think bitcoin has ? I'd really like to know what else do you see .
Have you truly tried to understand how the protocol works and what its implications are? It's not a decentralized PayPal, that I can tell you. It's much much more.
Maybe i haven't , can you point me of what the implications are ? I like socratic dialogues , but i have to warn you that to have such a dialogue we both need to have an open mind and a great understanding of how things work . Do you remember that ip to ip transactions were implemented in the original design that was later removed ? Mike Hearn makes a point , that things could be reinstated at some later point
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=9334.msg134801#msg134801 .