I've met a hell of a lot of authoritarians in the crypto scene over the past decade. Blockchain technology is a centralized datastore so of course it's a tool for global authoritarianism; think IBM in the 1930s selling slow databases to the Nazi's so they can keep a universal ledger of the Jews.
P2P distributed architectures such as Holochain which actually decentralize data and control are far more positive paradigms for humanity.
That's not what anyone in the space calls centralized. It's actually called "decentralized" by everyone because the way this consensus is kept and changed happens decentralized (to some degree).
Right now it seems: If you don't have central consensus you can't have digital currency. Since everybody needs to be on the same line regards to who owns what. This is different from cash in the current world. Where nobody needs to agree to how much I have because I can physically store it and it's impossible to copy my dollars.
They are calling it decentralised but it really isn't. Transactions with physical cash are fully decentralised, anonymous (save for finger prints etc.) and asynchronous. In terms of convenience credit cards, apple pay and PayPal are hard to beat. I do not know of a single use case for consumer facing crypto currencies that is compelling to me.
I agree that "global" would be a better word than "central", but that doesn't really affect treelovinhippie's point.
> If you don't have central consensus you can't have digital currency.
From what I can tell, the Holochain developers agree with this: you can't have a single global currency without global consensus. Their approach seems to be: rather than having a single global currency, have a network of IOUs, trusted and enforced locally: https://medium.com/holochain/beyond-blockchain-simple-scalab...
Personally, I have no opinion on their approach, other than welcoming experiments, since that's what I find interesting in Bitcoin and the rest of the crypto space (and frankly wish it hadn't passed that stage yet).
I started reading with that article but it doesn't really seem to answer the questions it's claiming to answer. It's talking about how Bitcoin et al. have a shared consensus that's updated once every 10 minutes, and how everyone needs to validate everything which is inefficient (I agree). But while trying to explain how holochain does it different I don't read how except for insect analogies, for example:
> ## Order of Operation Matters
> It turns out when you focus on distributing process first you end up with even more greatly distributed data. This is because each participant holds only their own data. In contrast, blockchains store everybody’s transactions in a single database that every node verifies and copies. The underlying foundation of distributed process enables deeper distribution of data and parallel architectures. Ethereum and smart contracts, are doing this the other way around — layering processes on top of a global ledger.
> By distributing process at the foundation, and leveraging Intrinsic Data Integrity, our approach results in massive improvements in throughput (from parallel simultaneous independent processing), speed, latency, efficiency, and cost of hardware. There is no need to wait 10 minutes to see if your transaction gets committed. This architecture can facilitate huge volumes of even extremely “low value” transactions permitting creative uses for coordinating shared activities that wouldn’t merit the cost or energy of implementing on a blockchain. You also don’t need to incent people to hold their own record — they already want it.
This is all true but the section heading "order of operation matters" - and how holochain deals with this - is simply not addressed. Given HN is a technical community feel free to link to actual research papers or more technical content that actually explains how Holochain solves the problems. This piece looks like a PR piece to me, one that doesn't really have any answers.
I think their point is that the Order of Operation matters for global currencies, but not for mutual credit systems like theirs. But don't quote me on that.
P2P distributed architectures such as Holochain which actually decentralize data and control are far more positive paradigms for humanity.