>but that is a tangential concern to the accessibility of executing financial transactions
No, I disagree. It's exactly the same, because without that concern your transactions can be deprioritized or blocked. Miners can absolutely interfere with the expected function of the network, because it's entirely them who determine what the expected function is in the first place. There are no other systems in place to guarantee the functioning of the network and as a user (not a miner) you have no say in the matter at all. They do whatever they want and you're forced to accept it unless you can afford to buy huge amounts of mining hardware and take over the network yourself. I believe I addressed this all already, it's not democratic by any definition of that word or in any way you could ever possibly look at it. The original bitcoin whitepaper proposed that many more people would be running full nodes and (correctly) stated that the security properties of the system would come from this, and if that ended up being a realistic way to set the system up then maybe you could have said it was more democratic. But this didn't work out in practice, and it's been very obvious since 2010 that it would never work out that way for multiple reasons, one being that the financial rewards from re-centralizing into mining pools are far too great to pass up.
>For instance? And what may have happened in the early days of the network is irrelevant to what is possible today.
Both bitcoin (in 2013) and ethereum (in 2016) have reverted transactions that the miners didn't agree with. Any statements from them that the network is "immutable" or "decentralized" or "democratic" is simply a lie. Nothing has actually changed since the "early days", the conditions for them to do it again are still there and will likely always be there because this is how the network is fundamentally designed to function, based on a consensus of those who have the most resources available to them to mine. For a smaller coin, it may not even be possible to tell that this is happening, because blocks that the miners all agree they don't want to process can simply be dropped with no log of that happening.
Now, if you could legally require that cryptocurrencies need to set up a legal entity that gives a certain level of democratic control to its stakeholders then that's probably the only realistic way you could change things, but I doubt that would ever happen because crypto enthusiasts don't seem to care much for laws or regulations. And in any case, doing so would not be an innovation, it would still have all the other fatal flaws of cryptocurrency. Best case scenario, it would just be moving back into a poor approximation of a credit union, which is something that already exists.
No, I disagree. It's exactly the same, because without that concern your transactions can be deprioritized or blocked. Miners can absolutely interfere with the expected function of the network, because it's entirely them who determine what the expected function is in the first place. There are no other systems in place to guarantee the functioning of the network and as a user (not a miner) you have no say in the matter at all. They do whatever they want and you're forced to accept it unless you can afford to buy huge amounts of mining hardware and take over the network yourself. I believe I addressed this all already, it's not democratic by any definition of that word or in any way you could ever possibly look at it. The original bitcoin whitepaper proposed that many more people would be running full nodes and (correctly) stated that the security properties of the system would come from this, and if that ended up being a realistic way to set the system up then maybe you could have said it was more democratic. But this didn't work out in practice, and it's been very obvious since 2010 that it would never work out that way for multiple reasons, one being that the financial rewards from re-centralizing into mining pools are far too great to pass up.
>For instance? And what may have happened in the early days of the network is irrelevant to what is possible today.
Both bitcoin (in 2013) and ethereum (in 2016) have reverted transactions that the miners didn't agree with. Any statements from them that the network is "immutable" or "decentralized" or "democratic" is simply a lie. Nothing has actually changed since the "early days", the conditions for them to do it again are still there and will likely always be there because this is how the network is fundamentally designed to function, based on a consensus of those who have the most resources available to them to mine. For a smaller coin, it may not even be possible to tell that this is happening, because blocks that the miners all agree they don't want to process can simply be dropped with no log of that happening.
Now, if you could legally require that cryptocurrencies need to set up a legal entity that gives a certain level of democratic control to its stakeholders then that's probably the only realistic way you could change things, but I doubt that would ever happen because crypto enthusiasts don't seem to care much for laws or regulations. And in any case, doing so would not be an innovation, it would still have all the other fatal flaws of cryptocurrency. Best case scenario, it would just be moving back into a poor approximation of a credit union, which is something that already exists.