ifwinterco

No it comes from spending a lot of time in my home country (the UK), which despite nominally being a parliamentary democracy is very clearly run by a small number of (largely unelected) people at the top.

The same as every company I've ever worked for, large or small.

Some systems obfuscate it more than others, but at the end of the day somebody has to have the executive power to make a decision when the chips are down, or you just have chaos

It simply can't work, somebody ultimately has to be in charge of a 15 person startup, it is literally impossible to run a country via committee

Best science fiction book ever written IMO

Continuing to believe in democracy when you seem to know how the country (all countries) actually works in practice is surely just illogical.

You can't vote for anyone who'll abolish the FBI, CIA and the rest of the elite groups that actually run things

Zero trust ≠ publicly accessible.

And zero trust makes sense, once one service behind a VPN is compromised attackers can potentially move laterally, zero trust mitigates that

Blindly running client side code (within a very carefully designed sandbox) is necessary for the modern web to operate, and people like the modern web.

We aren't going back to a page refresh every time you want to update something any time soon

There are examples of the apparently ineffective British state suddenly gaining some teeth and some competence when they actually care.

One example is after the Southport riots, miraculously the justice system became hyperefficient and the perpetrators were found, arrested, charged and jailed within a week.

That suggests a lot of what looks like incompetence (potholes, petty crime, maybe also this) is actually just the state not really caring about a lot of issues.

If they decide they really care about internet censorship, I wouldn't rule out them suddenly becoming a lot more competent in that specific area

Getting the raw data is relatively straightforward, but my understanding is doing real time DPI at country scale without being easily circumvented (and without breaking the rest of the internet you want to work) isn't so easy.

If you want to really make sure nobody in the uk can easily access 4chan (PRC style) it needs some effort, and you're in an arms race with attempts to mask/tunnel traffic so it gets through

I think it’s an open question whether the British state has the technical chops, money and willingness to implement a Great Firewall type solution.

The state isn’t totally incompetent but doing it properly would be a serious undertaking, the kind of thing where the recent track record of big government tech projects isn’t great

True for bitcoin but Monero is legitimately quite anonymous

I don't have an agenda, I just don't really believe in democracy.

There's very little evidence to support the idea that ordinary people vote for what they want and therefore control the direction of the state, in the UK or any other "democratic" country.

If that were the case then why are policies consistently implemented that go against the expressed desires of the majority of the population?

Every government in every state ever is more accurately described as a regime, for me it's a morally neutral term.

The only question is whether the regime is good or not

Also BTC has a very conservative 10 minute block time that protects to some extent against a network partition (there is time to recover)

The UK population is generally docile, we don't really riot even when things are bad (unlike the French who barely need an excuse).

Our elites are pretty bad at running the country but actually quite crafty when it comes to managing dissent and channeling it into things that don't threaten their hold on power.

So the regime can get away with a lot, there is no organised violent resistance

Yes, but the complexity of the setup (which is already way too much for any non-cypherpunk normies) is starting to get kind of ridiculous.

I am still pro crypto and fascinated by the technology but we have to admit the original cypherpunk vision was unfortunately never going to work, we're going to end up with something else

Say you've done everything right and used 3 coldcards spread across 3 geographic locations using 2of3 multisig.

You're feeling pretty proud of yourself, your coins are super safe.

Then it turns out the RNG in the coldcard mk2 was badly/maliciously implemented and is completely insecure. You need to move your coins right now.

You can probably see the issue