The core issue is that trusted, central bodies are generally already evil or will become evil, whether by their own volition or as authoritarian governments force them to use their centralized control to help them accomplish their goals.<p>Here is a talk I gave to Mozilla Privacy Lab back in 2017 about centralization and all of the extremely-concrete evil that has resulted, with every single example from the (long) talk directly cited (as every slide is a news article). And the sad thing is that every few days there is some new high-profile abuse of centralized power that I always feel <i>also</i> deserves to be in an updated version of this talk... it is a never-ending issue as people suck.<p><a href="https://youtu.be/vsazo-Gs7ms" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/vsazo-Gs7ms</a><p>So, I feel like your very question of trying to solve things that <i>can't</i> be solved with centralized systems is flawed; hell: I studied decentralized systems in grad school, and I have been saying for as long as I can remember that "anything you solve with a decentralized system I can solve cheaper and faster and <i>better</i> with a centralized one"... but you know what I can't do? I can't solve it in a way that doesn't lead to at least some moral landmines due to my now having chosen to take those shortcuts by having centralized control of the result.<p>Inherently, then, I believe the reason to work on blockchain stuff is not to solve things that "can't" be solved using centralized systems... it is to figure out how to re-solve the things that people already solved using centralized systems without putting any individual or small cabal in charge of anything that would let them do evil things. And it is then to figure out how to do well enough with what results that people are willing to put up with it probably being a worse result on the surface <i>because it is a better result for humanity</i>.<p>And like, that's a nearly impossible bar, and maybe to really get there will require regulation of centralized systems to make them illegal... which I realize will probably never happen :(. But that doesn't make working on these systems dumb, the way a lot of people here seem to think: it makes it all the more <i>noble</i>, as everyone who <i>isn't</i> doing this are actively making the world a worse place to live (and in some of the more egregious examples, such as everyone who chooses to work at Apple, have pretty direct blood on their hands from issues in countries like China).<p>Hell... looking at your comment history, I see you recently being excited about the idea that Google could use their fleet of self-driving cars to create a mass road surveillance network capable of logging the license plates of "bad drivers" (and from thread context, "reporting them")... Google already is used as a stooge for governments (even as they push back, they still provide tons of data) but at least it is almost always about their own users: expanding their charge into watching other people is just <i>evil</i> and will lead to unprecedented ways to abuse this information stockpile :(.