RE: The IoT will Become a Means for Centralized Control: Future Forecast and Understanding your Options
Wonderful post, and I strongly agree with almost all you have said. However, there are a couple things that I'd like to share that differ from your own considerations.
"The problem is that the Swift network that the banks use is tied in with the internet. If the internet goes down, so does global finance. As soon as they do that, they will have far greater problems and will lose complete control."
I believe this is not correct. I can point out several ways that they can kill the internet, or target internet access on an individual basis, that can leave them able to employ the SWIFT network, or another means of maintaining the extant financial system.
While I'm not going to detail them here, I think just a few minutes of thought will enable you to come up with some yourself. This means that your subsequent assumption, that cryptocurrency is inherently safe from institutional interference, is incorrect.
That does not mean that cryptocurrency is unable to be secure. It means that secure networks are necessary in order for cryptocurrency to be secure, and that creating a secure network(s) is necessary.
"There is another path away from centralized IT that is now echoing the early days of the internet in its technical development. It’s the underlying protocol behind the technology known as bitcoin...The smart way is to get involved in bitcoin (the sooner the better) and avoid parasitic philosophies."
Unfortunately, BTC is not parasite proof. We see that transaction fees are an Achilles heel, and the Lightning Network that has been created to solve the problem is a mechanism of control. Any mechanism that interposes itself between users and their BTC is able to be used to render BTC subject to outside control, no matter it's internal protocols.
I submit that no single cryptocurrency, network, or solution is competent to defeat extant bad actors seeking to impose control on society. Only a plethora of potential solutions that can work together might avoid centralization, and this means that cryptocurrency alone - any particular crypto - cannot succeed absent supporting mechanisms.
Not only money, but the things money can buy, means of transferring money and information, and security, all need to be simultaneously adopted. The problems posed by bad actors are more significant and resilient than supposed, and the solutions that can successfully solve those problems thus must be more robust and diverse.
A system of social control has been devised by those that would be omnipotent tyrants. BTC is not THE solution. It will take an alternative system, each part of which is immune from control, and that has redundant parts (because immunity can be broken), to succeed in enabling free society.
Thanks!
If you're referring to this video about the LN:
That video has been debunked on the technical level. The onion routing is almost exactly like TOR which leaves the individual hops unaware of the source and destination points. Only the actual sender and receiver have any idea among the 20+ hops who is doing what which makes the KYC accusation nonsense.
The only question in my mind is whether Blockstream bought up through banking interests a collection of like minded nerds to drown out dissident voices on the block size debate. Their like minded lockstep is suspicious, but that doesn't mean that they're not sincerely trying to solve a problem. However it's also quite possible that the owners bought up enough interest to have this group become dominant enough to buy the banks time while they solve unimportant problems (for now) such as micro-transactions. There is an argument that this base layer needs to be done correctly first though, because we got that wrong with the base layer of the internet and we've been paying the price with centralized IT ever since (the encroaching control grid such as FB, Google, etc).
It isn't a simple matter to shut down the internet for large countries in the west without crippling several dependent industries all of which will cause massive disruption. I only pointed out the SWIFT network for the sake of brevity, but the banks also have other networks.
Shutting off the electric grid for a long time will be next to impossible in the west and keep the control in place. There are too many interdependent industries. If they try to do it piecemeal, then there will be alternate routes created. The problem isn't that the electricity couldn't go out on a massive scale, but when you do this for any length of time, you create social chaos (hurricane Katrina was proof enough of that). In Philadelphia, when the EBT went out for a few hours, they nearly had a riot. Authorities would be replacing it for an actual revolution in the streets; the end of which would leave cops and military fearing for their lives, bloodshed, etc...
It was a significantly easier task to kill the internet in Egypt because the backwards state of their infrastructure allowed it. If they try it in all western nations at the same time, there would be much bigger problems and it would be over for the established power structure very quickly.