- Bitcoin
- Society is very confused about Bitcoin, and whether it is good or bad.
- Bitcoin benefitted from first mover advantage, but it suffers from the historic inevitability that any economic system without adequate governance will collapse when those that can, abuse others too much. Hence the drive to introduce much more governance into cryptocurrencies and have suitable mechanisms in the underlying block chains. Practically, some of the banks have been looking at how to establish “trusted Bitcoin” i.e. to put a cryptographically bound wrapper around the Bitcoin transaction and the provenance/traceability trail, which would more normally be met in a permissioned chain.
The lack of governance can also be seen as a feature of blockchains. Other distributed, non-hierarchical systems (e.g. PGP web-of-trust, BGP routing) did not collapse and managed to restrict abuse (at the expense of scalability).
It is also worth to consider that Satoshi's primary intent was to solve the double spending problem in a fully distributed system, which Bitcoin, even considering its inefficiencies, does solve quite well. It is without governance by design. It lets many different users agree on the current state of the blockchain even though they don't trust each other or any central authority. This problem had remained unsolved until the Bitcoin network was launched.
OTOH, as the recent Ethereum fork (to mitigate the DAO breach) showed, having a major decision being made by a ad-hoc structured community of developers reaching out to stakeholders by questionnaires appears scary. However, just adding adequate governance is difficult for such a system. Having a centrally controlled consensus algorithm or introduce gated access might contradict fundamental properties. I would be curious to learn which approaches lead to better governance without discarding the fundamental properties of the block chain.