Cryptocurrency Humanism vs. Libertarianism

The excerpt below is from a debate I had with another cryptocurrency team. That cryptocurrency is a top-10 cryptocurrency (by market cap). Several of my colleagues and I were heavily invested in that other cryptocurrency until we learned how they raised their pre-ICO capital. We learned that their ecosystem was completely dominated by a small number of anonymous whales, which obviously creates a high concentration of wealth and power. From a humanitarian perspective, this is intolerable.

So, we stopped participating in that cryptocurrency and launched Gini. Here's a summary of that exchange:

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Account Transparency is Not Enough; Actual Decentralization of Power/Control Is the Only Solution. Many people incorrectly assume that the power of cryptocurrencies is their public ledger transparency. However, we can all easily see that billionaires today control vast swaths of our planetary existence, but merely seeing them doesn’t change the fundamental reality: They have too much power/control over our planet. I don’t think it’s appropriate to force private investors to reveal their identities publicly because I believe privacy is a human right. Regardless, even if we knew the identities of all these whales, that transparency still wouldn’t change the fundamental reality: Too much concentration of crypto power/control in the hands of a few whales.

If Decentralization of Power is Not Achieved Early, It Becomes Virtually Impossible to Achieve Later. Even with the best intentions and highest integrity, most humans can’t resist the allure of power. This is why Lord Acton said, “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Once humans have it, it’s extremely difficult to persuade them to relinquish their power. I know [names omitted to protect their privacy] have been thinking about this issue for a while, but unless they included a legally-binding forced liquidation provision (or functionally equivalent provisions) directly in the voucher contracts, then a post-hoc solution is not obvious or easy. That means it could become very difficult to exert enough influence over the whales to persuade them to liquidate enough of their cryptocurrency holdings to create balance and trust in this allegedly trust-less monetary system.

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Prioritizing the Interests of Humanity Over Traders & Bots. One of the most significant problems throughout the cryptocurrency world today is rampant market and ecosystem manipulation by crypto whales. Unfortunately, it’s human nature to break rules when there is no meaningful accountability. Because most cryptocurrency teams are ideologically constrained by their puritanical libertarian philosophy, they reject rational rules that would create stability and integrity in their ecosystems. Their philosophies may sound good in theory, but they lead to markets and ecosystems that are even more dominated by whales than the fiat banking system is today.

In contrast, Gini is guided by Humanism, not Libertarianism; thus, we have no hesitation about implementing systems like Gini's Ecosystem Stability Mechanism, the Trust Protocol, and Community Governance System based on rational rules and incentive structures that prioritize the interests of humans over the interests of random traders and robots.