1) It is naive, at best, to believe that the wholesale destruction of privacy for individuals will also mean the wholesale destruction of privacy for elites. This simply won't happen.
2) Privacy is not a binary state. The crux of your argument is that since I do not have privacy from the NSA, then I should not have privacy from any individuals. I don't mind if you want to give up yours, but I like mine. Please do not subject me to your tyranny.
3) Your Constitutional hand-wringing ignores a lot of reality, including (but not limited to) the fact that Constitutional law isn't as simple as you think it is, and that if your best argument is that people who never conceived of mass photography and image recognition didn't take a stand against it, well... that's silly.
4) Your conclusions are precisely backwards. If we start making the locations of all cars perfectly public, of all people public etc, we won't have more freedom. We'll have an inescapable tyranny.
This is not an easy problem to solve. But your proposed solution is only fine for people whose actions are neatly aligned with current and future cultural norms as well as the preferences of current and future elites. Cheap widespread surveillance (which will happen otherwise) will be absolutely devastating to enemies of the state, it will be horrible for "unusual" people generally, and it will be FANTASTIC for elites.
If you mean the economic burden, yes, but I don't think they need to bear all the burden
My big complaint with private prisons, as they stand today, is that they tend to get paid based on heads and beds. As such, prisons are rewarded when prisoners behave badly (extending their stay), and when former prisoners reoffend (repeating their stay). There are no countervailing economic pressures.
If we want prisons to work, we need the economics to work in favor of societal goals. Everything else equal, a prison that generates low recidivism should get paid more than one that generates high recidivism, because they're eliminating future costs.
> If we want prisons to work, we need the economics to work in favor of societal goals.
This is true, but we already ignore that for our prison population. Otherwise, our system would be less punitive and more aimed to reformation and building productive citizens.
Yes, the economic burden but also the ethical burden of ensuring their sentence is administered fairly. Corporeal punishment at the hands of the guards is not a fair administration of the punishment.
This was a political and cultural question: is the contract the code?
The hard-fork won by arguing that "no, the contract is the code plus whatever a quite small number of greasy nerds decide it will be."
If the greasy nerds had instead decided to accept the loss, it would've established a cultural norm so strong that nobody would likely dare to try a fork again. It would have baked it into the community in a nearly indelible manner. "nope, they lost tens of millions and they ate it because the contract is the code, so we won't help you either."
Instead, what the nerds did was say "hey, you know the one interesting part of Ethereum? yeah, forget it... because we decided that we value our short-term wealth over the creation of that system."
And that's fine. It's fine that they decided they don't give a shit about contracts as code. It's fine that they took their ball and went home. But Ethereum is now dead. Not today mind you, but in the long run.
Only a complete and total lunatic will ever trust Ethereum again, because there will be more forks in the future. The precedent is set. They won't all remain "clear cut".
So the interesting question is: who's next? It's not ethereum anymore. But it's still an interesting problem space. And maybe there's a team that is actually interested in it.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't a fork _always_ possible in a decentralized blockchain? And if so, wasn't the "the contract is whatever 50%+1 of the network decides it is" always part of the contract?
Basically, anyone can introduce the fork with any arbitrary changes (including reverting any transactions, or, for that matter, creating more money out of thin air) at any point. But the fork is only viable if the majority of the network decides that they want it. So the governance model was always "majority decides"; it was just made explicit here.
Furthermore, it's impossible to address that problem by any kind of governance, because - this not being a government - submitting to the authority of the governing body is voluntary, and the way you avoid doing so is... by forking. So a fork is always an option, simply by virtue of decentralized implementation.
I like schemas ... most of the time! I like Avro ... some of the time! And JSON some of the time. And I write mostly in Python.... and Scala.
The world is not so black and white.