These are all good points. It is absolutely true that all of this comes down to the problem of social consensus. The role of the technology is to assist in resolving it, to create structure that gives a community a better shot at successfully fulfilling its chosen values/purpose. This is true for any p2p tech, Lemmy itself being one example.

The technical safe guards that you describe require a user to be knowledgeable in order to audit and prove that they’re being used effectively.

Sort of, but knowledgeable people can signal boost their knowledge and provide references to confirm what they’re saying. I follow some less active cryptocurrency subreddits, and the most common type of post is someone who has bought a scamcoin asking for more information, often hoping that what they are seeing was a technical glitch rather than a scam. Someone will then refer them to a token sniffer website; you put in the address of the token, and it automatically checks the publicly available information for the typical red flags, and basically always the tokens in these posts are confirmed malicious. For the OP in these posts, it’s usually too late, their money is gone, but there are accessible means to investigate security guarantees.

High profile projects that fail to hide what they are doing do get called out on it with solid rationale/evidence, for instance Terra Luna had many people loudly pointing out the fatal flaws in its structure well in advance of its collapse. Why were they ignored? At some point I started noticing a big cultural and values shift in people talking about crypto; I would be talking about technical verification as the obviously effective way to confirm legitimacy, and people would push back: actually, I was totally wrong, it doesn’t really work, and the real way to tell what’s legit is by paying attention to the personality of the central figure representing a project. Or others who didn’t necessarily buy into the cult of personality stuff, but also had no interest in learning how anything works, because what they wanted to do was casually throw $20-100 into a possibility of getting rich and not think about it too much. This represents a social failure; crypto provides a path to a chain of accountability that could reach everyone, but does not because a mass of people don’t believe in it, or don’t see it as worth their time to participate in.

The internet arrived at a scorched earth solution: the “crypto is a scam” narrative. Honestly, it is what a lot of people need to hear, because it is simple and because they aren’t hearing anything else. The people who think the way to pick investments is by making personality judgments need to stay the fuck away because they are going to lose all their money. But that narrative is also untrue, and denies the things cryptocurrency actually can do effectively.

Monero might be a good project making good decisions now, but what’s is stopping it from taking a course similar to the one you described bitcoin taking? It sounds like the only thing in the way is the current community.

It’s community values, aligned and reinforced with incentives. I don’t necessarily think Bitcoin took the wrong path, in retrospect. It adjusted its values to be compatible with the interests of its financial stakeholders, which is important because securing a cryptocurrency network against attack takes resources and so has to be a viable business. I believe that as long as values and incentives don’t diverge too hard, a cryptocurrency can hold together and do what it sets out to do.

Anyway that was some walls of text, but thanks I needed to vent about this stuff