Read a post earlier talking about fighting crime on permissionless networks and eventually it landed on “governance needs to move on chain.”
Ironically, in the attempt to solve the root issue that was barely grasped, ended up with just recreating "government" but with better graphics. Apparently, if politicians become Blockchain wallet addresses, then suddenly domination disappears. This however is far from reality. Making domination transparent will not remove domination nor will it bring more power to the people if it adopts Blockchain technology simply because that is not the nature of how government operates. The Master will never let their slaves gain back control without a fight unless it seizes to be a master. Likewise, a government can never serve it's people unless it stops being "government".
As I have explained before, on what government actually is(a cartel, a group of thugs, a fictional super deity demi-God depending how you look at it), they will not ever give up that power. So even if they adopt Blockchain transparency, they will simply harness that control by force if necessary. Transparent domination is still domination.
People keep confusing coordination with authority itself. Humans coordinated long before governments existed. Villages coordinated. Tribes coordinated. Families coordinate. Even animals coordinate. Coordination is a neutral by-product of nature.
Authority however is something entirely different. Authority is the claimed right to rule over others whether they consent or not. By itself, by its own nature, authority is completely anti-life. That is why putting governance "on chain" changes almost nothing philosophically.
If an authoritarian structure on chain can still:
tax
freeze
censor
blacklist
punish
surveil
restrict movement
or enforce obedience through violence
Then all that really happened was that domination just became digitized. People see transparency and immediately assume freedom, but a prison with glass walls is still a prison.
Blockchain technology itself is neutral. It can decentralize power yes, but it can just as easily centralize control harder than anything previously imaginable.
Now that I am thinking on it, imagine governments with fully trackable financial behavior, programmable money, automated taxation(DV), social scoring, immutable identity systems, AI surveillance tied directly into financial access, and you want to call this innovation? Are you insane?
That will only end up building the most efficient control system in human history and we're not that far off from it happening either in real life. And somehow, I bet this gets framed as "power to the people."
No.
Power is not returned to people simply because the cage became cryptographic.
No. Not by a long shot.
Maybe the strangest part about all of this is that people can recognize corruption perfectly fine while still remaining mentally attached to authority itself. Yet somehow every proposed solution always loops right back into rebuilding "authority" again but with newer technology attached to it.
People have been conditioned for so long to associate order itself with rulership that they cannot mentally separate the two anymore. They cannot imagine humans coordinating naturally without imagining somebody above them managing the process.
And maybe that is because freedom sounds beautiful until responsibility enters the room. The burden and the amount of accountability that freedom comes with scares most people than they care to admit. So instead of removing authority itself from their minds, people just keep trying to redesign it into forms that appear less abusive.