[wils1245]

I don't see how a decentralized cryptocurrency could possibly regulate itself efficiently. How would you go about banning even the most basic manipulations?

Take wash trading. How can you possibly ban wash trading? To do this you need to verify that identity of seller X != identity of seller Y. Even dismissing currencies that actively prohibit this verification (Monero), how do you possibly accomplish this in a decentralized currency?

Even without the identities issue, who is looking at bitcoin governance and thinking that deciding protocol changes with a decentralized electoral system is going to produce anything but gamesmanship and paralysis. Promising newcomer coins Abc will have the same issues once there's real money at stake.

And yes. Manipulation exist in the traditional monetary system. However, regulations raise the cost of manipulation to prohibitively high levels for most people. And yes, congress is dysfunctional. But underneath the chaos we have a set of fairly well established rules, and changing those rules didn't require forking the currency.

The problems with our economic system are political, not technological. What crypto brings to money is superfluous technology and even worse politics than we already have.