Thanks for this.
“…because the process was murky, it was abused and the ownership of the country’s assets ended up in the hands of the few, giving rise to the emergence of the oligarchs and some of the worst financial inequality seen anywhere in the world.”
This is also spot on about so very many things in today’s global society.
Murky processes seem to invite bad behaviour in the first place, then serve to perpetuate abuses over the long run. If we could actually see what has been obfuscated and/or hidden from us, we would make different choices; instead, we believe all kinds of myths that we’re fed (e.g., “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain; the great and powerful Oz has spoken.”) For me this was, and remains, the real promise of distributed ledger technology: turning on the sunshine, illuminating what was once in shadow, allowing processes to be fully transparent and auditable, and making them tamper-proof—now that’s a revolution. How it happens is key, but is still not as important as the fact that the idea is already out there, in ever-wider circulation, and more and more of us know we want it: in our money, in our goods and services, and in our governance. For starters.