Glad to see you’re taking the time to go through this in detail.

1. I was not referring to a reputation “ score”, more the concept of reputation in general. As you know in Bitcoin if I interact with an account and they don’t like what I have done I can just never use that account again. In this way, no accounts have any reputation as they can be ditched at any time. With this kind of architecture at the very foundation, it’s very difficult for anyone to build a real reputation system on top of Bitcoin with the advantages that reputation systems come with.

Yes, transactions have cryptographic accountability to the account that sent them. But if the account that sent them can be discarded and a new account created whenever a person wants, then there is no social accountability — http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/social-accountability.html

Let’s say a Bitcoin account hacks another account’s Bitcoin script. Despite knowing the account that made the attack, the attacker still gets the stolen money and can still continue to use Bitcoin however he/she wishes. That is the kind of lack of reputation and accountability that I am speaking of.

2. I totally agree with you and think that both POW and POS are equally lacking in the ability to support any non-financial incentives. I was not promoting POS, more warning people that it may not be a solution.

3. Yes I can always trust that the network will be available and my transaction will be accepted if I pay enough.

I am referring to a different type of trust: trust that the other person that I am transacting with will behave ethically /respectfully in our real-world interaction.

Take the case that I want to purchase a car from my colleague. We already trust each other somewhat and I send him the money for the car. Unfortunately though, this person lied to me, and tells me he will not give me the car. If the money was sent through the fiat system I would have additional trust that the regulation would be able to recognize my transaction and prosecute this person and maybe even force the money to be returned. If the money was sent through Bitcoin then this extra trust doesn’t exist.

4. The Bitcoin soft forks are not an example of self-regulation to fix problems, they are more like of collaborative improvement agreements to fix issues in a limited Bitcoin-main-concept-has-no-problems and code-is-law philosophy that keeps Bitcoin from changing to adapt to a mainstream userbase.

There are many attacks and errors that happened on Bitcoin: phishing attacks, lost keys and hacked contracts. None of these are recognized by the system as problems yet all of the people involved lose money forever. Even worse is that the system is not able to regulate and kick out any of the people that made these attacks, they stay in the system and continue to attack others till the end of time or till they get bored. Bitcoin has no ability to deal with this kind of self-regulation, while in the fiat system there are many systems that will recover stolen funds, recover people’s accounts if they lose their bank cards and prosecute people that attack others.

I currently see the cryptocurrency and current fiat/state nation systems as two very different approaches with different characteristics. Both have major weaknesses and major advantages. While the current system has huge problems, there is a lot of good reason why it is the way it is (and bad reasons). That level of wisdom has not yet been collected in the cryptocurrency system. The philosophy that Bitcoin hardly needs to change is going to make it very difficult for it to adapt to society’s evolution.

5. “are going to ensure that the end experience ends up being seamless” having been in this space now for 5 years I have lost confidence in promises and do not share your optimism.

7. The codebase is upgraded and the node software improves, but the protocol — the rules of engagement — never changes. This is what is important to be able to change, to be able to fix the rules when they are broken or improve them if that is a benefit to the users. Ask any mainstream software company to build a product that they can’t change once they launch. Ask any politician or anybody who’s ever collaborated with other people if they could do so without being able to change the way they work after they start. Look at history, and see that to be able to adapt to society’s needs, the rules need to be able to change as well.

The current coronavirus situation is an excellent example of this. Imagine if governments did not have the ability to change their policies to [try] manage the situation. What would we have done then? Who would step up to tackle this properly?

Adaption is at the heart of all mainstream software project philosophy (think “agile”) and needs recognition within blockchain technologies as well if they are to survive the evolution of society.

I recently wrote an updated technical article about upgradable Ethereum smart contracts, and I’m very involved in the EOSIO blockchain software ecosystem (not to be confused to mean the EOS blockchain — see this article), in part, due to its upgradable architecture. These are the kind of technologies that lay the technical foundation for people to write adaptive blockchain applications and are being adopted across the industry. While these technologies allow for easier upgradeability at a technical level, the political forces that govern these upgrades still have a lot of maturing to do.