"Whoever controls the data centre exercises political and economic control over communications. It’s difficult to see how we can counteract these recentralising tendencies in order to build a common core infrastructure... barriers include the age-old problem of scaling distributed forms of organisation beyond the local"
It is important to note that a ledger has to be owned and someone had to be trusted to maintain the ledger with integrity. A ledger owner has the power to move money between accounts, to inspect, edit, delete, deny and crucially, siphon off transaction fees (or any charges).
Many thinkers believe that certain types of infrastructure should be excluded from the realm of competition because the duplication of those services creates huge complexities and inefficiencies.
Those services, they argue, should be run by the state. But this reasoning went to the wall in the ongoing orgy of privatisation started in the 1980s.
The notion of rails reminds Englishmen of the British Rail, a natural monopoly owned by the government which was privatised by ruling ideologues in the 1990s. There were price rises, safety concerns, large profits, and even now station staff can often find better prices than the computerised booking system.
But I would point out that even in the midst of this farce, the rails were still managed by one company, Railtrack.
I know of no Western government which owns its payment rails outside the postal service. This critical infrastructure is almost all owned by private corporations.
This ‘natural’ cartel would have us believe that the only way to move ‘money’ is to own or rent the rails from payer to payee.
Many small, specialist and startup payments companies with no rails of their own pay to piggy-back on the rails of one of these corporations because building another set of rails would be prohibitively expensive.
The Islamic system of Hawala takes a different approach. Instead of infrastructure to guarantee the system integrity, hawala relies on trust and the personal reputations of the agents at either end.
This has the unfortunate consequence of avoiding any rails, transaction charges and surveillance, which has put this ancient low-tech system on the wrong side of post 9/11 Anti-Money-Laundering laws dictated to the world by the US Banking System jealous of our privacy.
Hawala is an informal value transfer system based on the performance and honour of a huge network of money brokers, operating outside of traditional banking and remittance systems - wikipedia 