Is this really any different than your ability to buy things in-practice gated nigh exclusively by MasterCard and Visa?
It sounds less like a dystopia and more like the tech sector and payment processors have been collectively itching to escape the current banking system.
If there is one thing I learnt is that using a techno-bubble elite speech you can cover up a large number of loopholes, fraud schemes, ... Regulators and prosecutors know payment processors extremely well; once you start using another language they're partially unable to compute.
In this sense the choice of initial validators alarms me. Trust is something that must be earned: it's different because I know the evils of the system I'm using, I don't know the evils of this system and it might be worse.
...worse...
> In light of this, Facebook aims for the project to be fully “permissionless” — rather than permissioned, where membership of the Association is only granted to a select few —after five years and transition to a proof of stake network.
"me looking at the GitHub repository": there's a lot of technical debt that needs to be addressed, where is the design for this stuff? A "we'll fix it" is not enough, certain issues require a lot more work than code development.
The oligarchic model offers considerable savings (less computational and energy waste). It's understandable why it's tempting.
But I think that the consensus protocol of Stellar looks a lot more like a sweet spot: it has different levels of participation to the network, each of which gives different incentives, requirements and use cases.
