Losers get scammed by opaque schemes. By itself that would be a perfect free market outcome. Losers would cull themselves or learn by experience.

The problem has been those who choose not to get scammed also lose because the power vacuum paradigm of politics coerces all of us to commit moral hazard by charging losses to the collective (via taxes, regulations, capital controls, expropriation, etc), whilst the oligarchs (and the corrupt riding on their coattails) behind the curtain of government surreptitiously privatize their monopolistic deleterious “profits”.

Objectivized transparency combined with decentralization has the potential to be untouchable by (at least nation-state) political power. A world government would have to form in order to attempt to regulate globalized ledgers, and even then I think the-powers-that-be (TPTB) would need a chip inside everyone’s brain to somehow extract the value from every blog post and mobile device swipe. Whether that intangible economy truly has a value is an orthogonal issue (define value?).

So it seems to some extent (at least in terms of capital in the intangible economy) those of us who don’t want to pay for the losses of those who prefer to get scammed may become enabled by this new technological paradigm.

The terms ‘fair’ and ‘just’ seem like socialist propaganda. There’s no fair and no justice in nature. Is it fair that I’m only 5'7” and Lebron James is 6’8”? Is it fair that I’m presumably more adept at math than he is?

Fair and equal would be a very, very boring world. And it would also be a non-resilient human race which might perish during extreme environmental episodes because we’d have to become carbon copies of each other as the non-meritocracy reached its natural equilibrium (which is essentially why collectivized politics ends in 50 million megadeath such as for Communism, so either nature can cull the herd in smaller diverse morsels or in large chunks, but culling can’t be avoided because it’s natural). I want unfair and inequality. I want maximum diversity. If by “fair and just” you mean no oligarchs enabled by a power vacuum, then I agree. If you mean redesigning Steem so that whales can’t game the system to reward themselves disproportionately to their proportion of the money supply, then I agree (which we both know can’t be achieved with voting rewards from a collectivized money supply pool). But the problem is that many people misinterpret that to mean something similar to the egalitarianism absurdity in the video I linked above.

I wish to help Millennials understand that if they embrace that egalitarianism nonsense, they will destroy themselves analogous to two or more individuals tying their shoelaces together and jumping into a swimming pool then they’ll both/all drown. It’s hard to get anything done when we’re constrained to be something unnatural. Nature needs diversity and free market competition in order to maximize the division-of-labor and continue its inexorable progress towards maximum entropy. The free market is not the problem facing humanity. Rather the problem is the power vacuum of politics and coercive political power. We must defeat that power vacuum so that the free market can be even more free and thus more efficient in stimulating the maximum diversity and prosperity. The Millennials are correct that there’s an inherent unfairness in the power-law distribution of fungible resources. The only possible remedy is to reduce the importance, value, and power of fungible resources! Again refer to back to my seminal writings from 2013 about the fact that knowledge production isn’t fungible unlike monetary capital:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=355212.0
http://unheresy.com/Information%20Is%20Alive.html
https://steemit.com/philosophy/@anonymint/geographical-cultural-ethos-science-is-dead-part-2
(↑ search for the links in the paragraph where I discuss Rifkin’s Zero Marginal Cost Society)

What I’m aiming for is eliminating the power vacuum paradigm so that all of us can go out and do our thing in this life without being coerced to pay for the mistakes of others. I want everyone to be free to experiment with their own lives and deal with the consequences of their own decisions. This is the only way to have a sane and responsible society. And actually I think people will be much more successful and feel much satisfied with their lives in such a meritorious system.

Quoting from my blog:

^{With such voluntary groupings instead of coercion (i.e. increased degrees-of-freedom), those groupings which are astute (and thus sustainably prosperous) will not be pulled down by the groupings of fools. Note I’m not claiming that a prosperous society (aka grouping) shouldn’t voluntarily choose have a charitable disposition.}

I want to emphasize that I don’t think we can fix society by way of political organization. Because politics is a top-down power vacuum control paradigm. I want to fix society by breaking it. Breaking it into unbounded decentralization and defection into voluntary groupings.

But your question is also about whether people will adopt a meritocracy. My insight is that if a meritocracy is defensible against the coercive power vacuum, then those who want to be prosperous and not pay their own losses, must adopt the meritocracy. IOW, if the meritocracy is defensible then it naturally grows because it’s more prosperous. Animals find their way to that which is most prosperous by way of trial-and-error (learning from experience and suffering along the way, or as analogous to the young boy such as myself who refused to learn to not touch the top of the stove until he burns his hands).

Finding those killer apps which can enable sufficient prosperity to drive adoption is one of the key challenges in front of us. Afaics Steemit emphasized get-rich-quick more than it did other modes of prosperity. Yet see I am here blogging on Steemit and not Medium. So it did enable some non-monetary prosperity that I can’t get from Medium. The motivation for me to continue to blog on Steem isn’t because I can earn a pittance from blogging. For one reason I blog on Steem because I think there’s less chance my account can be censored by some centralized authority (at least for the time being until Steem devolves into a whale clusterfuck). But afaik, Steem isn’t (yet) a juggernaut nor fulfilling an avalanche of needs.

EDIT: I wrote at Medium:

Objectivized, transparent, tamper-proof ledgers are all about bypassing the top-down corrupt, coercive monopolies on the formation of bottom-up trust circles aka networks of trust.

It was never about entirely eliminating trust. It’s about each individual being free to choose whom and what they trust. It’s about enabling more degrees-of-freedom so as to maximize the inexorable trend of maximum entropy and the maximum division-of-labor.

You apparently entirely missed the point.

We will end up looking back at you as we did Warren Buffett at the turn of the century when he predicted that the Internet was just a bubble. Now he kicks himself for not buying Amazon stock.