Nope, even wikipedia got you covered:
en.wikipedia.org
If you set socio-economic context as, say, prison, cigarettes can become money. Like it or not, it doesn't matter if there are "legitimate public institutions" backing it up or not. It matters if
people accept it as payment.
Pretty sure cryptocurrency meets "verifiable record" part, "generally accepted" is debatable for now, though in certain contexts it's probably "yes".
I don't see a significant difference between that and what I said. Sure, you can semi-arbitrarily define contexts in which crypto acts as money. There are also liminal cases where it is accepted as payment in arenas typically dealing with ordinary money. Does that mean it's generally accepted? Not at all. Not even close. It's a tiny, tiny niche at best. Any reasonable understanding of "generally accepted" would need to mean something like 'accepted by a majority of people' or something similar. I doubt 50% of people in any country (perhaps except Monaco, Macau, and various other tax havens and the like) have the faintest idea what crypto even is, despite the mainstream media coverage it's gotten in recent years.
As for legitimate public institutions, what do they do? They create frameworks allowing for people to accept and use things as payment, and ensure those frameworks are well-functioning and maintained, as well as ensure standardization within (typically) a country. Without the US treasury and all the related institutions, the USD would be utterly worthless if it existed at all, and it certainly wouldn't be the common system of payment across the US + an accepted form of payment in many other countries. So while public institutions aren't necessary for something to be money, they are pretty much necessary for something to
practically work as money at any sort of scale. As I said previously in this thread, crypto is fundamentally reliant on being exchangeable for common currencies for its value after all, so even that would utterly collapse without that institutional support.
I don't think it's unfeasible. We have this thing called "the Internet" and all the good stuff it brings to the table, one of which being the ability to vote remotely. Such ability already exists in several countries, albeit ones with high social capital and level of education. Just last year I created a "trusted profile" in my old country and got some property documents sent to me instead of being forced do travel thousands of kilometers just to get those papers. And we're talking about a country where you can see actual chickens feeding on the streets in some cities, the government is described as increasingly fundamentalist and oppressive and level of education is drastically falling each year. So the ability is already present. As for the average voter being an unwashed simpleton who can be barely trusted with not setting oneself on fire, I agree. It will require further development in many areas, but I don't believe it to be impossible.
Which brings me to the political interest in letting people participate in democracy and I can tell you immediately: there is none. You don't spend years getting to the position of power and money to let others do the same. Party programmes are changed immediately after election or just ignored, populism is rampant, and as soon as the party gets in a position of power it tries to attain control of national media and feed the unwashed masses with propaganda. It happens all the time in Europe, latest examples include Hungary and Poland where the propaganda rivals that of the North Korea.
So yes. Hard and will take a long time? Absolutely. Unfeasible? Maybe not so much in the long term.
I think you're confusing access with ability and time cost here. Could one make a system of direct democracy using the internet? Sure. Absolutely. Would it work? No. Most people simply don't have anything even resembling the time to vote on dozens of different issues every week. There's a reason elected officials have government as a full-time job and that the higher level ones have large staffs - the workload involved is immense. It would be such an overwhelming amount of work and responsibility that most people would just not do it. Ever. So it's not about people being unwashed simpletons, but about people generally wanting and needing to do other things beyond voting all day - like working for a living, having a family life, etc.
As for the developments you describe (party programmes changing after elections, rampant populism, etc.): these are symptoms of broken democracies, which means one of two things: either it was never built up properly to begin with (as is sadly the case in many previous Soviet republics, among others) or it has been systematically and intentionally deconstructed (like in the US over the past 4-5 decades, though Western Europe isn't
that far behind). And it's an easily started vicious cycle: if you break central functions of government, people stop trusting/never start trusting in the system of government, making them easy targets for populism, authoritarianism and other anti-democratic movements. You can't ultimately blame democracy for faults caused by people intentionally breaking it - that's just unreasonable. It's entirely possible to build well-functioning democratic societies with a high level of trust in public institutions, low levels of corruption, and high levels of accountability, but it takes a long time (decades at the very least), a lot of work, and a relative absence of actors hell-bent on breaking the system for their own benefit - and those are circumstances that have been exceedingly rare across the globe.
