I agree with everything in OP, and this admittedly makes me sound like a dreamer, but I think there's a good chance that computer-aided radical decentralization is going to have a major effect on these numbers in the next few years.
The possibilities of blockchain technology (and other technology inspired by it) has barely even begun to percolate through society, and in theory it allows free agents to fill roles previously only viable inside of corporations.
Can you name any businesses where radical decentralization builds important revenue?
As others have pointed out, technology seems to consolidate more than decentralize. Network effect is opposite force to decentralization. Companies like Airbnb, Uber consolidate previously small businesses under one huge company.
> Can you name any businesses where radical decentralization builds important revenue?
Well, contrary to popular belief, making large revenue isn't the only viable business model: The other viable model is to build something that greatly hurts your competition's revenue. Here, "viable" means "it survives", I don't think CARD is about making huge profits, it's about commoditizing scalable parts of a business, removing scalability as a revenue generating mechanism. (Airbnb and Uber are not CARD and I think will fail in the next 5-10 years.)
As for naming businesses: Only illegal business currently use this model, unfortunately (some parts of the online drug trade, and to some parts of the bittorrent scene.)
It's easily to be arbitrarily anonymous with something like bitcoin. The only way the government could maintain attributability for bitcoin accounts would be to put in place extremely aggressive enforcement policies that (hopefully) would not be viable.
Any references on how to accomplish this? The link above says ".. for perfect anonymity, both sender and receiver have to split every complex transaction among separate pairs of throw-away identities. But at this point, transactions stop being technically atomic, in addition to the fact that the system becomes quite complicated and heavyweight."
https://bitcoin.org/en/you-need-to-know says "Bitcoin is not anonymous .. Some effort is required to protect your privacy with Bitcoin. All Bitcoin transactions are stored publicly and permanently on the network, which means anyone can see the balance and transactions of any Bitcoin address. However, the identity of the user behind an address remains unknown until information is revealed during a purchase or in other circumstances. This is one reason why Bitcoin addresses should only be used once."
CoinJoin is a technology that can be viewed as atomic in regular usage (it's a generalized way of mixing coins.) As for complicated/heavyweight, most computer technology we use today was viewed as too complicated/heavyweight a couple decades ago.
Thanks for the pointer. Found a design thread that's been going for a year, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279249.0, but no implementations. This approach seems to have the same challenge as Tor or email encryption, i.e. convincing everyone to use it.
The possibilities of blockchain technology (and other technology inspired by it) has barely even begun to percolate through society, and in theory it allows free agents to fill roles previously only viable inside of corporations.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Rad_Decentralization/