In the candy jar experiment, we fill a glass jar with a lot of candies or pebbles or anything that would be difficult to guess the number of by only looking. None of us is super accurate guessing how many candies are in the jar, but if we take the median of all our guesses, it’s impressively accurate. This candy jar experiment as been replicated with variants many many times, and the bigger the number of participants, the more accurate the guess gets.
While this proves the wisdom of the crowd, it only works if everybody chooses freely. And one of the ways people won’t guess freely is peer pressure. We are guessing the value of things all the time. By buying and selling, either stuff or our time in a job, we’re broadcasting to each other how much we value what we have and what we want.
Of course if we don’t even have permission to guess freely, it’s even worse. Monetary restrictions all over the world prove that again and again.
Only truly decentralized forms of money can look resistant to censorship, and only private forms of money can be truly resistant to censorship. A private, decentralized money is necessary for our collective wisdom to reach its potential.