"I still don't understand people who think cryptocurrency is not fiat."

This was an unusually popular thread, thank you all for your comments.

In this thread, we examined how people think about the word, "fiat", and I figured out that in many cases people regard "governments" and "nation-states" to be the same thing. This is an interesting linguistic phenomenon - perhaps because of this, people generally have had trouble grasping the concept of governance where it does not apply to nation-states, which is where the sub-industry of corporate governance consulting finds its mettle.

Historically, the nature of the word, "govern", has nothing to do with nation-states per se, but with control systems in general. So with regards to understanding why crytocurrencies are controversial, my conclusion at this time is : people acknowledge that cryptocurrencies have governance, but they take issue with the absence of governance-by-nation-state.

Further discussion :

Two common themes from objectors to the notion that cryptocurrencies are fiat : "authority", "guns"

On to the definition of "authority", wherein, does the word imply a natural person who exerts dominance by force? Can it instead be an abstract protocol? What if it is a body of natural persons, who choose subjectivity to an abstract protocol? If the last one is accepted : it's just a self-governing decentralised organisation, subject to a credo, like any so-called religion. Even inter-national religious bodies are deemed to be authorities, one might note that some of them even happen to have guns.

I tend to say : any governance system issuing tokens, is issuing fiat; regardless of whether the governance system is manned, unmanned, centralised, decentralised, nationalised, or non-nationalised. The big linguistic hurdle in English is, "government" is customarily used to refer to "national government", whereas in general the implication is not necessary - hence by custom we refer to "non-government organisations" which are actually, "internally governed, but non-nationalised, organisations". Likewise if the global association of honest luddites issued, physical tokens bearing the mark of their god, for trade among their own kind, I would call that fiat also.

The really interesting development in the history of ideas then seems to be : it's not simply the contemporary nation-state-denominated monetary system which is being challenged, but the overarching concept of the nation-state as today's predominant "unit of governance".