I feel blockchains are an attempt to engineer away what’s fundamentally a social issue rather than a technological one. It’s not really a complicated problem it’s just a stubborn one: wealth and therefore power are concentrated among far too few people so lots of people (often with good reason) distrust the power structures this small stratum of society has put up and called ‘normal’. That’s what people really want to do with cryptocurrencies for the most part, they correctly identity there’s a great big dragon hoarding most of the wealth and they want to slay that dragon and replace it with themselves. The question they really need to be asking is how we can avoid the dragons to begin with, who told us they were necessary to begin with?

If not for the slow burning fuse lit in the 1980s and detonated in 2008 I doubt the hilariously inefficient bitcoin would ever have risen to prominence in the way it did. The problem bitcoin is trying to solve is far better solved politically and by actively designing systems that oppose the harmful concentration of power instead of encouraging it or treating it as some kind of positive social value. If it’s genuinely easier to imagine replacing how something as fundamental as currency works than it is to imagine anti-oligarch political reform then we’re truly fucked anyway. The problems with bitcoin mirror the problems with society at large.