
Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future - alanfalcon
https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustless-crypto-paradise-is-actually-a-medieval-hellhole-c1ca122efdec?source=linkShare-134efade5062-1523216649
======
dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16774293](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16774293)

------
Slartie
I generally agree with most of the article, but sorry, this big quote here
(that the author apparently thinks of being a good punchline) is just plain
wrong:

> There is no single person in existence who had a problem they wanted to
> solve, discovered that an available blockchain solution was the best way to
> solve it, and therefore became a blockchain enthusiast.

Anyone who was trying to buy drugs/penis-pills/whatever-other-illegal-
substance online and wanted to pay in an anonymous form would disagree. Anyone
who had a bit of money in a country with restrictive international money
transfer laws and who wanted to get that money out of said country would
disagree.

For both of these groups, available blockchains provided a good solution to a
real problem. And especially in the first group, which is generally
underestimated in size I think, a lot of people genuinely got enthusiastic
about blockchains and jumped on the cryptocurrency train relatively early -
first to buy some weed or whatever, and later also to make more money out of
less money. But the problem-seeking-a-solution situation was first!

~~~
roenxi
The article is exaggerating, there must be someone who has problems that are
solved by Bitcoin.

However, one of Bitcoin's features is that it has a completely public
permanent ledger showing all transactions assigned to everyone. It is a wildly
inappropriate technology for doing illegal things or skirting the law (which
cross-country transfers outside the system could well be). It has more
downsides than cash in a duffle bag.

~~~
deft
That's exactly the issue privacy currencies like Monero and to an extent Zcash
solve.

------
nnq
Blockchain tech and the whole "trustless economy" freak me out _precisely_
because _I think they can work_... The things that emerge out of this and
scale long-term can have some really scary consequences:

(1) a working "trustless economy" makes trust and peace no longer be
requirements for a functional global economy... this opens the door to all
sorts of fucked up scenarios like financing (or betting on) wars, no longer
working for peace because it's not always required to make your economic
schemes work, no longer caring about keeping your countries economy at least
somewhat functional because you can always "pull _your_ money out" etc.

(2) a "human-less economy" enabled by smart contracts - long before autonomous
"un-owned" corporations run by AIs take over the world, they will be used for
all sorts of shady things, money laundering, toxic waste disposal by buying it
but never paying to store it etc. I can't even imagine the creativity of the
conmen and criminals that will start to play with these possibilities.

"Trustless" can work... just that it doesn't seem to lead to scenarios that
increase the mid term survival changes of the human race :|

~~~
jMyles
I think your concerns are very reasonable. However, I think that thinking them
all the way through is cause for more optimism than you're applying. For
example,

> no longer working for peace because it's not always required to make your
> economic schemes work

Is this really a possibility? Peace is always good for bounty. Everybody
everywhere wants peace. Along with justice, freedom, and love, it is one of
the most unifying characteristics of the human condition.

It is precisely those middlemen whom blockchain tech might undermine that have
seized upon these soft parts of human kind and turned perverted them.

In a world without fiat currency, I am quite confident that there will be less
money for bombs and cheap plastic nonsense. This has been a critique of fiat
currency for thousands of years, and only now does humanity have a tool to
visualize it.

And it's not hard to imagine blockchain technology replacing currency and
consumerism altogether. Of course this will take a massive social movement -
advances in the technology alone are perhaps necessary, but certainly not
sufficient.

> a "human-less economy" enabled by smart contracts - long before autonomous
> "un-owned" corporations run by AIs take over the world, they will be used
> for all sorts of shady things, money laundering, toxic waste disposal by
> buying it but never paying to store it etc.

But again, humanity has a deep desire for the verdant. The deprecation of
"easy" money, global theft, and warfare-as-the-norm - these are continuing
imperatives and are good prayers for our earth. And on long time scales, it
seems that blockchain tech tends toward, rather than away from, these things.

~~~
scribu
> And it's not hard to imagine blockchain technology replacing currency and
> consumerism altogether.

It is for me. How exactly would blockchain replace consumerism? And replace it
with what?

> The deprecation of "easy" money, global theft, and warfare-as-the-norm -
> these are continuing imperatives and are good prayers for our earth. And on
> long time scales, it seems that blockchain tech tends toward, rather than
> away from, these things.

Do you have any evidence for such a bold claim? Or at least a rational
argument for why blockchain tech would lead to such outcomes?

~~~
jMyles
> It is for me. How exactly would blockchain replace consumerism? And replace
> it with what?

Painting with broad strokes: easy money / inflationary currency policy
promotes spending over saving, right?

So, with a less inflationary currency (or ecosystem of currencies), people
will be less incentivized to spend in such a frenzied manner.

I'm not really introducing anything new here; this is the basic Austrian
critique re: price signals in the environment.

> What evidence do you have for such bold claims?

Well, I hope we can take the former as read: obviously a cryptocurrency with a
less inflationary policy will promote deprecation of each money.

As for global theft: the main infrastructure for nation-state level economic
predation is monetary policy, and then trade policy as a secondary matter.

Monetary policy may (again, in this admittedly utopian world I'm describing)
be wrested from the state by virtue of cryptocurrencies. And trade policy with
smart contracts.

As for deprecation of warfare-as-the-norm: This, at least to me, is the
logical consequence of the first two. If there is less rampant easy-money-
consumerism, and no state-level monetary or trade policies, then warfare will
increasingly be viewed as a sink of power rather than a fount.

Am I being very hopeful here? Yes, I am. But I _am_ very hopeful. I think that
in these troubled times it is a great visionary exercise to ask yourself: what
are some of the best things you can imagine happening for humanity in the next
50 years?

~~~
scribu
Thank you for ellaborating.

It seems like your argument is centered around inflation, which is a
relatively new phenomenon.

Regarding consumerism, perhaps you’re right that lack of inflation will reduce
it. But what if, after a certain point, consumerism is the main driver of
economic growth, the thing that enables all the really good stuff to develop,
such as scientific development?

Regarding warfare, before fiat currency, you could argue that some wars were
waged in order to get access to gold and silver mines. But I hope you’ll agree
that those were only a small minority.

I’m excluding violence for the purpose of simply stealing gold and silver
outright, because the equivalent can still happen in a blockchain world - just
point a gun to someone’s head and tell them to transfer all their coins to
your account.

~~~
jMyles
Well, not only inflation, but a disarming of the international corporate
state's sole franchise in trade. Smart contracts cross borders in a nearly
frictionless manner; the same cannot be said of Coca Cola or the World Bank.

------
jmeyer2k
> To understand why this is the case, let’s work from the practical to the
> theoretical. For example, let’s consider a widely-proposed use case for
> blockchain: buying an e-book with a “smart” contract. The goal of the
> blockchain is, you don’t trust an e-book vendor and they don’t trust you
> (because you’re just two individuals on the internet), but, because it’s on
> blockchain, you’ll be able to trust the transaction.

No. Nobody trusts an exchange because it's on the blockchain. The idea of a
smart contract is to decentralize high-friction transactions such as insurance
(which is essentially what Amazon or PayPal is providing). The whole point is
to not have to trust anybody to ensure a transaction is carried out, which it
does accomplish to a reasonable extent.

The author also confuses peer-to-peer trustworthiness such as making a
purchase, with trustworthiness that data or transaction executions will not be
tampered with. The blockchain backs up the latter with mining, whereas it does
not back up the former.

~~~
barbegal
Smart contracts don't even work for insurance. Smart contracts require the
insuring party to tie up capital to make sure they can satisfy the claim in
the event that a claim is made. The problem is that each insurance smart
contract may pay out large amounts but only rarely. Typical insurance policies
often have maximum payouts north of $1 million. If every insurance company had
to hold $1 million in smart coins for every insurance smart contract they
produce, they'd quickly run out of capital. And if you allow capital to be
pooled together where claims are payed out from one large pool for multiple
insurance contracts (as is used in insurance today) then you have to trust
that the insurer will have enough capital available when you want to make a
claim. In this case the smart contract element is pretty useless because it
doesn't guarantee you anything.

~~~
swiley
That's not insurance, that's just ridiculous.

An insurance smart contract should require the insuring party hold some
fraction of the payout based on the expected number of claims.

~~~
barbegal
That allows an unscrupulous insurer to use a sybil attack to create insurance
contracts with itself that it then pays out against emptying the smart
contract pot.

~~~
swiley
It's probably not possible to implement trustless insurance using smart
contracts then.

------
dis13
1\. Your bank account balance is a number in a database. There are multiple
organizations much more powerful than you that have the ability to alter that
database. Your protection against them is the legal system which is
adversarial between you and these giant organizations, and run by government
employees. If you’re fine with that, great. If you aren’t and you want to take
responsibility into your own hands, try Bitcoin.

2\. Blockchain doesn’t make it easier to distribute and process information.
Blockchain makes it harder and a lot harder. Blockchain makes it possible to
verify a set of rules going back to the genesis block. It makes it possible
for you to prove that you own the book, if someone wants to create a book
ownership registry smartcontract. I don’t disagree with this element of the
article, a lot of people are trying to use blockchain tech to “solve” problems
where it offers nothing.

But that fact that shock therapy is worse than useless doesn’t mean
electricity is a bad vision for the future. To paraphrase Drake: the real will
live forever, the fake will be destroyed.

~~~
umanwizard
You've (accidentally) pointed out why cryptocurrencies will never achieve mass
adoption: 99.9% of people are perfectly happy to trust that banks and the
government will do the right thing most of the time.

~~~
sparkie
99.9% of people where?

If you look at the world outside of your little bubble, there are over 3
billion people with little or no access to banking services that the west
takes for granted.

And do you think people in Venezuela, India, Greece, Zimbabwe, etc trust that
their governments will do the right thing?

~~~
Nursie
The unbanked are not going to be using cryptocurrency, which requires secure
access to secure computers, a whole mass of precautions, technical knowledge
etc etc. They're not going to be putting what little they have into a wildly
fluctuating asset class with poorly enumerated tax liabilities.

It's a pipedream of western cryptocurrency enthusiasts, not actually something
that's going to be useful on the ground.

~~~
sparkie
I mentioned Venezuela because people there are using Bitcoin, despite it being
illegal, despite it being volatile. Because it's objectively better than what
their government is offering.

You're really thinking short term if you think that Bitcoin can't spread to
the masses of people worldwide. A couple of decades ago, people in rural India
for example, didn't even have permanent access to a telephone in their home.
Technical advancement has now meant that masses of them have phones, and many
of them smartphones. They have completely skipped over the home telephone
thing.

They certainly are going to use cryptocurrencies if it's the simplest way to
transfer money to people, without going through the bank (which they have
limited access to). In particular, you have large numbers of people working
abroad who send money back home to their families. In the old financial system
they usually end up paying big taxes on these transfers (fees which seem small
to westerners, but which could feed entire families for a day). Just as these
people haven't rushed to get a landline to get a telephone in their home,
they're also not going to rush to get a bank account where they're restricted
on how and when they can use their money, when a better technology is now
available to them.

Volatility is and obvious side-effect when demand is changing at such
staggering volumes. Some days Bitcoin might get a million new users if it's
put out in mainstream media. These fluctuations will probably increase in the
near term, as more people become aware and being to adopt cryptocurrencies,
but long term, they will die down as adoption rate slows too. It's not going
to happen overnight, which is probably where most of the dismissive attitude
comes from. People's expectations are too high in what they want to be able to
do tomorrow with crypto, but in reality it's going to take several decades to
work its way into society.

------
gh1
A lot of valid points here, but ultimately very short sighted. Firstly, the
author does not mention many of the highly plausible use cases for trustless
and permissionless services such as replacing rent seeking P2P marketplaces
like eBay (where the advantage is cost reduction) or online Poker sites (where
the advantage is manipulation resistance). He does not mention DAOS, where
strangers can trustlessly enter into contractual obligation to create e.g. a
crowdsourced Venture fund. He does not mention the potential to provide
financial services to the 2 billion unbanked people in the world. He does not
see the potential for innovative and completely new financial products coming
out because of the permissionless nature of public blockchains.

The use cases that he sites include buying an e-book using a smart contract or
its use in the supply chain or voting. The e-book example is slightly
misguided, because this is not an use case where decentralization provides
much value. So the entire discussion about auditing smart contracts is rather
unnecessary. But it is nonetheless an important objection that may become
important in DAOs. But it's short sighted to think that this problem won't be
solved. Some companies are already starting to tackle the smart contract to
natural language translations (e.g. Iolite).

Supply chain is yet another use case where it is unclear whether blockchains
will add value. Perhaps cost saving. But note that the blockchains used in
supply chains will most likely be private, therefore permissioned. It's unfair
to put private and public blockchains in the same basket, because they are
very different beasts.

Finally the use case of voting. The author thinks that whoever is in power
might distribute a few additional addresses to their cronies to manipulate the
system. He is missing the point that all data is public in public blockchains.
So anyone can audit the voting results later if they want and discover that
those addresses do not belong to any real people (assuming there is a KYC type
identification system built-in). Voting is an use case where blockchains are
sorely required. All we need is for the knowledge to reach public
consciousness and for the people to tell their governments that they want it.

~~~
acdha
> the author does not mention many of the highly plausible use cases for
> trustless and permissionless services such as replacing rent seeking P2P
> marketplaces like eBay (where the advantage is cost reduction) or online
> Poker sites (where the advantage is manipulation resistance).

Both of those claims are severely in need of support before you can attack the
author for not mentioning them. eBay doesn’t cost what it does because there’s
no other way to send money online – it’s things like discovery, fraud
protection, etc. which are necessary either way. It’s similarly non-obvious
how magic blockchain pixie dust could address the challenges which online
gambling actually has.

~~~
gh1
You are right. Discovery, fraud protection and many other functions need to be
there either way. When I say cost reduction, I mean getting rid of any
additional premiums which eBay (or any corporation for that matter) levies
because of their strong position in the market.

As for the problems of online poker, the Virtue Poker whitepaper is a good
starting point about why blockchain is indeed that magic pixie dust[0]

[0][https://virtue.poker/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Virtue-
Poker...](https://virtue.poker/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Virtue-Poker-White-
Paper-0.9.pdf)

------
Geee
Here's a great list of blockchain uses from Disney - most of these are NOT a
bad vision for the future [https://dragonchain.github.io/blockchain-use-
cases](https://dragonchain.github.io/blockchain-use-cases)

------
laktek
As someone born and lived in a 3rd world country for a better part of my life,
I believe Blockchain solves a very real problem. That's equal participation in
internet economy irrespective of someone's geographic location.

It was thanks to the internet I realized I can also contribute to the world
(by creating something people want & writing about something others want to
learn). However, when it came to making a living out of that there weren't
many options. One of the prime motives for me to move out of Sri Lanka was it
will be way easier for me to accept payments online.

PayPal is still not available in Sri Lanka, even after repeated attempts to
convince Central Banks and governments [1]. Also, recently Stripe blocked a
payment from one of my customers due to high risk profile. Reason? He used a
US issued debit card from Nigeria. I reached out to the person, turns out he
was a passionate young entrepreneur who was trying to build a really
interesting business. But his geographic location becomes a resistance in a
medium it shouldn't.

For me, Blockchain( and Cryptocurrencies) is a reframing of the trust model
from heuristics such as geographic location to verifiable algorithms. The
Internet protocols enabled us to exchange code, art & virtual goods without
geographic boundaries. Then why not money?

[1] [https://www.change.org/p/enable-receiving-money-to-sri-
lanka...](https://www.change.org/p/enable-receiving-money-to-sri-lanka-
through-paypal)

------
joeblow9999
Smart contracts rely on Block chain but Block chain is not smart contracts

~~~
DonbunEf7
Smart contracts rely on a trusted ledger. The original smart-contract
discussions in the 90s were in the context of a contract between various users
in virtual open-world games, enforced by the trusted game server. This setting
also meant that many of the lame parts of EVM, like the inability to represent
capabilities or to protect cryptographic secrets, were supplanted by the game
server's encapsulated backend logic and database.

Blockchains and smart contracts don't have to be related at all.

------
devteambravo
The whole Blockchain debacle feels like MLM/pyramid-like to me. The interested
parties are in too deep.

------
platz
> If someone comes to you with “the mango-pickers don’t like doing data entry"
> then “let’s create a very long sequence of small files, each one containing
> a hash of the previous file”, _is a nonsense answer_

> “What if everyone keeps their records in a tamper-proof repository not owned
> by anyone?”

Exactly, "What if everyone keeps their records in a tamper-proof repository
not owned by anyone?” is a re-framing of what blockchain does in use-case
terms, (as opposed to technical terms) which makes it clear if you try to
apply it to real use cases, that doesn't really solve anyone's problems

------
jwatte
A fully public, fully transparent, immutable ledger is "useless?"

Only if you don't believe in accountability and transparency.

What with modern voice and face morphing technology, I'd expect major news
organizations to start signing their releases onto a block chain to allow us
to spot mutations.

Currency is just one potential use case of block chains; there are many
others.

------
SemiTom
There are opportunities to be had but there is a fair amount of hype as well.
[https://semiengineering.com/blockchain-hype-reality-and-
oppo...](https://semiengineering.com/blockchain-hype-reality-and-
opportunities/)

------
ericb
The impossible problem of digital scarcity is finally solved, but it will have
no practical uses.

------
doctorless
What a load of crap. Normally I feel more inclined to give thoughtful dialogue
in response to critique, but this article was so ill-conceived in argument
that the author had to narrowly define blockchain and it’s uses to make his
point, and then went as far as to claim nobody has a real use case that only
blockchain can solve. How incredibly naive, and so willing to discard any
potential idea (despite actual, proven use cases). His privilege shows too —
to argue that a war torn region can’t use technology. Has he seen how
cellphones have become the de facto credit card in parts of Africa which are
too remote for banking infrastructure? Articles like these read like NoSQL
naysayers when it first broke out into the developer ecosystem. It’s easy to
be a critic.

~~~
hyprCoin
Engineers are trained to look critically at proposed solutions. It's much
harder to imagine where the future lays. I personally see crypto as just
another extension of software eating the world.

------
arisAlexis
there is so much hate towards this I am getting very positive.

~~~
ThrowMeDown01
That's a non sequitur if I ever heard one.

------
hyprCoin
This is a good example of why you should not start your research into a
nascent space with a conclusion.

------
thinkloop
Weak old arguments that are easily refutable:

> Venmo is a free service to transfer dollars, and bitcoin transfers are not
> free.

Credit cards, payment gateways et al, are not free, they just obfuscate costs
that are eventually passed back to consumers - when you include fraud it is
estimated that society pays a hidden 5% tax on all goods and services just for
payment processing.

> no single person in existence who had a problem they wanted to solve

Illicit purchases at minimum? Silk Road, etc.? Whether this is good or not, no
need to think of other examples, the statement is simply not true.

> but once the vendor has your money they don’t have any incentive to deliver

There are many interesting solutions to this like automatic escrow,
reputation, mutual burn, etc. Additionally using a trust-based system for
small meaningless purchases while storing and transacting your actual wealth
in crypto is not incompatible with the goals and vision of the space.

> Auditing software is hard! The most-heavily scrutinized smart contract in
> history had a small bug that nobody noticed

Sure is, yet the world runs on software now, it's doable. Additionally of
course the contract was the most heavily scrutinized, it was one of the first
ever.

> yet is your Afghan villager going to download the blockchain from a
> broadcast node and decrypt the Merkle root from his Linux command line to
> independently verify that his vote has been counted

An afghan villager (or even a sophisticated engineer in the valley) isn't
going to read and check every line of code of all software ever written, and
will end up trusting to some degree - but that's very different than having to
trust every transaction, every build, and having to ask for permission for
every use of the system. I didn't check the linux code, but I still trust it
much more than a closed source alternative. There are degrees of trust,
nothing is absolute, and here it is minimized. And if you somehow don't trust,
then you are free to verify, you have the choice. This is valuable.

> These sound like stupid examples

Agreed

> in less than a decade, three successive top bitcoin exchanges have been
> hacked, another is accused of insider trading, the demonstration-project DAO
> smart contract got drained, crypto price swings are ten times

What does insider trading have to do with blockchain technology? What do
hacked exchanges have to do with blockchain? What do price swings have to do
with blockchain? Bitcoin itself has never been hacked. This is fud nonsense.

> A person who sprayed pesticides on a mango can still enter onto a blockchain
> system that the mangoes were organic.

Yes and we can trace it with certainty and punish the infringer who had to
sign their name - rather than have the organization invent confusion and doubt
until everyone forgets and moves on.

> Projects based on the elimination of trust have failed to capture customers’
> interest because trust is actually so damn valuable

Trust is fine to grease the wheels, maybe the last mile will be trust-related,
but having the underlying final infrastructure not reliant on the good graces
of others when push comes to shove is valuable.

------
jMyles
The criticisms of blockchain tech have become so incoherent that there may be
cause for confidence again. Full circle!

> There is no single person in existence who had a problem they wanted to
> solve, discovered that an available blockchain solution was the best way to
> solve it, and therefore became a blockchain enthusiast.

It's amazing to me that this person finished this sentence and didn't, in the
time it took to type it, realize how flatly wrong it is. Every corner of the
USA, online and otherwise, has satisfied customers who were able to purchase
psychoactive compounds online despite the prohibition against them. This is a
wonderful application of blockchain tech and, as a solution, has produced many
enthusiasts.

Moreover, society benefits generally from drug prohibition being undermined,
and this too has produced more indirect enthusiasts.

However, this phenomenon serves to show the blockchain's fitness, not the
limits of its reach.

Many of us spend our days working on blockchain tech that is far more mundane
and unlikely to grab headlines, but also fits more cleanly into current legal
and political structures. What has the author to say of that?

> The number of retailers accepting cryptocurrency as a form of payment is
> declining, and its biggest corporate boosters like IBM, NASDAQ, Fidelity,
> Swift and Walmart have gone long on press but short on actual rollout.

Borrowing from the previous confused critique: are any blockchain enthusiasts
(regardless of their original fount of enthusiasm) also enthusiasts for these
giant, largely outdated companies? The fact that these companies have tried
and failed to integrate blockchain tech is, in the minds of most enthusiasts,
a positive sign, not a negative one.

> Hm. Perhaps you are very skilled at writing software. When the novelist
> proposes the smart contract, you take an hour or two to make sure that the
> contract will withdraw only an amount of money equal to the agreed-upon
> price, and that the book — rather than some other file, or nothing at all —
> will actually arrive.

Not a critique of blockchain tech, but of open source software generally. And
a bad one.

> “Keep your voting records in a tamper-proof repository not owned by anyone”
> sounds right — yet is your Afghan villager going to download the blockchain
> from a broadcast node and decrypt the Merkle root from his Linux command
> line to independently verify that his vote has been counted?

I'll note the racist overtones here without further comment.

I will, however, point out that no blockchain voting system has ever been
proposed with such a UI.

> These sound like stupid examples — novelists and villagers hiring
> e-bodyguard hackers to protect them from malicious customers and nonprofits
> whose clever smart-contracts might steal their money and votes??

Yes, they sound like stupid examples. They are stupid examples, designed
precisely for use as a strawmen in this stupid essay.

> A person who sprayed pesticides on a mango can still enter onto a blockchain
> system that the mangoes were organic. A corrupt government can create a
> blockchain system to count the votes and just allocate an extra million
> addresses to their cronies. An investment fund whose charter is written in
> software can still misallocate funds.

I have no idea what point the author is making now. Can anyone clarify?

> The contract still works, but the fact that the promise is written in
> auditable software rather than government-enforced English makes it less
> transparent, not more transparent.

This has not been history's experience with government-enforced English. By
ignoring this fact, the author allows himself to indulge in arguments that
don't make sense in order to make points that don't matter. Such as...

> Eight hundred years ago in Europe — with weak governments unable to enforce
> laws and trusted counterparties few, fragile and far between — theft was
> rampant, safe banking was a fantasy, and personal security was at the point
> of the sword. This is what Somalia looks like now, and also, what it looks
> like to transact on the blockchain in the ideal scenario.

...and...

> Silk Road, a cryptocurrency-driven online drug bazaar. The key to Silk Road
> wasn’t the bitcoins (that was just to evade government detection), it was
> the reputation scores that allowed people to trust criminals.

But I think the author's most dangerous fallacy is actually his apparent fear
that systems of "alternate" trust or consensus somehow threaten to push out
systems in which trust is currently serving well. For example:

> Projects based on the elimination of trust have failed to capture customers’
> interest because trust is actually so damn valuable. A lawless and
> mistrustful world where self-interest is the only principle and paranoia is
> the only source of safety is a not a paradise but a crypto-medieval
> hellhole.

I have met and worked with dozens of movers-and-shakers in blockchain tech,
and I have never, ever met anyone who's politics are fairly characterized as
advocating "A lawless and mistrustful world where self-interest is the only
principle and paranoia is the only source of safety."

Quite the contrary: I think that there's a realization that small batches of
community cooperation work quite well, and that trustless technology has the
capacity to out-compete the violent regimes that threaten it, such as drug
prohibition, fiat currency, and environmental recklessness.

The author concludes with the only paragraph in his essay which is sensible
and sober:

> As a society, and as technologists and entrepreneurs in particular, we’re
> going to have to get good at cooperating — at building trust, and, at being
> trustworthy. Instead of directing resources to the elimination of trust, we
> should direct our resources to the creation of trust—whether we use a long
> series of sequentially hashed files as our storage medium or not.

On these points, we agree. However, these points are not supported by the rest
of the author's essay.

Clear thinking and reasonableness need to be the orders of the day.
Cooperation and compassion need to be the acts of our daily drive. And, so far
as I can tell - the many scams and holdovers from yesterday's economy not
withstanding - blockchain tech is full of these things.

We all want peace. We all want freedom. And yes, we all want trust and strong
communities. The idea that blockchain tech is a threat to these things is
confusion at best, fear-mongering at worst.

