You need legal systems to enforce trust in societies, not code. Otherwise you'll end up with endless $10 wrench attacks until we all agree to let someone else hold our personal wealth for us in a secure, easy-to-access place. We might call it a bank.
The end state of crypto is always just a nightmarish dystopia. Wealth isn't created by hoarding digital currency, it's created by productivity. People just think they found a shortcut, but it's not the first (or last) time humans will learn this lesson.
I call blockchain an instantiation of Bostrom's Paperclip Maximizer running on a hybrid human-machine topology.
We are burning through scarce fuel in amounts sufficient to power a small developed nation in order to reverse engineer... one way hashcodes! Literally that is even less value than turning matter into paperclips.
If gold loses its speculative value, you still have a very heavy, extremely conductive, corrosion resistant, malleable metal with substantial cultural importance.
When crypto collapses, you have literally nothing. It is supported entirely and exclusively by its value to speculators who only buy so that they can resell for profit and never intend to use it.
Well, not literally nothing. You have all that lovely carbon you burned to generate meaningless hashes polluting your biosphere for the next century. That part stays around long after crypto collapses.
The “$10 wrench attack” isn’t an argument against crypto—it’s an argument against human vulnerability.
By that logic, banks don’t work either, since people get kidnapped and forced to drain accounts. The difference is that with crypto, you can design custody systems (multi-sig, social recovery, hardware wallets, decentralized custody) that make such attacks far less effective than just targeting a centralized bank vault or insider.
As for the “end state” being dystopian, history shows centralized finance has already produced dystopias: hyperinflations, banking crises, mass surveillance, de-banking of political opponents, and global inequality enabled by monetary monopolies. Crypto doesn’t claim to magically create productivity—it creates an alternative infrastructure where value can be exchanged without gatekeepers. Productivity and crypto aren’t at odds: blockchains enable new forms of coordination, ownership, and global markets that can expand productive potential.
People now have the option of choosing between institutional trust and cryptographic trust—or even blending them. Dismissing crypto as doomed to dystopia ignores why it exists: because our current systems already fail millions every day.
What they are saying is that we have a system that evolved over time to address real world concerns. You are designing defenses to attacks that may or not be useful, but no one has been able to design past criminals and this is evident because if we could there would be no criminality.
> Dismissing crypto as doomed to dystopia ignores why it exists: because our current systems already fail millions every day.
This only makes sense if crypto solves the problems that current systems fail at. This have not been shown to be the case despite many years of attempts.
You need legal systems to enforce trust in societies, not code. Otherwise you'll end up with endless $10 wrench attacks until we all agree to let someone else hold our personal wealth for us in a secure, easy-to-access place. We might call it a bank.
The end state of crypto is always just a nightmarish dystopia. Wealth isn't created by hoarding digital currency, it's created by productivity. People just think they found a shortcut, but it's not the first (or last) time humans will learn this lesson.