After the FBI shut down Silk Road you couldn’t even buy drugs with it anymore. In practice you couldn’t do anything with your Bitcoin but bet on it,
For years dudes were going around asking vendors if they could slap a Bitcoin sticker onto the back of the cash register, because the optics of making it look like a place takes Bitcoin was cheaper and easier than actually using Bitcoin as a currency. We have an entire decade of credulous articles about how Venezuela and Chile are on the verge of switching entirely to crypto, based entirely on the claim of two trust fund dudes from San Bernardino.
They don’t understand anything about the ecosystems they’re trying to disrupt, they only know that these are things that can be conceptualized as valuable and assume that because they understand one very complicated thing, programming with cryptography, that all other complicated things must be lesser in complexity and naturally lower in the hierarchy of reality
The assumption that mastering one domain of complexity (e.g., cryptography) grants authority over all others misses the core insight of ecology-of-technology: that embodied reality and its systems have their own irreducible complexity that resists abstraction.Standard applications are typically things like activity logs, which is conceptually all a blockchain really is: a giant log of transactions. The hitch is that it’s decentralized, with elective participants hosting a complete copy of the entire log, and this is where the second component comes in, the consensus mechanism. All validating participants, called nodes, have a complete copy of the database, and no one copy is considered to be the authoritative copy.
Rather than preventing these actual common types of fraud, cryptocurrency has made them absurdly easy, and the main reason why cryptocurrency needs to be so resistant to man-in-the-middle attacks is because the decentralized nature of the network otherwise makes them acutely vulnerable to those attacks. What this all kinda means is that blockchains are all pretty bad at doing most of the things they’re trying to do, and a lot of the innovations in blockchains are attempts at solving problems that blockchains introduced.
