[asymmetric]

It's precisely the application of market economics to fields of technology, communication and society that previously were mostly voluntaristic that is one of the main opportunities for blockchains (whether that's a good thing or not is an interesting discussion that I wish were had more often).

Think of the incentivization layer built into something like Filecoin vs the voluntaristic approach of Freenet.

Which leads us back to your point:

> Because no one wants to put the effort in to dealing with running an email service, we allow Google, Facebook etc. to run them for us.

Because until now, you'd have to do it for free.

[wdewind]

> It's precisely the application of market economics to fields of technology, communication and society that previously were mostly voluntaristic that is one of the main opportunities for blockchains

We don't actually let markets make decisions for the big stuff. Take banking: in fact by a lot of measures it's the most highly regulated industry, and most of the fundamentals (like the interest rates) are not set via markets, but via elected (or sometimes not) officials. We don't actually want market economics to run the vast majority of our systems, which is why we've never built frameworks for it before, not because it's particularly complicated.

> Because until now, you'd have to do it for free.

Why wont specialization of labor take over again, and make it so crypto just turns into a different set of centralized players running the infrastructure with a ton of consumers? What happens when it turns out the vast majority of people don't actually want to be involved in running their own banking infrastructure?

> (whether that's a good thing or not is an interesting discussion that I wish were had more often).

Totally agree, upvoted :)

[asymmetric]

> We don't actually let markets make decisions for the big stuff

I agree with you on this point and it's what scares me the most about the whole blockchain "revolution".

If you look at the people who actually started it though, it was mostly anarcho-capitalists/rightwing libertarians, so that isn't surprising.

> Why wont specialization of labor take over again

That could happen. But what could also happen is that people start relying less exclusively on one relatively massive source of income, and instead start relying on several, parallel smaller ones.

I think that's already the case in non-Western parts of the world, and one of the reasons why it hasn't taken place (at least in Europe) is regulation - think of how you can't just sell food on the side of the road in Paris, which you can do in, e.g. Bangkok.