[jonnycat]

I think there's a certain trap that many software engineer & technical types fall into with crypto. Crypto & blockchain are often portrayed as technically superior solutions to many problems, especially by non-technical people. Many of these problems, upon technical scrutiny, are actually not better with crypto: for most crypto use-cases, one could build a more efficient, simpler & "technically superior" solution using centralized services like, I don't know - a Postgres database and a REST API. In this way, a lot of technical people see crypto as a solution in search of a problem.

But the interesting thing about crypto is - in my opinion - not technical: it's social, and economical. Due to the decentralization, it changes the kinds of systems & solutions that are socially and economically viable. When I say "economical", I don't mean that the solutions are necessarily cheaper in the dollar sense, but in the sense that it changes which parties can participate in and profit from those systems. DeFi, for example, lets individuals participate in, and benefit from, transactions that used to only be provided by traditional banks.

So while there are many technical types that do see this side of crypto, there are many for whom their deeper technical understanding is a bit of a liability on the topic.

[redka]

I agree with you about the importance of the social and economic ramifications - after all, that's the main idea behind a lot of cryptocurrencies, conceptually. I guess you might be right though that this isn't obvious or some perhaps not think of it as an important objective. I'm not sure about the trap though - or maybe I think of it differently - because what you're describing I associate only with some form of business bastardization of the idea where people are led to believe false things without ever actually grasping the underlying concepts. In which case, sure, there's your postgres or your web panel or whatever. But if you know any better you'll realize that if you *can* build something without requiring blockchain or other such systems then you're simply doing something else entirely and it might be completely unrelated. The whole point is that you can't just host an application with Postgres backend or create anything that is more efficient or "technically superior" (not easily, anyway) without compromising the uncompromisable which is some crucial property of the system, eg. decentralization, permisionlessness. I can easily conjure up "better" solutions to an infinite pool of problems if I can simply reject the requirements.