[gfodor]

The value is that the blockchains (or analogous tech) maximize durability and odds of societal consensus across time and space. For example, I would put higher odds on the Ethereum blockchain still existing and being citable in a century or two than most centralized authorities today. (These may be low odds in absolute terms, but in relative terms I think the Ethereum chain wins.)

[woodruffw]

I can only speak for myself, but I do not feel any particular predilection towards "social consensus" when I'm told that a think has cryptocurrencies mixed into it. If anything, it's a negative signal that tells me that someone has undisclosed financial interests in whatever they're trying to tell me about.

[gfodor]

Sure, the argument made by crypto people is that is a transitional condition and in a few decades society at large will in general consider information on blockchains (or their descendants) as authoritative in many situations.

[woodruffw]

Sure, I can understand the vision. I guess the more salient "why?" question is the one that still feels lacking to me. Current easy money aside, it's not clear why society as a whole would be willing to cast aside the last 250 years of physical ownership and financial infrastructure in exchange for digital ownership(?) and immutable ledgers with irrecoverable error conditions.

[gfodor]

Possibly last man standing phenomenon after a few decades of turmoil unwinding present day nation states.

[Nasrudith]

Sounds like the same fallacy as preppers getting ripped off buying Krugerrands at a premium to keep value safe after a complete collapse of all civilization. When it is like putting platforms on the boughs of a tree to stay safe when the trunk is cut and felled. It fundamentally misunderstands the order of dependencies.

[gfodor]

I think that’s actually it’s own fallacy: presuming that one can predict the dependencies and survivorship of various elements of society in a scenario where one or two larger ones go through a disruptive transition. This is a contradiction in many cases, because if you could know how such a disruption was actually going to play out, it would be unlikely to actually happen. If our kids are growing up in a world that is fundamentally different than ours in terms of sovereignty, it is very hard to know what the side effects of that transition will be.

You’re presuming a scenario where the structure of government changes is the same as a civilizational collapse. That’s not a given.

[roywiggins]

Okay, Ethereum is still around, but all it says is that in 2023 you bought a string of digits that referred to a special hat in Fortnite. But it's 2040 now and the special hat has linkrotted away because Fortnite got taken over by Zuckerberg.

[gfodor]

It’s hard to say if the link rot will be a problem. Not to mention, many of these ownership transactions won’t be links. The point is being able to agree on something, not have access to the underlying. The latter is a somewhat orthogonal concern. No matter what Zuck does, it won’t be possible for people to deny who owned the hat, regardless of if the underlying bits of the hat have gone away. And of course, for the things that people actually care about, these bits will be preserved, or over time the ownership will be understood to relate to new, probably better bits.