[paulgb]

> In the sense that: its kind of true, in that they accomplish a similar goal of sending a document from one person to another over wire, but it discounts as irrelevant the most critical, foundational thrust of why this new technology is interesting. For email: that it is all-digital. For blockchain: that it is decentralized.

This confuses the real-world benefit with the means of achieving that benefit. The benefit of email wasn't that it is digital, but that it is near-instant, accessible from anywhere, etc. It's able to do those things because it's digital, but the fact that it's digital is an implementation detail, not the thing driving people to use it.

It seems the issue facing blockchain is that it's stuck on the “it's decentralized” message without having a good story for why that matters (and matters enough to be worth the other trade-offs) to something like file storage or an ISP.