We've had tens of thousands of competent software engineers working on this for the last 5 years and no one came up with anything more than gambling in a closed zero sum ecosystem.
+1...though Edison's old quote about genius being 1% inspiration (concept), 99% perspiration (implementation) immediately comes to mind.
From a longer-term point of view...the ways in which blockchains & crypto are going wrong look amazingly similar to things which kinda regularly went wrong, ~1.5 centuries ago, with under-regulated brick & mortar banks, securities, & such. "Backed by real gold in the vaults!" didn't mean much, when there were few checks that said gold was really there (some groups of banks had only enough gold - collectively - to pass an inspection at one of them), paper "gold-backed" notes & securities could be printed with only the backing of other such pieces of paper "backed by someone's gold, somewhere, supposedly...", etc., etc.
this reminds me a bit of 'not real communism' or 'not really free market.'
The basic concept was that mathematical limits made crypto fundamentally anti-inflationary: you can't debase the currency by minting more of it in response to exigent circumstances (you could wonder whether some inflation should exist to account for population growth and the demand that goes with it, but that kinda presumes universal adoption),
The problem was that while the minting of a cryptocurrency can be mathematically self-regulating, there's no barrier to just setting up more cryptocurrencies. A big reason I have not become more heavily involved/invested in crypto was that everyone I asked about the utility of having ~15,000 different virtual currencies hurriedly changed the subject. How is a rational investor supposed to choose between the proliferating altcoins and shitcoins...and why? The only honest answer I ever got was 'throw money at a bunch of cheap things and then shill the fuck out of them in the hope that they become expensive.'
Crypto just swapped inflation in the currency supply for inflation in the number of currency instruments.
We've had tens of thousands of competent software engineers working on this for the last 5 years and no one came up with anything more than gambling in a closed zero sum ecosystem.