It took centuries for the fundamental hermetic assumptions of alchemy to be questioned, and it had to come from 'insiders' (like Boyle and Newton) rather than t

It took centuries for the fundamental hermetic assumptions of alchemy to be questioned, and it had to come from 'insiders' (like Boyle and Newton) rather than total skeptics. Even then it was never refuted in any official sense, it just sort of faded out of fashion as its surrogate children, the sciences, took over more and more of its academic spotlight. Blockchain-ism, the alchemy of the internet age, will probably have to follow the same arc, though sped up by an order of magnitude thanks to the much improved knowledge-sharing network of the present day.