I'd be more excited about the productivity if my observations didn't suggest people experimenting in the space were ignoring history. We've had a century or so

I'd be more excited about the productivity if my observations didn't suggest people experimenting in the space were ignoring history. We've had a century or so of modern economic theory and thousands of years of history before that time to study how money, tangible goods, production, and consumption interact. Maybe I'm not being charitable, but a lot of the cryptocurrency experiments feel like tossing that history out the window and starting over from base principles---which would be fine if I didn't watch them recapitulate the same mistakes nation-states have made throughout history. To take BTC as a specific example: it's considered a feature of the currency that there is no fiat institution that can just print more BTC. Which is great up until the point that a hacker compromises an exchange and re-assigns a giant pile of value to anonymous criminals (or just makes it evaporate), and there's no back-stop institution to make victims whole. In a world where FDIC insurance exists, why would I bother with that nonsense? We've already had history from the Great Depression to observe the ramifications of common people getting screwed when the money storage and transfer institutions they rely upon go haywire; I don't see a need to jump feet-first into the barrel of unregulated transaction institutions again (and for BTC specifically, without those institutions available to close out transactions quickly, the lag on BTC transaction resolution makes it undesirable for day-to-day spending).