It's a very good question. There's an interesting argument that the greatest value is not in the ledger, but in a mechanism for reliable, unalterable history: h

It's a very good question. There's an interesting argument that the greatest value is not in the ledger, but in a mechanism for reliable, unalterable history: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/05/25/blockchains-never-forget/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/05/25/blockchains-never-forg... It's also worth considering that crypto is effectively the greatest experiment the world has ever seen in free banking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_banking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_banking. Hypothetically, this could be done with paper+metal currencies, or centralized digital currencies; but for whatever reason, crypto is getting a regulatory pass where past "experiments" have been shut down hard by states who claim a monopoly on issuing currency, for better or worse. Rather than viewing blockchains through the narrow lens of "Money 2.0", I think it's more relevant to view both money and blockchains as social technologies to solve coordination problems, and then inquire about those technologies' performance characteristics, incentives, externalities, and moral hazards. I think there's longterm potential for blockchain use cases to find traction; but at the same time, it may be that centralized solutions simply achieve superior results, in the same way that Amazon out-competes mom-and-pop retail, and Netflix out-competes buying DVDs. (The market lessons of the last twenty years seem to indicate that consumers value cost and convenience vastly more than abstract notions of freedom.)