I work with cryptography daily and I had to stare at that statement for several minutes to figure out what they were getting at. There's a kernel of truth in t

I work with cryptography daily and I had to stare at that statement for several minutes to figure out what they were getting at. There's a kernel of truth in there, but in the end I think this statement is an example of being "not even wrong". It's not clear what they're trying to say. When you talk about people actually using blockchains, the last mile happens through "traditional computers", so blockchains vs. traditional computers isn't a meaningful contrast. Now if you said blockchains vs. traditional uses of cryptography, then you'd have a point. If they're trying to selectively simplify, then simplifying "traditional uses of cryptography" to "traditional computers" isn't a useful simplification. Blockchain is a way for software to decentralize decisionmaking. People are still controlling the computers. If you take away the "decentralize" part, there's plenty of non-blockchain software that does decisionmaking. If you take away the "decisionmaking" part, there's plenty of non-blockchain software that does decentralized stuff. If you take away the software part, email threads, internet forums, and even conference calls accomplish decentralized decisionmaking all the time. The following sentence is why I think the point is fundamentally wrong: For the first time, a computer system can be truly autonomous: self-governed, by its own code, instead of by people. That's just not true. People control the computers that participate in a blockchain. Those computers express the will of their operators, which in this case is participation in a decentralized decision engine. There's nothing keeping those operators from making their computers do anything else, they just won't be able to hijack the blockchain. But that's also not new, your computer acts as your agent all the time in systems where you can't hijack the rules of the system (aka most websites).