I suppose I'm asking for an "explain it to me like I'm five" response here, but when I read things like (from TFA): > When you have an internet service that se

I suppose I'm asking for an "explain it to me like I'm five" response here, but when I read things like (from TFA): > When you have an internet service that serves hundreds of millions or billions of people, there is a huge asymmetry of power and knowledge between the service provider and individual users. To fix this, you’d want a system that provides a way for users to organize and act collectively. You’d want users to receive a straightforward digital representation of their economic and governance rights. You’d want a system that has unambiguous rules along with mechanisms to enforce those rules. And you’d want this all to be available globally and accessible to anyone. Sounds useful, right? Well, the system I’ve described is basically a blockchain. I think: a blockchain is an append-only distributed transaction ledger. But how is the system Dixon describes "basically a blockchain?" A blockchain has some of those properties, sure: it's available globally and accessible to anyone (with the technology to access it). It has mechanisms to enforce its rules, e.g., you only get to append transactions to the ledger and you can't modify past transactions without the tampering being obvious. But the "non-protocol" parts here -- providing a way for users to organize and act collectively, receiving a straightforward digital representation (?) of their economic and governance rights -- seem to me to be orthogonal to blockchains. What legally recognized rights you have in anything stems from, well, laws -- from legally binding contracts. Those don't need the blockchain. If you buy the "digital original" of your favorite meme for $3M, a transaction entry on a blockchain could be agreed to be the bill of sale -- but so could any number of things off the blockchain. What the blockchain brings to the party that's entirely new seems to be the ability to get ridiculous sales prices because there's currently a frenzy for anything NFT. And this is an issue I have with an awful lot of Let's Build It On The Blockchain! thinking right now: it's not that I can't see value in the concept of blockchains, it's that there seems to be a "it's good because it's on The Blockchain!" frenzy around a lot of things that are transparently dubious (see: millions of NFT scams, the insistence that digital in-game assets can be easily transferred between games built on entirely different back-end systems just because blockchain, etc.). And stepping back from that, the whole "Web3" pitch is "we can build an entirely decentralized Internet now because BLOCKCHAIN!" But, again: why are blockchains critical to this idea? We already built a decentralized Internet before blockchains; it was called (checks notes) "The Internet". I get that the idea is the new blockchain-based everything can't be centralized, but y'know, that's what we thought about the non-blockchain Internet a quarter-century ago. All the tools we had then to not be centralized still exist now. The issue with centralization now isn't a technological one -- which makes me pretty skeptical of purely technological solutions.