> However: just because you don’t need a blockchain to do something doesn’t mean the industry won’t settle on using blockchains to do it anyway. The technology

> However: just because you don’t need a blockchain to do something doesn’t mean the industry won’t settle on using blockchains to do it anyway. The technology industry is immensely path dependent. Particularly when buckets of money appear, feedback loops can form whose outcomes seem all but inevitable. Speculators and venture capitalists alike have inundated crypto with cash. There’s a certain reflexivity to it: when cash pours into anything, the intrinsic value of the thing is at least the value of the cash… and potentially much more, if that cash is invested productively! Blockchains may become the future — including for use cases where they are not natural fits — only because their story was told, speculated on, invested in, and told some more. This bothers me: That we could end up with expensive, unnecessary systems that exist not because they offer a tangible benefit but because everyone just kept going along with things, collecting investor money and ignoring criticism until it was too late. I don’t see that being apocalyptic necessarily, I think Adam Smith’s scythe will mow down any companies that make truly bonkers decisions on this stuff. But it bugs me that we could collectively spend years arguing about this and building blockchains and training a generation of blockchain engineers only for the near totality of blockchain stuff to fail for reasons that were evident from the beginning.