I think it's a fair criticism, which is why I don't have a high degree of confidence in Bitcoin itself, or the political-economy narrative of "crypto-anarchism"

I think it's a fair criticism, which is why I don't have a high degree of confidence in Bitcoin itself, or the political-economy narrative of "crypto-anarchism". The fact that there's still not a crypto eBay is damning. (Though it's not clear where the right point of comparison is: do we measure from TBL's WWW, or ARPAnet? The earliest chains are more transport layer than application layer.) That said, the kinds of innovation I'm talking about are still young: DAOs have only existed since 2016, and many of the non-speculative projects I mentioned (mutual aid, mutual credit) are only a couple years old. Maybe the critics are right, and "crypto" is a flash in the pan unable to deliver on its promises, and destined to be a cautionary tale, like tulips or Beanie Babies. But it might be an expensive question to get wrong: if cryptographic mechanisms for distributed coordination are able to outcompete firms (per Coase), or states (the Global South moreso than the West), that "basin of attraction" could be non-trivial to disrupt, just as it's now non-trivial to defeat the chicken-and-egg problem of making a new eBay. If any aspect of the future is to be based on cryptographic coordination, I'd rather the tech (and culture) be truly democratic and open, not reliant upon the neo-oligarchs of BTC. Refusing to engage in the space at all is ceding the territory.