I agree that the ownership perspective is not likely to be very fruitful when paired with blockchains and the abstractions implemented on them. And I'm not all

I agree that the ownership perspective is not likely to be very fruitful when paired with blockchains and the abstractions implemented on them. And I'm not all that excited about money. It's just boring. You could build consensus about anything and you choose... account balances? But sometimes you need a log that can't be altered by threatening to fire whoever has write access to the data of record. The strategy of not having any infra worth attacking is valid against some threat models. If I have evidence of wrongdoing by a nation state, I like that I can put a hash of that evidence on a blockchain and no amount of deepfakery to the contrary will allow that state to create evidence that provably preceeds it. If I have the kind of enemies that can dns-poison a whole continent in order to keep my voice from being heard, I like that I can use a crypto domain that I "own" to periodically update the corresponding nft with the merkle root of the latest version of my manifesto blog. This lets me get new versions to readers who have my blog's name without worrying about whether a DNS registrar, certificate authority, or ISP is gonna interfere. The reason that crypto sucks for money is that the value of a token is subjective anyway, so having an indelible record of who has how many tokens of whatever flavor doesn't buy you much since people can turn their backs on the token's value without bothering to attack the recordkeeping behind it. But the fact that anybody with the knowhow and access to the code can participate--you don't need to be buddy-buddy with somebody in a privileged position--that's kind of cool. So if the hype can carry the technology far enough that it's no longer an electricity hog (and it pretty much has) then when everyone's aspirations about using it to get rich fail, it'll still be around and useful for computing in the presence of powerful adversaries without having your own IT department, or for enabling participation in non-money social protocols at scale without having to submit to a gatekeeper. And I think that's pretty cool, even if I can't retire on it.