Hence my explicitly noting that Dr. Liskov continued this research and grew it in scope long after it had become clear that one of if not the primary applicatio

Hence my explicitly noting that Dr. Liskov continued this research and grew it in scope long after it had become clear that one of if not the primary application was clearly going to be tamper-resistant ledgers of financial transactions. It’s also why I gave the example of Dr. Wadler FRS FRSE as someone who even more explicitly did extremely sophisticated research well-received by the academic community unambiguously in this context. I just do not understand what it is about this topic that turns a normally very thoughtful community of people with a generally very high regard for the research agendas of noted computer scientists into spinal-reflex, knee-jerk critics on a dime. You hear all kinds of arguments but they generally boil down to some version of “blockchain is for cryptocurrency, cryptocurrency is for financial fraud and financial fraud has no place in our society”. But every link in that chain is either incorrect or selectively tolerant of wrongdoing. Tamper-resistant ledgers have applications outside of finance. “Everyone knows I mean crypto.” Ok, cryptocurrencies have complex outcomes attached to them, some positive, some negative. “I’m talking about the fraud which is rampant and the main/only use case.” Eh, not really, speculation isn’t by itself fraud, although it is true that markets (say, OTC derivatives markets) with a high ratio of speculation to other non-speculative activities generally have more fraud in them, so more or less rampant than conventional digital finance? “More both relatively and absolutely.” No. Neither. Trivially false. You think that because you have no fucking clue how much fraud happens either relatively or absolutely in conventional financial markets. Furthermore, the fraud that does happen is dramatically more likely to be investigated and prosecuted, and the victims of that fraud are dramatically more likely to be recognized as victims (unlike for example victims of predatory lending in 2005-2007 who lost their homes and got called criminals into the bargain”. I don’t want to believe that it’s just the banal fact that we all know someone who got stinking rich speculating in crypto markets and we didn’t (I’ve never speculated in crypto markets and am not in the same galaxy as well-off: I went into debt when the tech job market collapsed last year, with uh, a little help). But I’m really struggling here to find a more charitable conclusion.