@ 63db3b6d:899680ff
2025-02-22 11:52:51
Many of the tragedies we see in today’s crypto world can be described as a symphony—one composed of ignorance, greed, vanity, and the cunning of those who exploit these human flaws for profit.
People often discuss blockchain while loosely tossing around terms like _cypherpunks_, _decentralization_, and _cryptocurrencies_—concepts they barely understand. They lump them together into some vague image and follow it blindly. It’s a bit like encountering a stranger whose looks alone inspire you to imagine they’re wealthy, kind, and from a noble lineage, projecting all your hopes and wishes onto them.
Take any basic “Blockchain 101” course, and you’ll inevitably hear about cypherpunks. **Cypherpunks** form a social movement that aims to protect individual freedom and privacy against surveillance and censorship by governments or Big Tech. While some of their arguments are certainly relatable, social movements tend to be niche; they rarely represent the mainstream view.
Blockchain was specifically designed as a tool to solve the problems that cypherpunks identified. How valuable, then, is a technology born from such a niche worldview? This is one reason people say, “I don’t see the point of blockchain.” It’s similar to climate change technology: How valuable is it to someone who believes climate change is a hoax? If you don’t relate to cypherpunks’ vision, then blockchain may seem to have zero practical value. And realistically, how many actual cypherpunks are there among all the current blockchain users?
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### Is Blockchain Really That Worthless If You’re Not a Cypherpunk?
An interesting thing about inventions is that they rarely remain confined to their original purpose. Take **Propecia**—it was developed as a prostate treatment but is now often prescribed to slow hair loss. Cypherpunks created blockchain for their own ends, but other people have since discovered different, potentially useful applications.
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### Why Would Blockchain Be Useful to Non-Cypherpunks?
The freedom cypherpunks sought is, in modern society, largely defined by the rights our social systems establish and protect. They needed a tool to build a system that would **not** be controlled by any single person or group, yet remain viable among participants who share a common vision. That required **decentralization**.
Here, we find another misconception: equating cypherpunks with decentralization. Decentralization is simply one necessary characteristic of a system that serves their goal: “a system free from the control of any individual or faction.” A decentralized design isn’t _inherently_ superior; it’s just that for cypherpunks, decentralization was a must. If their goals had been different, decentralization might not have mattered at all.
Yet, building a truly decentralized system is extremely difficult. The cypherpunk movement was active in the 1990s, but the first blockchain—Bitcoin—didn’t emerge until 2008. Once blockchain technology was invented, it radically lowered the costs for like-minded people to create decentralized systems.
Any system that defines and protects a set of rights needs **resources**. Ensuring those resources are used fairly, transparently, and in line with collective consensus has always been expensive, which is why we traditionally rely on centralized authorities. Blockchain enables **Trustless Trust**, drastically reducing the cost of building such systems.
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### Currency as Collective Decision-Making
These systems don’t rely solely on formal governance or voting. **Spending** also reflects decision-making. Fiat currency has no intrinsic value; it represents a _delayed claim_ on real resources within the system. Thus, when more money is spent on a particular good or service, more _actual_ resources are ultimately funneled there. Over time, this **asynchronous spending** accumulates to form a kind of collective will—effectively guiding resource allocation without requiring constant explicit votes.
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### The Misconception: “Cryptocurrency Is the ‘Killer App’ for Blockchain”
At one point, people struggled to find practical uses for blockchain. Some even flipped the narrative, saying that “cryptocurrency is the killer app of blockchain” or worse, that “blockchain exists only for creating cryptocurrencies.” In reality, cryptocurrencies aren’t the end goal of blockchain; they’re simply tools that allow participants in a decentralized system to **signal their intent** and **allocate resources** in order to shape the system’s future direction.
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### Then Why Does Blockchain Seem So Useless?
Blockchain itself is a value-neutral technology. It has **no inherent agenda**. It simply allows groups with shared purposes to build decentralized systems. Unfortunately, most current blockchain communities lack genuine shared objectives or real-world problems they intend to solve. The only “problem” many of them define is: “I have less than others,” and their sole “solution” is to extract wealth from someone else.
For a system to be sustainable, resources need to **stay** within it. Since currencies represent delayed claims on these resources, if everyone is constantly converting those claims back into external assets, the system can’t survive.
To make blockchain genuinely useful—and to show that cryptocurrencies aren’t just a scam—there must be:
1. A **clear definition** of the collective problem the system aims to solve.
2. A shared **vision or direction** for solving that problem.
3. A concrete **protocol** specifying how to achieve these goals in a decentralized way.
Without that groundwork, merely issuing a cryptocurrency in the hope of creating a better, happier world is a fantasy—no better than a cultish scam. And that, ultimately, is why so many blockchain initiatives fail to deliver real value.