Is the following a good analogy?
1. The Internet aspires to be neutral infrastructure for communication.
2. Permissionless blockchains aspire to be neutral infrastructure for computation.

Head of research at a16z crypto.
Professor, Columbia University.

Would suggest to substitute computation for coordination — this got to be the core value-prop in my mind, otherwise distributed computation wouldn’t be that valuable.

Research at cyber.fund | prev mathematician | artofkot.xyz

And to add compute into the picture:

7. Need for “programmable” coordination
↓
8. Smart contracts & distributed computation

In general, have been using the following sequence as a quick “path” to blockchains:

1. Need for scaled coordination 
↓
2. Centralized systems 
↓
3. Collusion problems 
↓
4. Neutral (=>permissionless) distributed systems via consensus
↓
5. Incentives & Sybil problems 
↓
6. Crypto assets & PoW/PoS

Yep, thats a fair point — the term coordination *is* a bit vague. Wonder if there is a more rigorous term corresponding to coordination, and if not, perhaps there is an academic opportunity here…

My experience has been that non-crypto computer scientists find the term "coordination" to be too abstract and vague. I could imagine it working well for non-academic/non-CS audiences, though, it has an appealing grandness to it