Though well-written and inspirational, I believe this post fundamentally misunderstands Ethereum and blockchains. 

Ethereum's distinctive property is objective, strict global consensus, and absolutely nothing else. It's great for usecases that require strict global consensus, but it's impossible for everything else, because Ethereum cannot parse any subjectivity or rough consensus at all. 

As such, while money, contracts, governance, identity, law are presented as examples, Ethereum can only parse very, very limited forms of the above, where it's objective. In some cases, like governance or law, it's almost entirely subjective with negligible scope for Ethereum to help. 

99.99% of economics, institutions and the like are deeply human and subjective, which Ethereum or blockchains in general cannot interpret at all. Indeed, we've seen many a times how forcing subjectivity into objective code has led to many disastrous outcomes in crypto.

(Contd...)

very well said. esp appreciate the “99.99% of economics” part

my hottest take here is that cryptocurrency will never be a good currency (à la USD) because maintaining an inflation target is inherently subjective

1. determining the CPI requires picking a basket of goods. every couple years the BLS adds (or removes) goods… eg. at some recent point cell phones were added

2. picking an inflation target requires balancing stable prices against low unemployment. these goals are often at odds and picking between them is a political decision

instead of framing cryptocurrency as currency, I prefer to think about blockchain as an engine for decentralized consensus

the money part is necessary to incentivize consensus. the point isn’t to introduce a new currency or replace central banks… it’s all about decentralized (objective, strict) consensus

founder of @comm.eth
open source / build in public

PS yes I recognize stablecoins exist, but I don’t see them as currencies on their own… they are assets for transacting in a currency (such as USD), but the currency itself is controlled by somebody else in a centralized way

Chasing Curiosity. Empathetic Accelerationist. Founding Fullstack Engineer @icebreaker. YC S16, KB7. 
icbk.me/tayyab.fc

cc @tayyab, we were talking about this at the last Farcaster Friday