I found a much better take

This here is a much more reasoned approach to the possible future of blockchain and cryptocurrency.

It’s...not breathless, not at all, but still a little gee-whiz despite its reserved tone. It also ignores a few important points, like blockchain technology’s horrendous inefficiency. The savior of the web needs to not gobble up energy at tens of thousands of times the rate that a centralized system does, or we arguably go extinct quicker.

And even if we solve that, there’s also the problem that we haven’t yet found a good use case for blockchains despite ten years of trying. Other than buying hookers and blow and getting rich on a speculation bubble that your barber will ultimately pay the price for.

Even so, cryptographic identity verification is big. A decentralized database that no one owns is big. A robust system for verifying transactions democratically is big. These are all huge technological achievements.

And you’ll get no argument from me that the internet needs saving. Client-side JavaScript alone is killing it, even before we crack into the problems described in the NYT link at the top. Money and power are throttling it. But the solution will have to be efficient, basically bulletproof, and all but invisible (or at least easily understandable and low-friction) to the user.