I read through the article — the level of incomprehension here is … astounding.

The primary set of objections appears to be centered around how Bitcoin can’t operate at the scale of monetary systems (tens of thousands of transactions per second). Secondarily, that crypto assets aren’t backed by anything (aren’t a claim on other wealth).

Both valid constraints.

But these aren’t the reasons that crypto assets, Bitcoin and DeFi are interesting!

If he’d come out with some superior theoretical foundation for trust-free Byzantine fault tolerant distributed ledger technology obsoleting the current state of the art, maybe this would be interesting. But it doesn’t appear he even understands why this invention is interesting…. Or, maybe if he argued that total-order consensus isn’t required to maintain consistency in distributed state machines and hence PoW is unnecessary, it might be useful commentary — but nope…

Nothing new here. Move along.

“But it doesn’t appear he even understands why this invention is interesting”

Thing is, it’s not interesting.

Here’s why it’s interesting to me.

Forget about cryptocurrencies, we probably feel the same way about all that.

If you want to run a database to store whatever, the person/entity running the database has superpowers: they can alter the data, take down the whole thing, etc.

Blockchain is a database where no single person/entity has privileged access.

That’s it. As a distributed system person this is cool. Everyone else might shrug. I’m ok with that.

This is a new paradigm and opens new possibilities. Remains to be seen what we do with it.

That's subjective. It clearly interests lots of people.

Actually, I think this perhaps hints at an interesting dichotomy (except the wrong way round): I think cryptocurrencies and smart contracts are genuinely interesting from an academic point of view. Leaving money laundering and Proof of Work aside for a moment, it's incredible that you can have this kind of "serverless" synchronised execution with no trust between parties.

There is of course the money laundering and incredible cost to environment. It feels like crypto's original sin is still not coming up with a valid use case (sending money and banking in unstable countries is I guess one, but fairly minimal compared to the size of the industry).

In a way crypto feels to me like what Internet would be like if it went from the niche academic thing to its current shape, but cut out the "useful" stuff of Dot Com rise and beyond, like social media, Wikipedia, e-mail, communicators etc. The Internet is full of porn, useless cat memes, malware and other criminal stuff. We don't really mind, because it is also stupidly useful and indispensable. Crypto just hasn't found that (yet?). But then, how long did it take from ARPAnet to anything remotely useful?

Wow, this guy is a moron.