Dear Patrick,

Thank you for your very sincere and thoughtful response. I am not sure if you want to see where this goes, but I would be very interested to try to parse out how and why you think some of things in your response and generally in your posts. All too often in the crypto space advocates post apodictic reasoning for the “good” of crypto. When you try to take them back to their starting positions and through understanding of their positions, I find there’s nothing but cliff.

Much of what you say in your post follows this model. You state that “bitcoin was in response to the inadequacies of the current system whether perceived or actual”. I would suggest this would be something more interesting to pursue (is modern liberal democracy and its mechanisms a bad thing?). But you then proceed to suggest that because the “value store” has not dropped to zero value (at least in the respect it can be converted to “fiat”) that is proof of demand for the alternative system. Well, of course. And this could be said of any store of value that bypasses legal commerce and regulation and is largely in demand for this “inadequacy” in “legal” tender. Pizza dough, massages, and pedicures do not scale.

The fact is therefore that for the majority of users (perhaps apart from HODLRs), the “inadequacy” of the current system is the first and still most successful use of crypto: easier money-laundering, drug sales, and all other manner of illegal and dangerous commerce. This latter would include pump-and-dump schemes massively enabled by bot usage and even should include the vast majority of ICOs.

All too often, as well, there are vague appeals to possibilities of positive outcomes or such. I don’t mean to be rude and mocking, but I simply have no idea what you (or others with similar statements) mean when you say something like this:

“There are no silver bullets, but what we should at least consider, beyond a thought experiment is to cross the Rubicon and challenge ourselves as human beings to do better.”

I cannot remember any significant advance in tech (or any other field) where anything like this was uttered by a participant or advocate of Some New Thing: antibiotics, the transistor, ICs, magnetic storage, TCP/IP, RDBs, HTTP, Browsers, the Web, etc.

It is good to remember that “crossing the Rubicon” is NOT a moment that presaged ‘humans doing better’: instead it was the harbinger of civil war, the death of democracy and the rise tyranny. Perhaps this is the most appropriate use of expression in the case of crypto.