Those were all really relevant and interesting links, @aschrijver. Thanks!
I appreciate – and share much of – your skepticism about blockchain, @aschrijver. But I also invite people to educate themselves and come to their own conclusions. I think this article in the NYTimes does a good job at looking “Beyond the Bitcoin Bubble”.
To share my personal perspective: I don’t write off “everything blockchain” because it is over-hyped and has attracted scammers or because many of the ideas are not yet viable or able to scale. That was all true of the first dotcom boom / bust era.
And while some people/projects in the blockchain space demonstrate fraudulent or unethical behavior, I also encounter many blockchain researchers / economists / lawyers / developers / thought-leaders who are motivated by many of the issues that we are all passionate about on this forum: privacy, identity, transparency and new non-extractive economic incentives / business models.
I definitely agree with you that “blockchain” is not the answer to all of these problems… but it is still worth bringing up and questioning and discussing. As someone who is a member of both the CHT and the blockchain communities, I see this moment in time as a unique opportunity to build whatever it means for tech to be “humane” into the blockchain culture and protocols now, when it is still very nascent (and not wait for it to be too late).
Which perhaps is a good segue back to the original topic of this thread: what does it mean for technology to be humane?