Techies look upon the financial world and find its messy structures
hard to reconcile with the physical reality around them.
Which is why we’re going to propose that the blockchain fad is mostly
about putting finance in terms that are understandable to techies — i.e.
as something absolute – and having them learn for themselves through
trial and error why that’s actually a flawed assumption in finance.
However, what I hear there is "oh sure, you might be able to write software for all of these other things, but not this thing that I'm an expert in, that's way too complicated". Many people have been wrong about this in other domains, and it seems to me that essential complexity can only delay the point at which software can usefully automate things, not prevent it entirely.
-John Kenneth Galbraith, Money: Whence it Came, Where it Went
She's contrasting that with a "techie" view where all that matters is securely and immutably recording the fact that a borrower has received the "coin" (which represents mainstream blockchain implementations, though I'm sure blockchains could be designed to reflect debt relationships and even enforce debt repayment), and suggesting that what the distributed consensus actually records is only a subset of the relationships a centralised accounting/clearing system deals with.
She also pointed out that our financial system being built around debt relationships actually guarantees there will be some non-zero level of demand for dollars/Euros/Yen etc in future, whereas building the Bitcoin ecosystem around who holds the Bitcoin at a given point in time doesn't actually guarantee people will still want them tomorrow (especially if they owe repayments on dollar-denominated debt to buy BTC or mining equipment)
It just reads like a poorly structured argument against a huge strawman.
But most arguments in favour of blockchains as a superior way of doing things are centred around the idea that replicating cash is the most important thing about building a monetary system, when cash is actually the least important (and most likely to be deprecated!) part of the monetary system the world today is built on. If you still need a separate authority or method of reaching consensus to reconcile debts, then making the record of who controls the assets independent and immutable is a bug of the monetary system rather than a feature.
Have you heard of the health benefits of being naked? Naked is so easy to clean. You never need to mend naked. Naked never goes out of style. Naked is easy to color coordinate.
It isn't entirely relevant to the emperor whether he succeeds in getting naked accepted as the latest fashion or not, as long as he succeeds in not getting laughed at. Being naked is ultimately survivable, being tricked is not.