If society is burning up not just a lot, but a majority of its effort in servicing its model (resource tracking), it seems to me something has gone very very wrong.
You need to keep track of who owns what. You don't need to make that such a complicated thing that it takes vast portions of available human effort to track, and sucks in vast portions of the fruits of said effort.
You don't have to be an anarchist to think that that's ridiculous.
We can do that with trust and the vast majority of people don't care.
I think the situation will improve dramatically when some of these crypto projects begin to mature. From what I can tell, blockchains are the opposite of lightweight, and personally I'm not holding my breath for one to become useful for anything besides profit anytime soon. I think something like IOTA is a better candidate to be useful (a fee-less directed acyclic graph, not a blockchain). It's more like a new communications protocol that will allow machines to conduct their own transactions with each other. The team's goal is to make it useful first, and if it's profitable too well that's great. Maybe I'm just not that creative anymore, but I can't see a production-quality future for blockchains, and would agree that giant PNW datacenters doing nothing but proof-of-work is a massive waste of resources.
That said, these are mostly just research projects hoping they have one of the big ideas that will win.
Is it really that ridiculous that we dedicate a lot of resources to keeping track of who owns what? We're a mostly capitalist society, right? In a system where private ownership reigns supreme, you absolutely need to keep track of who owns what or we'd have even greater wealth inequality than we have now. Personally, I'd like to see some kind of anarcho-syndicalist structure but let's be honest our greatx10 grandchildren will probably still be capitalists.
This article is a little over-the-top in some spots, but the main point is correct. Cryptocurrency is an innovation in accounting: https://hackernoon.com/why-everyone-missed-the-most-importan...
Cryptocurrencies are trying to make trustless transactions a reality so we don't need a human workforce to keep it all mostly accurate. Don't get too disappointed yet, this stuff is just getting started.