He isn't praising anything. He is simply saying not being anti-something that early. The world isn't all black and white, there's nuance, not being anti-something doesn't means praising it.

> I don’t understand why you would be anti- something so new at all. >[...] > why write it off at this early stage?

What if there's actually nothing good that we can do out of it but you aren't there to talk against it? Well it will die naturally. What if there's actually something good that we can do with it but there's a bunch of anti-something people? Well that add unnecessary friction to something good being made and that just make you a jerk adding it.

You see how it's better?

I agree that a token based currency is not required, I'm just interested in what people define a blockchain as for intellectual curiosity.

A (potentially distributed) datastructure of some kind, which resembles a linked-list, and ensures its integrity using some sort of cryptographic hash of the previous link such that changing any link but the most recent invalidates the whole chain. Literally -- a chain of (data) blocks.

A non-engineering description of a "blockchain" should be considered to be misleading.

edit - also, I'd take cryptocurrencies more seriously if they could stay out of the headlines for a while

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxos_(computer_science)

You're thinking of a distributed ledger, which combine blockchains with consensus protocols