That's about is Lindy as it gets. I'm dubious of anyone who supposes we can "rethink society" to make money less crucial. It seems simpler to assure that anyone who doesn't have enough money gets some.
It's a dangerous experiment we're running, to have all currencies in the modern world be government-issued paper. Such currencies have a known and spectacular failure mode, which continues to happen right now, and "it can't happen to us" is just a bet, not a law of nature.
I'm glad that cybercoins exist, as a hedge against that occurring. Gold is the old standard, but difficult to transfer other than hand-to-hand.
Maybe it won't happen, perhaps Modern Monetary Theory is perfectly correct and the Fed and ECB will keep on trucking indefinitely with a manageable and smooth inflation curve. I'd prefer that, of course, a currency collapse tends to be a regime-ending event as often as not, and it's bad for commerce, which I need in order to eat, clothe myself, and travel more than about ten miles in a day.
But I'm grateful that there exists at-least-one distributed and uncensorable way to "track who owes what to whom". We might all be grateful for it one day. Or we might not.
But you will just dismiss all these ideas. Same way people dismissed all the ideas people were imagining when the internet is young.
If you want to broaden your mind— just detach the idea of blockchain from the price of Bitcoin. Yes, it’s insane to the point of being obscene.
Trading of any financial asset - why do we need Robinhood / Fidelity etc to trade shares? If shares in companies can be listed on a blockchain then people can trade them anywhere anytime directly with each other even when they don't trust each other.
Larger markets for digital goods: Many games have started putting their items on Etherum (or layer 2 solutions) so that players can easily trade them without the developers needing to run their own marketplace. This can then extend to being able to use items across multiple games, or trade items from one game with items from another.
Now there's ethereum tokens that allow the original creator to get a cut of all trades of that item. This opens an interesting funding model where a company could create an open source permissionless game where you download the client, connect to the public chain, play and acquire items, trade those items with others, and the game creators gain funds based on a cut of all trade happening around the game which allows them to further development. Then because it's open source people can create forks with their own art styles and mod the game easily and people can participate in the same world with many different clients.
I understand Bitcoin (in principle), it is not that hard to understand. I don't understand most of Ethereum.
For instance, if I feel my country's currency is heading towards hyperinflation, I can buy up tokenized USD as a hedge. There is no limit to how much I can buy nor do I ever need to visit a bank and comply with an oppressive regime - think Venezuela.
Most of the "blockchains" listed on aggregators such as coinmarketcap.com are essentially clients communicating to a few nodes which, for all we know, sync up in a coordinated way to provide the illusion of a decentralized consensus system.
Like maybe we need to take a step back and ask "what problem are we actually trying to solve?".
Is an uncontrollable & anonymous currency truly the next big thing we need? Did we even stop to think of the potential issues of a system like that?
To me the future should be more audacious. Maybe we don't need some kind of unalterable decentralized database where capitalism can thrive from. Maybe we need to rethink society where money is not as crucial as it is today.
Hoping that the "next" cryptopunks can think of these ideas to really change the world for the better rather than ways to scale an unalterable database which, for all I can tell, just provides a distributed way to track who owes what to whom.