Blockchains give us new paradigms (such as ownerless & distributed program execution) that most of us weren’t thinking about before it was achievable.
TFA is full of blustery arguments to say that crypto is a worthless dead end and should be banned deserves more reasoned arguments. Toning down the emotional levels might be a good first step.
But I don't totally understand your comparison of early PDA's to the current state of cryptocurrency. Palm pilots were a successful product in their day. Blackberries were hugely successful. It's not as if the iPhone was the first example of value being created in this space.
As far as blockchain, from what I can tell, the only value its creating so far is for drug dealers, those executing ransomware attacks, and people running cryptocurrency exchanges.
I'm not ruling out the idea that someone will find an interesting use-case for cryptocurrency in the future. But what seems a bit strange to me is that cryptocurrency advocates seem to want us all to give a ton of attention and investment towards this space which so far has produced nothing of value. It seems to me that the rational standpoint will be to ignore it until someone can actually demonstrate the "potential" which has been promised for so many years now.
But I think the whole discussion is missing the point. Blockchain is mostly not trying to be a solution to engineering problems, but societal, "how do we do X without a trustworthy party involved". We already know how to do any given X with someone trustworthy involved.
And, fundamentally, that's how society works, no matter how much anarchists wish it didn't. It's almost always possible to agree to some party to be in charge, making blockchain mostly pointless, no matter how much money is poured in the technical details.
The "Bitcoin" application is a tool useful for buying and selling recreational drugs without exposure to the physical risk posed by cash transactions. Edit: That is, the physical/financial risk posed to you by the other party or third-party robbers. Legal risk is probably also reduced: law-enforcement deanonymization attacks seem much less frequent than busting people with drugs on the street.
Blockchain-based markets in general enable transactions without revealing personally identifying information to the counterparty or platform while circumventing regulatory restrictions on conventional transactions.
> The "Bitcoin" application is a tool useful for buying and selling recreational drugs without exposure to the physical risk posed by cash transactions.
It hasn't been since at least 2018; authorities regularly seize millions worth of bitcoins together with drug dealers, and have been openly bragging about their de-anonymization successes as early as 2019.
> what's the authoritative history lies with Linus Torvalds.
I agree with your point about distributed consensus in general, but there isn't really a single authoritative history of linux, there are tons of important forks simultaneously maintained.
As for deanonymization, that doesn't seem to be very common. Compare to the rate at which people get busted by street cops for buying drugs.
What does that have to do with blockchain? Is bittorrent to you "blockchain for downloads" just because it's decentralized and has hashes?
> Git was created by Linus Torvalds in 2005 for development of the Linux kernel
They use similar data structures, but blockchain is more than a Merkel tree, it also includes a consensus algorithm.
None of these are real problems. Each and every one was invented as a problem as a post hoc rationalisation for Blockchain technologies.