It’s sort of a genie in a bottle proof of concept. It becomes whatever its desiderants wish for, about half the time, maybe. I think if you really want to understand why it has become so powerful, then you have to change the question of “how does this solve a problem people have and therefore empower people?”, to “but how does it apparently empower its worshippers without solving a problem at all?”

I am basically not talking about the merits of its technical design; I am talking about the impact of having a software that a nontrivial minority of society view as a money pump whose only input resource constraint is lines of code + cheap hash compute.

In a way you can reframe it like this: when you learn lisp, you realize, code is just data. Bitcoin had some people conclude, code could also be money. Then the ethereum fans have another epiphany: money can be computation etc and so on w the others.

I think it’s less so fidelity to being the optimal remedy for the present’s ailments, and more being wedded to the inpouring of dedication of a few talented coders being caught up in a style of financialized mass sociotechnological engagement that was not really possible to witness until fairly recently w the modern internet