Imma up this from comments. To be clear, I could GAF about blockchain, Bitcoin, etc:
- BTC is to blockchain as biplanes are to aviation: an arbitrary implementation that happened to take off, as it were. Ultimately, ‘pyramid scheme’ isn’t a very useful lens for financial structures, because they’re all pyramid schemes on a certain level. (So were the pyramids, and they’ve proven to be pretty durable.) BTC had a few things going for it, the biggest (IMO) being that it was born on the cypherpunks list, a milieu / meeting ground whose impact cannot be overstated: BitTorrent, TOR, Wikileaks, distributed crack.nets, BTC… That gave it traction among a pretty 31337 bunch of, for the most part, alpha assholes, and it filtered out from there. In retrospect, I think BTC’s main ‘value’ will be, as you say, a pyramid scheme — but with a twist: it ~generated enough money to attract lots of here-comes-everyones. Enough to start driving forks etc. And that ~forking is what’s revealing the basic value-generating thing they share: blockchainy-type stuff. </learned *discourse>
And what is that ‘value’?
- The main value lies in making ~events more or less impossible to repudiate. That’s it, the rest is neo-dotcom wanking. Here’s a simple (and relevant) parallel: what ‘value’ was generated by the second ledger in the development of double-ledger bookkeeping? Nada. There’s no intrinsic value, it’s just a copy. But the effect was, as the kids used to like to say, to disintermediate or unbundle trust. It became less of a matter of the personal honor of some trusted person and more about the potential application of a technique — cross-checking two ledgers. Blockchain is mainly just a distributed extension of that. That’s not to say aren’t other broad values to be found in it (not just startuppy applications), but that’s it. It’s like asking what’s the value of some big-ass prime number? Not much, until computer-enabled cryptography came along. /// HOPE THIS HELPS