A Comprehensive Synthesis of the Technological, Ecological and Political Critique of Blockchainism

It’s all about the externalities

I’ve just read one of the most lucid, wide-ranging, cross-disciplinary critiques of cryptocurrency and blockchain I’ve yet to encounter. It comes from David “DSHR” Rosenthal, a distinguished technologist whose past achievements include helping to develop X11 and the core technologies for Nvidia.

https://blog.dshr.org/2022/02/ee380-talk.html

Rosenthal’s critique is a transcript of a lecture he gave to Stanford’s EE380 class, adapted from a December 2021 talk for an investor conference. It is a bang-up-to-date synthesis of many of the critical writings on the subject, glued together with Rosenthal’s own deep technical expertise. He calls it “Can We Mitigate Cryptocurrencies’ Externalities?”

The presence of “externalities” in Rosenthal’s title is key. Rosenthal identifies blockchainism’s core ideology as emerging from “the libertarian culture of Silicon Valley and the cypherpunks,” and states that “libertarianism’s attraction is based on ignoring externalities.”

This is an important critique of libertarianism. The idea that “liberty” is the freedom to do as you like, provided it doesn’t harm others is simple enough on its face…