Patri Friedman

1/10 The reason "Blockchain" is so susceptible to cargo cult mentality is that the fundamental features that make it what it is are, in a sense, invisible, and inseparable from how the technology works.

2/10 If I invent a new, more efficient lightbulb, I can easily demonstrate that it A) gives off a certain luminance and B) draws less power than similarly-bright bulbs. Anyone can see this demo and be convinced it's the real deal, no knowledge of how my design works is required.

3/10 If I fail to make such a demonstration, everyone knows I'm BSing. If someone says they can build up on my design and use it to improve things which are completely unrelated to lightbulbs, he needs to demonstrate this, or he's BSing.

4/10 But the benefits of Bitcoin over traditional currencies isn't anything you can so easily measure. Even without using any of Bitcoin's innovation, I can create a system that, to the end user, will appear indistinguishable from Bitcoin - greatly outperform it, in fact.

5/10 It will allow receiving tokens and sending to anyone, easily and quickly, with little to no fees. Of course, it will be completely centralized, and with it will come the associated risks - The system might one day shut down, or start charging high fees or apply censorship.

6/10 But these are things that might happen in *the future*. They're not things you can observe now. The only way to distinguish the two systems is to look at how they actually work. To be convinced of Bitcoin's merits, you need to know how it works, and why it is the way it is.

7/10 The problem is, most people *don't* understand how Bitcoin works. They know there's this thing called "blockchain" that somehow makes it decentralized, and they deduce that blockchain is some kind of general-purpose magic powder to make anything stronger, faster, cheaper.

8/10 So when they hear about this new way blockchain is being used to cure cancer and whatnot, they don't have the tools to call BS. And since the benefits of using a blockchain are not directly observable, these projects get away with not demonstrating superior performance.