Oh damn, that's a long comment, let me try to answer point by point.

> The core things that blockchain stuff tries to solve are not actually the hard problems.

What are the hard problems though? Depending on where you stand you might see different things, but to me the hard problems are that banks throughout the world have a hard time trusting and interoperating, things are slow (payments have to go through banks correspondences and central banks and the BIS and that route takes a long time even if some of the stages are RTGSs), errors are way too common (basically audits happen all the time, are manual, and consequences of errors are real issues that people have to deal with).

> The hard part of online commerce is not that customers can reverse credit card transactions. The hard part of contract law is not automatic payments. The hard part about property law is not atomic transactions of money and deed transfers.

What are the hard parts from your point of view? Is your point of view that the system is perfect and doesn't need the technical improvements proposed by blockchain? I'm not sure I follow.

> It's not trivial to track money, but the stated goals of cryptocurrencies is to make it hard or impossible to trace, and to compel.

I feel like that's too much of a strong statement considering that some cryptocurrencies, which I've worked on, were built specifically to follow regulations and make fraud hard.

> The explicit goals of cryptocurrencies is to get around AML & KYC laws. This is what Pintrest was talking about.

Again, there are many cryptocurrencies with very different goals and this statement can't apply to all. The statement is at least very wrong for some well-known cryptocurrencies.

> We as a society, as a people, don't even want people to be able to send money any way they want. E.g. we don't want people to be able to send money to ISIS. There's a "baby and bathwater" argument that can be made here, but since cryptocurrency people don't even WANT to prevent this use case, it's not what they're making, or selling.

So, ignoring what I said previously that different cryptocurrencies have different goal, and so that statement doesn't apply to the field in general, there's still something to be said about that. How much privacy do we deserve? Where is the line where privacy is too strong that it is damaging to society? There's a very similar argument with end-to-end encryption in messaging applications and governments trying to fight it. For example: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/international-sta...

> Like airline security, it's not effective because it's perfect, but because there's too much risk that one of the layers will catch you.

BTW I don't think airline security is a good example. Adam ruins everything has a good episode on that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LDzOi1dyAA (tl;dw: it's security theater)

> Reversibility: People don't want this. One of the main reasons to use a credit card AT ALL is that people want reversibility. If that's all you wanted then you can probably just accept debit cards.

Credit cards are mostly a US thing btw, I never knew about them before moving here, and even in the US reversibility is not always a thing. For example, you can't reverse transactions done on venmo or zelle. But even then, cryptocurrencies don't preclude reversing transactions, there's nothing in the technology that would prevent that, especially if it used as a settlement layer for virtual assert service providers (exchanges, banks, etc.)

> And as for smart contracts: All smart contract systems need a way for a court to interpret the contract. The contract may not be legal, it may have been signed under duress, etc.. So all smart contract systems need this escape hatch.

I'm not sure I understand your point. A smart contract has its code published in clear so by using it you already choose to trust and obey the code.

> The most ridiculous one is "land ownership registry". You know who ultimately decides who own a piece of land? The government of the country it's in.

Agree, linking real objects to the blockchain is hard, and projects that tout that usecase are often scams.

> And note that all this is in addition to technical problems like PoW/PoS, electricity use, scalability, transaction speed, 51% attacks, etc... Even assuming all those are solved, the problem is the the very GOAL is a dystopia.

PoW/electricity use are things of the past for the technology. No new cryptocurrency rely on these. Scalability and transaction speed are things that are being solved (I believe Algorand is aiming for 20k transaction/s for the end of the year). There are other consensusless protocols that pretty much scale linearly based on the number of machines you throw on the problem (see fastpay or At2).

BTW if you have any question, happy to continue this conversation or clarify anything.