> You sound like someone who knows your stuff on this and I regret if I was in any way making it sound personal or disrespectful to you personally. I maintain it’s an unfortunate if not offensive phrasing, but I’m in no position to carry rocks around glass houses: I say unfortunately or offensively-phrased things too.

I didn't take offense at all. I find your knowledge of the space refreshing. I have watched blockchains carefully from the sidelines for some time because of my interest in the intersection of economics, state, and technology and how blockchains might change those things. Over time I became more jaded because the scaling problems blockchains run into seem to be almost insurmountable, so my interest has pivoted into less-global, more-scalable approaches (like merkle-DAG CRDTs with some external form of validation).

> There isn’t really a robust consensus that I’m aware of as to what constitutes a blockchain per se: Wikipedia lists git as one, and I suppose that’s as good a source as any absent such consensus.

Fair enough.

> In more pragmatic/colloquial usage I might define a blockchain loosely as a “tamper-resistant, directed, and typically acyclic / bounded-cyclic data structure with an implied machine economics optimization around infrequent but critically important fully-verifiable history subject to heuristically-determined / freely parameterized bounds on branching factor, duration in branched states, and a bounded susceptibility to adversarial interference in a verifiable consensus on the periodic elimination of branching on some semi-predicable cadence”, which is pretty hand-wavy but I think captures the spirit of the general usage.

Have you considered a career in poetry?? Joking aside, this pretty much sums up my view as well. A DAG with a strong gravitational pull towards a master branch with somewhat infrequently changing data. Which also includes git, so you're right.

> Throw in a bunch of electricity consumption that’s maybe net driving up carbon emissions and maybe net attaching a financial incentive to electricity so cheap that it basically has to be renewable but it’s kinda too soon to tell, and I think I’m now having trouble seeing how crypto three years ago and “AI” last year are any different along these dimensions.

Yes, agreed. Let's spin up an immense amount of computing power to train a model that hallucinates when asked basic questions. Again, there is a space where the marriage of a large dataset of knowledge and an automated linguistic system searching that knowledge has great use-cases, but throwing "AI" at every problem is just another eye-rolley fad.

> The difference in my view is that AI is probably higher variance by a lot on social welfare, and not because of some dumbass “paperclip-indifferent AGI” tripe.

What do you mean by this?

> Blockchain as applied to finance has the scope to create transparency into financial markets and compel governments to open the books on what is and isn’t legal regarding money, for who, and why.

This is one of the things I was originally most excited about. Make politicians receive all wages, contributions, etc through some auditable public currency. If you're going to work in the public sector, then you have to consent to transparency. I have my own issues with money (mainly its deficiency for economic transactions) but cryptocurrencies are certainly a step up from it. But like you said, you can't just release some new currency and expect the government to bless it. Some empires had their armies, some their navies, but we have our banks. Our empire is a financial one, and a currency that replaces the USD is a direct attack against the heart of the empire. Many mountains would have to move before that is possible, unless Wall St finds some extra utility in it that allows them to extract more.

> the public to understand a little better how important digital identity, security, privacy, and autonomy are in 2024

100%...cryptographic identity is going to be huge in the next few years (I'm betting on it quite heavily https://stamp-protocol.github.io/).

> AI has more obviously useful applications at the consumer level (though it’s largely a solution to itself as a way to get information one could previously get from a search engine before it ruined the indexes of search engines by making arbitrarily persuasive falsehoods too cheap to meter, we’ve had spam for a long time, but spam so good it’s convincing to experts in anything other than a bad mood? That’s new.).

Yes, exactly, LLMs as they are are a glorified search engine. Search engines have consumed themselves trying to tailor results to their users instead of just fucking showing objective information and are becoming essentially obsolete pay-to-play ad machines.

> The danger with AI is that it winds up being something other than “available weight” and “operator-aligned”, i.e. whoever is the last man standing has arbitrary unaccountable power to convince anyone of anything and prevent that from being accessed by anyone else.

Well, there's more here. As AI markets itself as this sort of objective intelligence machine, it garners more and more trust. As this solidifies it has the potential to shape perception over time to the benefit of the operators/controllers. The obvious conclusion is snuck in advertising, but I'm thinking much more sinister like the editorialization of information to protect the owner classes and the state from any kind of scrutiny. Effectively, a Big Brother that instead of using fear for compliance, softly whispers in your ear. Pair this with the immense surveillance apparatus we've spent decades perfecting (but it's in the private sector! so it's ok!!1) and we're setting ourselves up for a hellscape dystopia.

Definitely higher stakes, I'd say.