You certainly might be right! But this is not a very convincing piece because you don't actually address the damning technical problems that well-informed critics of blockchain technology point to, perhaps because- as you candidly admit- this is a subject that's well outside your own area of expertise.

But the technical details are kind of the point. If you start from the assumption that "blockchain incentives, consensus mechanisms, and smart contracts can do it all in a fundamentally different, more decentralized way" then yes, obviously that's a big deal. But the question is whether that's true! And there's very good reason to think it isn't.

If we take the example of Bitcoin specifically, people have been making all of the exact same promises about radical decentralization and mass adoption for more than a decade now, but- at least in the narrow case of Bitcoin- it's all complete horseshit.

Economies of scale meant that mining became extremely centralized early on, and a handful of men (I believe they're all men) now control the overwhelming majority of all mining power, meaning that Bitcoin is not actually "trustless" in any real sense. So, uh, why not just have those same guys run a database that keeps track of who owns which Bitcoins and save us all ~180TWh of electricity every year?

Meanwhile mass adoption is a practical impossibility because the whole system has a *hard theoretical limit* of ten transactions per second (it's about half that in actual practice). For comparison, the Visa network does about 1,700 transactions per second and could hypothetically do many more. Bitcoin boosters are generally either not aware of this inconvenient fact, or will gesture wildly in the direction of some piece of vaporware (like the much-hyped and utterly harebrained Lightning Network) that's always just a few years away. And this is not some hypothetical future problem! The network *already* ground to halt in 2017, with hundreds of thousands of unconfirmed transactions getting stuck in limbo, and has largely ceased to function as an actual payment system since then.

And the truly wild thing is that none of this mattered for the price of Bitcoin! The price just kept going up even as it became clear that the network is fundamentally broken! It was almost as though the technology was never really the point, anymore than the specific qualities of the tulips or the Beanie Babies were the point in past speculative manias.

So I don't know, maybe some of these Ethereum apps are actually different, and not just efforts to spark their own little bubbles. (After all, the Ethereum network can handle a whopping 30 transactions per second. Look out VISA!) But this stuff sounds *exactly* like the hype I've been hearing from Bitcoiners for a decade now, so you'll have to forgive me for being skeptical.