As to opinions about the shortcomings of the language itself, or the standard run-times, it’s important to realize that every developer has a different background, different experience, different needs, temperament, values, and a slew of other cultural motivations and concerns — individual opinions will always be largely personal and, to some degree, non-technical in nature.

I respect the idealism of blockchain developers who, I believe, are sincere in their faith that they are building a better world. But I am confounded by their inability to see that they are falling victim to exactly the same fallacies their hacker forebears embraced: this notion that we can code ourselves out of the deep holes we’ve dug; that we are building utopias in our virtualities that will finesse away the imperfections of human character.

Contrary to mainstream thinking that this new technology is unregulated, it’s really quite the opposite. These systems apply the strictest of rules under highly deterministic and predictable models that are regulated through mathematics. In the future, industry will be regulated not just by institutions and committees but by algorithms and mathematics. The new technology will gradually out-regulate the regulators and, in many cases, make them obsolete because the new system offers more certainty. Antonopoulos explains that “the opposite of authoritarianism is not chaos, but autonomy.”