Blockchain's key promise of no-need-for-trusted-parties tech is largely irrelevant; systems built on trust, norms, and institutions inherently function better
Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future. Its failure to achieve adoption to date … Tweets: @naval , @francoisz , @frankpasquale , @glynmoody , and @joshelman Tweets: @naval : The dirty secrets of blockchains: they don't scale (yet), aren't really decentralized, distribute wealth poorly, lack killer apps, and run on a controlled Internet. Back to work. https://twitter.com/... Franois Zaninotto / @francoisz : Blockchain is a bad vision for the future. A future where it's impossible to enforce laws, a future where there are no trusted intermediaries. That's not our present, either - so the #blockchain is useless http://medium.com/... Frank Pasquale / @frankpasquale : “Instead of directing resources to the elimination of trust, we should direct our resources to the creation of trust” http://medium.com/... Essential blockchain reading via @angela_walch See also http://papers.ssrn.com/... Glyn Moody / @glynmoody : “Projects based on the elimination of trust have failed to capture customers' interest because trust is actually so damn valuable.” interesting points #blockchain http://twitter.com/... Josh Elman / @joshelman : Thought provoking line from this post: “ there is no single person in existence who had a problem they wanted to solve, discovered that an available blockchain solution was the best way to solve it, and therefore became a blockchain enthusiast” http://medium.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Stinchcombe's essay lands at the peak of a 2018 argument that had been building all quarter: weeks earlier, TechCrunch told blockchain startups to stop promising a decentralized Internet and build small, viable apps instead, while Bloomberg framed Bitcoin and ICOs as a 1999-style bubble. His contribution is sharper than either — he attacks the founding premise itself, arguing that removing trusted intermediaries is a bug, not a feature.
The piece reads differently in hindsight because the corpus already contains its verdicts: the 2015 vision of Bitcoin powering an alternate Internet never materialized into adoption, and the most serious institutional attempt — the Australian Securities Exchange's plan to rebuild trading, clearing, and settlement on blockchain — was abandoned in November 2022. Even sympathetic voices like Matthew Green's 2022 defense concede the point by reframing crypto around payments utility rather than trust elimination.
First-order effects
- Startups whose pitch rests on disintermediation lose their strongest talking point: if Naval Ravikant's litany holds — blockchains don't scale, aren't really decentralized, distribute wealth poorly, and lack killer apps — then 'no trusted parties' stops being a value proposition and becomes a liability investors price against.
Second-order effects
- Serious adopters pivot from ideology to plumbing: instead of replacing courts, banks, and exchanges, projects like the ASX's target narrow back-office functions — and when even those fail, the market learns that trusted-party removal has no proven enterprise home.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, blockchain settles into a niche settlement-and-record technology judged by cost and reliability like any database, while the broader industry reframes trust as something to be engineered alongside institutions rather than abolished — a split visible in the 2022 defenses of crypto-as-payments versus the abandoned trustless megaprojects.
The trend: The industry is moving from selling the abolition of trusted intermediaries to accepting that trust, norms, and institutions are features any ledger must interoperate with — a repositioning that separates surviving payment-rail uses from failed trustless replacements.