Most of the fraud that exists out there is due to social hacking. There is no real problem a blockchain solves.
The surprising thing is how many people are falling for it.
For example, blockchain is allowing many Russians to move capital out of the country while the state locks down foreign currency transactions. That's a real problem that's getting solved, and I'm sure in some cases it's good people trying their best to survive. On the other hand, it also allows individuals or organizations to avoid sanctions or paying taxes. The cost isn't worth it. I'd rather not have the crime, schemes, and pollution that so often come with crypto. Plus all the countless stories of good people losing all their money because they forgot their password to their cryptowallet.
Like it or not, this means it's breaking the law. So this is just another way of saying that it allows you to break the laws you don't agree with. (also the ones you do agree with, of course)
> That's a real problem that's getting solved
On the flip side it's a real law that's being broken.
So your "on the one hand, on the other hand" is "it allows people to commit good crimes, but also commit bad crimes".
The law isn't perfect. Absolutely not. But the solution to bad law isn't "no law". That's not the path to a good future.
There are people out there who think all taxation is theft, and that tax evasion is as moral as smuggling money out of Russia. Of course others say exactly the same, but mean that they are both immoral.
This morality will, of course, flip along with the geopolitical situation.
... Unless, of course, your ethics are utilitarian in nature - in which case, you will need to do a full accounting of all plausibly foreseeable consequences of creating this software - the same kind of accounting that was done by people who were philosophically motivated to leak nuclear secrets to the USSR.
Breaking a law is not obviously immoral. Many people have broken traffic laws to save a life by getting them to the hospital, to give an obvious example.
(well, less obvious in case they actually hit someone. The morality shouldn't depend on the outcome. Anyway, this is getting a bit too deep)
I think both your options, which seem like they're referring to realpolitik and utilitarianism, are way too simplified to even be useful for practical application on this topic. And they are most certainly not an exhaustive list of the options.
So no, it's neither A nor B.
And as for utilitarianism, the problem with blockchain is exactly it's LARPing strength: "It's math". It's pretending that you have the right, today, to decide morality, and indeed utility, for all of time.
And you can't. Adding anonyminity to the mix means that you are even hiding evidence of something going wrong with your predictions.
Looking forward to seeing President Eric Trump ordering the treasury to transfer everything into some Monero account? That may impeach him, but the money is gone forever.
If it's the same guy looting Fort Knox, then we can send people to get the things back.
You seemed to have understood my "Bad law X" vs "No law X". No, I mean "Bad law X" vs "No laws what-so-ever", which is the actual tradeoff being done here.
That said, there were plenty of inventions used by spies against The Third Reich. Those inventions, in of themselves, could be used to destabilize any possible state; but the fact that they were being used by real heroes in the fight against injustice does, at least in part, redeem them. We both may not like the practical consequences of most of what blockchain has to offer, but I think it would be intellectually dishonest to pretend as if there were no benefit. There is some partial benefit to blockchain, even if it is mostly a scam.
That doesn't conflict with saying "A system that prevents laws is absolutely horrible and immoral".
As for people who aren't building general-purpose distributed databases, a solution to the Byzantine generals problem is more of a solution to a problem that they don't have - as other posts in this thread demonstrate.
1) The original BTC paper was a huge breakthrough in decentralized systems.
2) Most "blockchain" projects today are merely elaborate Ponzis.
Whether it's Byzantine fault tolerance, or cryptoeconomics, there are some good solutions there. People's issues tend to be whether the solutions are applicable to the world, and/or useful.
I still hold out a hope (perhaps a fantasy) that all the talent and money funneling into all this, combined with the fundamentally interest and novel technology behind it, will come up with something truly innovative. It just seems like it must, right? But every new thing (most recently this NFT stuff) that comes out just further and further confirms my long-held tentative conclusion that there really isn't much there, there.
Pretty innovative and useful stuff...
Aave seems like something that is useful within the bubble of cryptocurrency traders, but not outside it. It strikes me as a meta thing, not a thing. It doesn't work if cryptocurrencies are never useful for anything outside that bubble.
Does Dai have a strategy for being actually useful as a currency to purchase things? Bitcoin has been trying to be useful as that for a decade with very little success.
Yearn seems to be in the same boat as Aave, it only exists in this bubble of cryptocurrency speculation.
None of this stuff or anything adjacent to it exists for anyone I interact with in my life outside of this website. What will blockchain technology be known for amongst people who are neither computer science nerds nor financial speculators? If it's just a new kind of speculative asset, like a new kind of derivative, then fine, that's innovative in a way, but it is extremely niche.
I don't think they are falling for it, I think they are mostly trying to talk up their speculative investments. (Be they direct I-own-coins financial investments, or indirect I-make-money-by-consulting or I-am-building-a-startup carreer 'investments'.)