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"People had to invent entirely new ways to explain it because our existing models didn't work" isn't a very good argument for it being real.

Why not? We made something and it takes time to understand its implications.

I mean, it's not even 'entirely new ways' to describe it. Bitcoin has been reinventing the finance industry one mistake at a time.

Tragedy of the commons is fully evident in the bitcoin block size debacle.

Cryptocurrency is wasting modern technology to recreate the economic system of the 1800s.

I would even venture to say the tangibility of precious metal-backed currencies in the 1800's made them still a step above cryptocurrencies currently.

> entirely new branch of economics

More like, everything old is new again. Nicholas Weaver called it "speedrunning 500 years of bad economic history".

I think the hard part is convincing people that it’s a new branch of economics and therefore the old rules need not apply.

I can understand mapping out a new branch of a field is nontrivial. But I’d also hope that domain experts could explain it well enough to bring others to a basic level of understanding without saying, “it’s too hard.”