Dunning-Kruger much? :P Lots of academic fields look like gibberish to a lay audience. (I suspect GPT could pass a Turing test, of showing real and fake academic papers to those outside the relevant disciplines.)

Rent-seeking is not exactly uncontroversial amongst economists (though some claim it only occurs through state intervention, which is a view I don't share). The most egregious examples are fee-simple ground rents (Adam Smith called a landlord's right to rents a "monopoly price... apportioned to what the farmer can afford to pay"); and many forms of patents (eg, "discovering" a certain curvature of rounded corners, or a "one-click buy button").

There's certainly an argument that some forms of rent are net-productive ways to create markets for labor exchange, which would be difficult to capture otherwise, so I'm not arguing against rent as a broad category: only that some rents are unearned, and therefore a net drag on real wealth creation.

I think it's a fair criticism, which is why I don't have a high degree of confidence in Bitcoin itself, or the political-economy narrative of "crypto-anarchism". The fact that there's still not a crypto eBay is damning. (Though it's not clear where the right point of comparison is: do we measure from TBL's WWW, or ARPAnet? The earliest chains are more transport layer than application layer.)

That said, the kinds of innovation I'm talking about are still young: DAOs have only existed since 2016, and many of the non-speculative projects I mentioned (mutual aid, mutual credit) are only a couple years old.

Maybe the critics are right, and "crypto" is a flash in the pan unable to deliver on its promises, and destined to be a cautionary tale, like tulips or Beanie Babies. But it might be an expensive question to get wrong: if cryptographic mechanisms for distributed coordination are able to outcompete firms (per Coase), or states (the Global South moreso than the West), that "basin of attraction" could be non-trivial to disrupt, just as it's now non-trivial to defeat the chicken-and-egg problem of making a new eBay. If any aspect of the future is to be based on cryptographic coordination, I'd rather the tech (and culture) be truly democratic and open, not reliant upon the neo-oligarchs of BTC. Refusing to engage in the space at all is ceding the territory.