Building for the Blockchain
A blockchain ensures that some sequence of agreements was made in a way that everyone can trust.  If everyone keeps their secret keys secure and solely in their possession, then no activity can be forged on the network by any significant likelihood.<p>Anywhere this concept has value, a blockchain has value.  That&#x27;s all there is to it.  The rest is fairy dust and noise.<p>I don&#x27;t really follow a lot of the discussion in this article.  As I see it, most of the buzz around blockchains is just wild speculation and fantasy.  For example, why would be want a &quot;fat&quot; protocol?  In any other context in technology, &quot;fat&quot; <i>anything</i> is considered bad.  Technologies are supposed to be &quot;thin&quot;, simple, efficient, and composable.  So why would the opposite be praised in this case?  Furthermore, the characterization of existing foundational internet protocols as &quot;thin&quot; and blockchain protocols as &quot;fat&quot; seems like an inversion of truths.  By my understanding, it would take as long or much longer to become well versed in all the nitty-gritty details of TCP&#x2F;IP, DNS, etc. than it would to gain a solid understanding of Ethereum. 
 Also, where is the need for software ecosystem micro-economies?<p>None of this makes any logical sense to me.  It seems people have gotten it in their heads that the simple technological innovations of hash trees and distributed consensus protocols are going to somehow make them rich.  And they&#x27;re finding weird ways of justifying this.