I sympathize with your position regarding trust, but the vast majority of people trust governments and corporations enough to use their digital services. I can think of a number of privacy-oriented services (e.g., in search, email, finance) including cryptocurrencies that have proven through their tiny market share that users simply doesn’t prioritize data security and privacy. If they did, people would refuse to use Google, Facebook, etc. — yet we continue to do so. For the minority who care enough to stop using established services, of course blockchain is a godsend. But the majority of developers want to cater to the market, and my article is intended in part for them.

Blockchain’s privacy model bakes in a level of privacy that assumes a radically trustless (N.B.: not necessarily distrustful) world. This trust model is so excessive for most practical purposes that I would go so far as to call it an entomological model. If we really think that the world is so trustless, then we should be questioning many, many fundamental factors of our very existence: politics, sex, food, friendship, religion, work, etc. Money is a technology that rises to such a critical standard. I would argue that sharing cat photos, controlling logistical supply chains, or 99% of the current applications of blockchain simply do not.

Or another way of putting it: if your perspective is that the world is so trustless that we must bake blockchain into everything, then probably blockchain should be the least of our worries. There are activists who hold that worldview and see blockchain as a tool to reshape society, but that’s a far cry from how people were talking about blockchain when I published my article (the hype has died down considerably since then).