Technology as Power Transfer
Though I've forsaken cryptocurrency and blockchain in my personal and professional life, I currently work in homomorphic encryption. Both areas have fertile soil for new ideas in cryptography, and so the blockchain world remains in my periphery. As much as I avoid the topic, I can't avoid people in my field who work on it.
A mild silver lining of that reality is that most of the people I interact with who work in blockchain appear to be in it for the math, and put up with the blockchain parts for funding. To be clear, that crosses an ethical line for me personally—and I've been thinking a lot about how to express my thoughts about this that is both meaningfully persuasive and intellectually honest in the essay that will close Practical Math for Programmers. But shaming them about not meeting my ethical standards also doesn't feel productive.
And occasionally, I find people who have a similar persuasion to me, and in an appropriately private setting we sometimes discuss how one might frame the problems of Bitcoin and blockchain to the non-cryptographers in their lives who have bought into the hype—and for whom recent events have not convinced them otherwise.
