Neal Stephenson: preference

Transcript context

…How bullish are you on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies? Do they have some kind of killer application? Or are they a novelty? So far, it seems like they’re a bit of a solution in search of a problem. I think that the nonmonetary applications of distributed ledgers seem to be more interesting than just making money. When people want to talk to me about a new cryptocurrency, I tend not to be super interested in continuing that conversation. But when they want to talk to me about using distributed ledgers to enable some other kind of initiative, then frequently, it can get very interesting indeed. I just had a conversation last night with a friend of mine here who’s looking at a really cool possible new application of distributed ledgers. Whether that distributed ledger is based on blockchain, I think, is a separate question. Blockchain seems to be a pretty complicated and expensive way of doing that. Here’s a reader question, and I quote: “Are you, in part or in whole, Satoshi Nakamoto?”…

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