Why We’ll Need Blockchains

Blockchains still look like toys. Bitcoin is thought of as a currency for speculators. Ethereum is an odd experiment where people launch coins out of thin air. If you read most of the headlines, you wouldn’t think these things matter much beyond a small corner of the internet.

But I think they’re inevitable.

Not because the current versions are perfect — they’re not. They’re slow, expensive, clumsy to use. And not because they’ve “proven” themselves — they haven’t yet. They’re inevitable because they’re solving a problem that the world doesn’t fully realize it has: how to build shared infrastructure for coordination in the digital age.

The Old Infrastructure is Breaking

Every era has an invisible layer of infrastructure that makes it work. For the Industrial Age, it was factories, railroads, and nation-states. For the Knowledge Era, it’s data networks, cities as platforms, and global flows of capital.

The problem is, the old coordination mechanisms — governments, firms, banks — don’t scale to this new environment. They’re designed for local and slow. But the world is now global and fast.

Look at finance: we’ve built an economy where a trade in Singapore ripples instantly to New York, but the settlement system is days behind. Look at governance: problems like climate change or migration ignore borders, but our institutions can’t.

The result is friction. Systems that look sophisticated on the surface but still run on paperwork, trust in middlemen, and political bottlenecks underneath.

Why Blockchains Are Different

Blockchains are the first credible attempt at a new kind of coordination infrastructure.

They let strangers agree on a single version of events without needing to trust each other. That’s a bigger deal than it sounds. If you can all agree on who owns what, and that record is unfakeable, you’ve just reinvented property rights for the digital age.

The early applications — coins, tokens, DAOs — may look trivial. But history shows new infrastructure always starts trivial. Railroads began with coal. The internet began with emails. If something is genuinely new, the first uses will look like toys.

The point isn’t what blockchains are doing now. The point is what they make possible: coordination without permission.

The Supportive Pieces

When I think about cities, economies, and governance — the other areas I’ve been studying — they all circle back to the same thing.

Cities are becoming more data-driven, but who owns the data? Economies are experimenting with universal income, but who distributes it fairly? Governance is straining under polarization, but who enforces rules everyone can agree on?

Each question has the same structure: we need a shared ledger of truth that no one can control alone. That’s exactly what blockchains are.

The Inevitability Test

How do you tell if a technology is inevitable? Not by asking “is it ready?” but by asking “is there another way?”

If you look at the problems of coordination in a global, digital world, there really isn’t. Either we keep patching old systems with more bureaucracy, more surveillance, more intermediaries — or we build neutral infrastructure that anyone can use and no one can fully control.

That’s what blockchains are.

Conclusions

None of this is certain. Blockchains could fail for years, stumble under their own hype, or take decades to mature. Maybe the names we know today won’t even exist tomorrow.

But the deeper idea — that we need an incorruptible base layer for coordination — will stick. The world is too interconnected and too fast for the old machinery to keep up. Something like blockchains has to exist.

And once you see that, the question isn’t if but when.