Governments are the largest perpetuators of the "blockchain for real world assets" silliness. Non technical managers tend to push for these sorts of things to get a "blockchain project" to their name. For some reason the idea of lying to the blockchain isn't something that occurs to them very often.
If something is effectively "magic" to someone, even in the base case, an improvement is just another sort of magic.
This is why I don't have a lot of confidence in big-picture types that don't know anything about computer science but hold some parallel business analogies in their head and think they can make decisions on that basis.
On the other side, sometimes interesting and valuable things can happen when you don't have reality as a constraint. I read (but have not verified) that William Gibson's world of cyberspace and internet etc. in the Sprawl books ended up being so attractive largely because he understood almost nothing about computers.
> I read (but have not verified) that William Gibson's world of cyberspace and internet etc. in the Sprawl books ended up being so attractive largely because he understood almost nothing about computers.
He knew enough to know that computers and computer hackers were not the stuff of noir-action-thrillers, but saw the potential in answering the question: what if they were?
To quote Gibson:
The only computers I’d ever seen in those days were things the size of the side of a barn. And then one day, I walked by a bus stop and there was an Apple poster. The poster was a photograph of a businessman’s jacketed, neatly cuffed arm holding a life-size representation of a real-life computer that was not much bigger than a laptop is today. Everyone is going to have one of these, I thought, and everyone is going to want to live inside them. And somehow I knew that the notional space behind all of the computer screens would be one single universe.
What I had was a sticky neologism and a very vague chain of associations between the bus-stop Apple IIc advertisement, the posture of the kids playing arcade games, and something I’d heard about from these hobbyist characters from Seattle called the Internet. It was more tedious and more technical than anything I’d ever heard anybody talk about. It made ham radio sound really exciting. But I understood that, sometimes, you could send messages through it, like a telegraph. I also knew that it had begun as a project to explore how we might communicate during a really shit-hot nuclear war.
…
I knew that cyberspace was exciting, but none of the people I knew who were actually involved in the nascent digital industry were exciting. I wondered what it would be like if they were exciting, stylish, and sexy.
> hold some parallel business analogies in their head and think they can make decisions on that basis
The advantage with folks like this is it becomes abundantly clear when they open their mouths that they have no idea what they are talking about most of the time.
The major disadvantage though is these people tend to be the loudest in the space, and are heard more since people tend to want to hear exciting sexy ideas over the mundane reality of things.
I'm reminded of the pitch I heard from the IBM salesperson talking about the "logarithms" they had that were solving client problems. (Being charitable, maybe he was a slide rule enthusiast)
I find it typically very easy to tell someone is full of crap, but trying to call it does not always work in one's favor. Definitely agree it is a good sign you should get yourself out of the situation
