eg to take the highest profile example with the most consequences, George W Bush got elected because people were confused with butterfly ballots and then it took too long to do a recount in Florida so the Supreme Court had to step in and stop the recount … as a result we got 9/11 (negligence) the invasion of Iraq (lots of excess deaths and destruction of large swaths of the middle east) the PATRIOT Act (erosion of civil liberties) and much more. Imagine if we had a secure system alongside the paper ballots that involved Merkle Trees and multi-factor verification for voting, so everyone could verify theirvote and participation would be higher. Banking apps are secure enough for people, why not this…
I wrote an article on CoinDesk about this very thing two years ago: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/03/12/in-defense-of-block...
Anyway, going back to “feature not a bug”. The real problem is Blockchain. It uses the full power of the network on every transaction, so it costs just as much to transfer $500 million in one shot as it does $0.50 — that is the wrong pricing structure. It is too cheap to transfer huge amounts and circumvent capital controls, do money laundering etc. The “world computer” is a glorified mainframe with “gas” playing the role of renting time on the mainframe. “Flash loans” shouldn’t be possible, they only are because one transaction in the world can happen at a time.
When we move past blockchains, we will have proper pricing of securing transactions (in % of the amount being managed). And then we can build reversibility ON TOP OF the non-reversible architecture.
The non-reversible architecture and finality in the vast majority of transactions is a GOOD thing just as it is in most databases. Reversibility should be explicitly built on top of it.
Smart contracts and other things are great and we have only scratched the surface because Blockchain holds them back. Having the rules stated upfront and enforced without government violence is great. For example copyright and DRM is being replaced with NFTs and POAPs. Old boys clubs are being replaced with DAOs. New non-coercive business models are emerging. Open source and journalism and other digital content can be monetized without SWAT teams raiding grandmas. Just one of hundreds of innovations.
People just cling to the old ways because the technology is not mature yet.