Bitcoin is now generally understood to be A Thing, and a particularly exciting one at that. Once-fashionable skepticism for its own sake is quickly becoming less click-worthy than this gripping Stephensonian saga written in real time. Take care you don't go overboard. I've done it myself. I'm sure I still do, in some way or another. There are many trees and the forest is still taking shape. And boy, can those trees captivate. This presents new problems.

Visions receive more attention than game plans. We know we want to "decentralize," at least. Growing pains notwithstanding, the old ways simply will not do. Power corrupts, we are reminded from birth. The worst get on top, fewer learn later. Men are not angels but too many of them still run the world. No, our doomed synthetic seraphocracy must go.

We say we desire the opposite: A way to remove the need for trust in human judgment among the commanding heights. Or, as the Telegraph put it yesterday, an "anarchic future where centralised power of any kind will dissolve." Imperial obsolescence or a Techno-Leviathan, depending on your ideological bent. Creatively destroying our inherited repositories of human derp and replacing them with a null set. Well, more like a mostly-unbreakable cryptographic constitution that enforces institutional neutrality. Upon this first-best taxis will a constellation of (monotonic) cosmos proliferate. Good Things should follow, in whatever form you please.

In its most basic form, this cryptoinstitutional utopianism belies a seductive, but incomplete, understanding of both human social systems and of Bitcoin's potential.

Let's start with the easy stuff: human nature.

Partly grounded in hopeful affiliation and WEIRD moral universalism, cryptoinstitutional utopianism misses the forest of human sociality for the trees that line adherents' individual Minecraft plots. It does not consider that institutions may be largely endogenous to  human populations or that some human populations may prefer their "non-inclusive" institutions, thank you very much. Nor that Alice and Bob are secretly guided by a grab-bag of heuristics, impulses, and tribal connections. Like it or not, we too are compelled by a number of "irrational" drives—religious, familial, and national—that thwart our tidy utility models and foil the according schemata for "optimizing" outcomes. Bitcoin provides us with tools, but these will not immediately transform worldly humans into the homo economicus who would best wield them. Our monkey brains, at least in the foreseeable future, are here to stay.

We should therefore not be surprised when Bitcoin-based institutions emerge with the same deficiencies that riddled outdated models. It is not the protcol's fault, for instance, that consumers fork over their private keys to third party processors without batting an eyelash. And why would they balk? Top Bitcoin boosters promote expansion as an end in itself, a confederacy of carpetbaggers are too eager to oblige. (Say what you will, at least Tim May was forthright.) Inspired amateurs can't help that they harbor normal human distastes for abstraction. Trust in math? Yeah, right. They are drawn to familiar forms so Xapo gives them debit cards. We truly trumpet trustless exchange in name only. "Bitcoin" is decentralized, "Bitcoin" is private, "Bitcoin" is secure…oh, but Circle is my #brand. The lesson here is that if you're going to mass market a commercial anti-value, you should expect a lot of nihilistic consumption.

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