Describing cryptocurrencies as a transaction layer does not describe the value. Communicating “Adam paid Bob X coins” is not hard.
What’s hard is having everyone agree on the same history of transactions. That’s what cryptocurrencies provide. There is an enormous amount of accounting and verification work that goes on within banking systems to solve the verification problem.
My argument was not that every human role has a cost that needs to be factored in, but that any human role has a high cost, and a large number of human roles require very large amounts of energy to support.
A fair bit of what you describe also can in fact be done with just smart contracts where the contract and those who sign it (the human customers) makes the decision without any middleman (without a human escrow agent).
What’s hard is having everyone agree on the same history of transactions. That’s what cryptocurrencies provide. There is an enormous amount of accounting and verification work that goes on within banking systems to solve the verification problem.
My argument was not that every human role has a cost that needs to be factored in, but that any human role has a high cost, and a large number of human roles require very large amounts of energy to support.
A fair bit of what you describe also can in fact be done with just smart contracts where the contract and those who sign it (the human customers) makes the decision without any middleman (without a human escrow agent).