[lawrenceyan]

This piece totally misreads the temperament of actual builders imo. The author confuses a malicious will to power with a genuine, if sometimes naive, optimism that code/crypto can solve human coordination problems.

[jhbadger]

I think both things can be true simultaneously. Like in the Russian Revolution, there can be a mass of people motivated by a sincere, if naive, optimism in a new way to organize society, but they can get used by people like Lenin and Stalin who were primarily motivated by their thirst for power.

[cassepipe]

Although that may be a lack of historical knowledge on my part, Lenin does not strike me as suffering from a thirst of power but as sincere ideologue (in rare combination with a good dose of pragmatism, see his critique and later repression of "leftists" and his adoption of the NEP)

[phs318u]

No idea why you're getting downvoted. That's exactly how it played out. Though the "mass of people" rapidly lost their naivete.