The speculation has burned off. Most of what got built is gone or forgotten - the party's over. What's left with us is after-party landscape, sticky floor and the broken bottles. But these sobering moments, once the hangover sets in, are exactly when the questions bite sharp. So it's a good moment to ask: what was blockchain technology for in the first place?
The answer most people reach for is "removing middlemen." But that's an answer to a smaller question. To see what blockchain is really aimed at, you have to go one level deeper - past the intermediaries, past the technical machinery - to the thing underneath both.
The problem
Human nature is unreliable, and it fails us in a specific, repeating way. Give a person power over something shared, and sooner or later they bend it toward their own interest. Not always, not everyone - but reliably enough, across enough people, that you can treat it as a constant.
Let me give you the smallest possible version of it. Years ago, as a student, I was queuing at the post office on our campus to pay a fee for an exam application - exam season, crowded, a bit chaotic. At the door stood a middle-aged security guard whose entire job was to regulate who went in and who goes out. But you could watch it happen in real time. The tiny scrap of authority went to his head. Instead of just doing the procedural thing, he got rude, made people wait, made sure everyone understood he was above them. And my conclusion was that this wasn't his personal problem. It was human nature problem talking through him. Flawed human nature talking through a thousand historical faces, across cultures, historical periods and position of power we've ever invented. It was just same old human nature doing it's thing, nothing more.
And it really is a constant. It doesn't matter what the culture is, how rich the society is, how good its anti-corruption laws are, or how transparent its institutions claim to be. These things change the rate. They don't change the direction. Sooner or later, someone with power over a shared resource, or post office entry door, will find a way to put themselves first and to missus.
This is the very old problem that plagued our societies for the centuries. Just look at how much of civilization is actually a response to it. Law. The separation of powers. Audits and oversight. Transparency requirements. A free press. Term limits. Cultural norms, honor and shame. Strip away the specifics and they're all the same kind of move: attempts to temper human nature from the outside. Every one of them is a railing built around the same cliff. Attempted behavioral modifiers with more or less historical success.
And basically every one of them shares the same flaw. The railing is also built and maintained by humans. The auditor can be bought. The judge has interests. The transparency report is written by the people it's meant to expose. We've been patching problem for millennia with tools that are made of the very material that causes it. That's why the patches are partial - they slow the failure, they never stop it.
What Was That Blockchain Actually For?
Blockchain is the first technological attempt to address this problem from a different angel - not by tempering human nature, but by removing the human from the loop entirely. Where possible. Lowering the space where misuse can happen. That's all.
Where every previous tool said "let's constrain the person in power," blockchain says "let's build a protocol that remove humans from risky loops!" The code should executes the same way every time, for everyone, regardless of who's asking. There's no official to lobby, no clerk to bribe, no authority whose discretion you have to trust, because there's no discretion left to misuse.
That's the real claim, and it's worth stating precisely: blockchain doesn't make people honest. It makes their honesty unnecessary. It's the first time we've tried to address subjective distortion of shared power not with a better human check on humans, but by taking the human out of the decision altogether lowering surface where misuse can happen (not entirely eradicating, we will come back to this later).
How?
That's the why, and it has to come first - once you see the real target, everything else falls into place as means to that end. But "remove the human from the loop" is an ambition, not a system. Three more questions turn it into something you can actually reason about, and each is only answerable once the one before it is settled. What does the protocol promise? How is it really built? And what can you honestly do with it?
The protocol: what it promises, and on what condition
If the point is a system that runs without a trusted human at its center, the protocol is what makes that possible - and its promises are the famous words: immutability, censorship-resistance, one canonical chain. The trap is treating them as unconditional. They aren't. Three things to keep apart: the mechanism (proof-of-work, proof-of-stake) is the how; the guarantee (immutability) is the what; and the assumptions (honest majority, bounded network delay, rational actors) are the fine print.
We recite the what and never say the under what conditions out loud - which is exactly where every famous failure lives. A 51% attack isn't a bug in the mechanism; the mechanism works as designed. What broke is the assumption underneath it. Immutability was always immutability-given-honest-majority. We just dropped the second half. A guarantee whose preconditions you don't state isn't a guarantee. It's a marketing claim.
The machinery: the spec versus the thing that actually runs
The protocol is a clean mathematical object with theorems. The thing actually running is a client - written by specific people, carrying properties the protocol never promised: consensus bugs, MEV, governance, the social layer that decides which fork is "real" when the chain splits.
The protocol is mathematical; the running blockchain is: social, cyrptograpical, economical and technical system. All this mixed together. The map is not the territory, and most of the real engineering - and the real drama - happens in the gap between those dimensions. Notice what surfaces here: the human we removed in the "why" creeps back in "how". Not as the official with discretion over your case, but as the person who writes the client, who governs the upgrade, who decides which fork to keep building on. Blockchain doesn't abolish human judgment. It relocates it - from the inside of every transaction to the edges of the system, where it's rarer, more visible, and harder to exercise quietly. That's a real improvement. It is not the same thing as the human disappearing.
And there's a deepest edge, the one that should worry you most: layer zero - the core developers, the community, the culture that produces a neutral protocol in the first place. That neutrality was itself an assumption. It held only as long as the people building the thing didn't want to bend it. But teams change. Culture drifts. A core team gets infiltrated, or simply captured, by people with different intentions, and now a totally different set of values is being projected onto the canvas of the technology - from the one position no consensus mechanism can defend. Call it the revenge of human nature: it doesn't break the cryptography, it walks in through the only door cryptography was never able to lock. This is the long-lasting problem of the field. Governance, and the human ability to capture the position from which the nature of the technology itself is decided.
So what is it good for?
One question settles it, and it points straight back at the beginning: does this remove a human point of failure that no law or audit could ever reliably fix? If yes, it's a real candidate. If the honest answer is "a trustworthy person already handles this fine," you're not solving the human-nature problem - you're just bolting a chain onto something that didn't need one.
Most of the hype fails that test. "Supply chain on the blockchain" is the textbook miss: the hard part was never storing the record, it was whether the human typing "ethically sourced" told the truth. The chain faithfully records the lie - you didn't remove the human failure, you notarized it. What passes points straight at the original target: money under an issuer who can debase or freeze it (remove the issuer, nothing left to debase), or value transfer an intermediary can be compelled to block - capital controls, a hostile border, a dissident (remove the intermediary, no one left to compel). Same shape every time: not "we trust the system more than the person," but "there is no longer a person whose honesty we're forced to depend on."
That problem is ancient. Blockchain is just the first tool we've built that doesn't try to make us better, and instead tries to make our weakness irrelevant until we really become better. To create better society without necessary having to create better people.
