I haven’t read Dixon’s book, so I can’t discuss book-specific arguments. I’d address points that are more general. (1) “It's profoundly weird to read RSS's obituary as a person who checks her very-much-still-alive feed reader several times a day to get everything from cryptocurrency news to dinner ideas, and who rarely encounters a website that doesn't provide a functional feed.” I know that platforms like Flipboard & basically all podcasts use RSS. But RSS is still a pretty niche solution compared to social media & newsletters, which ate RSS’ lunch. (2) “Throughout the book, he refers to "software-enforced", "strong commitments" from blockchains that they won't ever change aspects of the code out from under their users. The problem with this argument is that it overlooks the fact that blockchains can and regularly do change their code — something Dixon himself acknowledges elsewhere when he refers to community consensus to implement software changes. Perhaps he believes that "community consensus" will somehow always reflect the desires of each member of the community, and that that governance mechanism can't or won't ever be captured, but a brief look at some community-governed blockchain projects over the past few years should be enough to disabuse anyone of that misapprehension.” Ofc these commitments aren’t carved in stone - we all know Ethereum’s 2016 fork. But the argument is not that everyone will be 100% happy all the time with the software they use The argument is that your digital life won’t be decided by five unaccountable guys in Palo Alto. (3) “blockchains have yet to produce any viable projects despite hardly being a recent invention“ It’s not true. Stablecoins alone are a 10X improvement for millions of people and have a huge adoption. (More on that: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories?index=0x65af028737c5943a6191c4f97da7d0ebbd54c12e85337eb1e232e4abf04b4c25c2fc4abd) NFT art is a 10X improvement for digital artists who couldn’t monetize their work efficiently. (4) “He's correct that new hardware products often take a while to get off the ground — advances in hardware are often required to make these products small enough, cheap enough, or functional enough for mainstream adoption. His only other software example is "AI", a vague and broad term that encompasses many technologies that have been in widespread use for years and years, despite Dixon's claim that it is only just now "going mainstream, eighty years from its inception". He is of course referring only to large language models (a small subset of the technologies broadly termed "AI") which have indeed enjoyed breakthroughs lately thanks to advances in — you guessed it — hardware (GPUs). Blockchains have no such hardware hurdles to overcome, and Dixon does not offer any explanation of what exactly they're waiting for or why it's taking so long.” I’m not an AI expert, but saying “AI enjoyed breakthrough only because we have faster GPUs” is pretty offensive to all AI engineers who worked their asses off to first invent GPTs, then apply them and do years of hardcore R&D to optimize them. Anyway, the primary reason blockchains have been taking so long is the infrastructure and user adoption cycles. When Jeff Bezos started Amazon, he didn't have to invent credit card payments, shipping & Internet. He could tap into these battle-tested solutions used by millions. With blockchains, we had to build most of the things from scratch, and it took time to do it right. *** It shouldn't be surprising that this review looks like this if it was written by "a researcher, software engineer, and prominent critic of cryptocurrencies and blockchain-based projects".