This New York Times Magazine article covers quite a few aspects of Bitcoin and it's blockchain brethren, but the ones I'm interested in are identity and token scarcity. The article has much to say on the enabling effects of the technology in this area, but I can't help but think about other, simpler, ways to do the same thing.

Indieweb is all about identity, so we have that one solved. I think token scarcity could be done too... after all, we get to decide what our websites hand out. It's easy to imagine a system where urls carry value and reciprocal links validate a value relationship. And it would avoid the FOMO problem in the crypto currency world which conflates token functionality with wild speculation on the token's value. The tokens your own website hands out will never be hoarded by speculators, I promise. ;-)

So what does the blockchain provide that far simpler, url based systems do not? Immutability for one, link-rot is our enemy when relying on urls as a value system. But if urls had more explicit value, maybe we would put more effort into keeping them around? The blockchain is interesting, but I think it's worth asking what problems it's trying to solve and what other solutions might look like.