Case Study 1: Two Views of the Same Technology

A Bitcoin Maximalist and a Crypto Skeptic Walk Into a Bar

Setting

It is a Friday evening in November 2025. Two old college friends — Mara Koenig and David Oyelaran — meet for dinner at a restaurant in Washington, D.C. They have not seen each other in two years, though they have followed each other's careers from a distance and occasionally exchanged sharp-edged text messages about cryptocurrency.

Mara is a senior policy researcher at a think tank focused on financial inclusion. She has spent the last six years studying mobile money adoption in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, and her field work has taken her to Nigeria, Kenya, the Philippines, and El Salvador. She holds Bitcoin and several stablecoins. She has seen, firsthand, people using cryptocurrency to survive economic crises. She identifies as a Bitcoin maximalist, though she would qualify that label — she is a maximalist about the problem that Bitcoin solves, not about Bitcoin's price.

David is a computer science professor at a major research university, specializing in distributed systems and network security. He has published peer-reviewed papers on blockchain consensus mechanisms, and he has served as a technical reviewer for two crypto startups (both of which he advised against launching). He holds no cryptocurrency. He has seen, firsthand, the gap between what blockchains claim to do and what they actually do. He identifies as a skeptic, though he would qualify that label — he is skeptical of the industry, not of the mathematics.

They are both well-informed. They have both done their homework. They are about to have the conversation that most people in the blockchain space avoid: an honest disagreement between two people who respect each other and cannot dismiss each other's evidence.

The Conversation

David: I read your paper on stablecoin adoption in Lagos. It was good work. But I have to ask — you buried the lede. Your own data shows that 73% of the users you surveyed were using stablecoins to speculate on price movements, not for remittances. Only 18% reported using them primarily for cross-border payments.

Mara: I didn't bury it. I discussed it in section four. But you're cherry-picking. The 18% who use stablecoins for remittances are saving an average of $47 per transaction compared to Western Union. For a family receiving $200 a month from a relative working abroad, that is a 23% increase in the money that actually arrives. Over a year, that is $564. In a country where the median annual income is around $2,000, that is transformative.

David: I don't dispute the math. I dispute the attribution. You're crediting the blockchain for the cost reduction, but the cost reduction comes from eliminating the intermediary — Western Union, MoneyGram, whoever. You could achieve the same cost reduction with any digital transfer mechanism. M-Pesa does it without a blockchain. India's UPI does it without a blockchain. The blockchain is incidental to the value proposition.

Mara: It is not incidental. M-Pesa works within Kenya. UPI works within India. Neither of them works for a Nigerian sending money to a family member in Cameroon, or a Filipino worker in Dubai sending money to Manila through a Bangladeshi hawala broker. Cross-border payments are the use case, and the blockchain is the only infrastructure that works across borders without requiring bilateral agreements between national payment systems.

David: SWIFT works across borders.

Mara: SWIFT works for banks. Not for the 1.4 billion adults who do not have bank accounts. And SWIFT takes three to five business days and charges correspondent banking fees that make Western Union look reasonable.

David: Fair enough. But here is my problem. You are describing a real pain point — cross-border remittances for the unbanked — and a real solution — cheap digital transfers. What I am not convinced of is that the solution requires a blockchain specifically. Why not a centralized digital payment platform designed for cross-border transfers? Wise, formerly TransferWise, has reduced cross-border remittance costs dramatically. They do not use a blockchain.

Mara: Wise operates in 80 countries. There are 195 countries. The countries Wise does not serve are precisely the countries where remittance costs are highest and financial need is greatest. Why doesn't Wise serve them? Because the regulatory and banking infrastructure doesn't exist to support their model. They need banking partners in both the sending and receiving countries. A blockchain-based system does not need banking partners. It needs internet access and a smartphone.

David: And a user who understands private key management, which —

Mara: Which is a UX problem, not an architectural problem. And it is being solved. Custodial wallets, social recovery, smart-contract wallets with guardians — the user experience in 2025 is dramatically better than 2020.

David: I will grant you that the UX is improving. But let me press on a different point. You said "it needs internet access and a smartphone." In the populations you study, what percentage have reliable internet access and a smartphone?

Mara: In urban Lagos, above 80%. In rural sub-Saharan Africa, it varies — 30% to 60% depending on the country. But here is the thing, David: the same constraint applies to every digital solution, including the centralized ones you prefer. If we are going to exclude blockchain because some people lack internet access, we have to exclude M-Pesa and UPI and Wise for the same reason.

David: That is a fair point. Let me try a different angle. The censorship-resistance argument.

Mara: Go ahead.

David: You have written compellingly about the Nigerian government freezing accounts of #EndSARS protesters. I do not dispute that this happened. I do not dispute that it was wrong. But I want to push back on the implication that censorship resistance is a general-purpose argument for cryptocurrency. The number of people in the world who need censorship-resistant money — dissidents, activists, journalists under authoritarian regimes — is in the hundreds of thousands. Maybe low millions. The number of people who are harmed by the fraud, scams, and volatility that the crypto ecosystem enables is in the tens of millions. You are proposing to build a global financial system optimized for the needs of a small population while imposing costs on a much larger one.

Mara: That framing assumes a zero-sum trade-off that does not exist. Censorship-resistant money can coexist with regulated money. The existence of Bitcoin does not prevent the existence of bank accounts. And I would challenge your numbers. You say hundreds of thousands need censorship-resistant money. The population of countries classified as "not free" by Freedom House is 3.8 billion. Not all of them are activists, but all of them live under governments that could, at any time, weaponize financial infrastructure against them. The argument for censorship resistance is not "this helps dissidents." It is "this creates an option that did not previously exist, and options have value even when they are not exercised."

David: An option that comes with a cost. Bitcoin's volatility means that anyone who holds it for censorship resistance is also exposed to potentially massive purchasing-power losses. The Venezuelan who converted bolivars to Bitcoin in January 2021 and needed to spend that Bitcoin in June 2022 lost more than half their purchasing power — not because of Venezuelan inflation, but because of Bitcoin's price collapse. You have replaced government monetary policy risk with crypto market risk. Is that actually better?

Mara: For some people in some circumstances, yes. The Venezuelan who converted to dollar-pegged stablecoins rather than Bitcoin did not experience that volatility. And the Lebanese citizen who converted to Bitcoin in September 2019 and held through 2022 still ended up dramatically better than the one who left their savings in Lebanese banks, which imposed arbitrary withdrawal limits and devalued the lira by 90%. The question is not "Is Bitcoin a perfect store of value?" It is "Is Bitcoin better than the alternative that is actually available to this person?" For a citizen of Switzerland, the answer is obviously no. For a citizen of Lebanon in 2020, the answer is obviously yes.

David: I accept that. Context matters. But this leads me to my broader concern. You have just made a very context-specific argument — "for some people in some circumstances, stablecoins or Bitcoin are better than the available alternatives." That is a moderate position. That is not maximalism. And yet the industry does not market itself as a contextual solution for specific populations with specific needs. It markets itself as the future of money, the replacement for the global financial system, the technology that will disrupt every intermediary in every industry. The gap between the legitimate value you describe and the marketing claims of the industry is enormous.

Mara: I do not disagree that much of the industry's marketing is overblown. I can be a maximalist about the importance of the problem — financial sovereignty for people failed by institutions — without being a maximalist about every crypto project. Ninety percent of tokens are garbage. Ninety percent of DeFi protocols will fail. That does not invalidate the ten percent that create genuine value, any more than the dot-com crash invalidated the internet.

David: The dot-com analogy is one I hear constantly, and I think it is misleading. The internet in 1995 had a clear and rapidly growing user base for core applications — email, the web, e-commerce. The trajectory from "some people use email" to "everyone uses the internet" was visible by 2000, even through the crash. Blockchain in 2025, after sixteen years of development, has not achieved that kind of adoption for any non-speculative application. The trajectory is not "early internet." The trajectory is "technology that has not found its mass-market application."

Mara: You are measuring adoption by the standards of wealthy, well-banked populations. If you measure adoption in the populations where the value proposition is strongest — the unbanked, the underbanked, the financially censored — the trajectory looks different. Stablecoin volumes in sub-Saharan Africa grew 45% year-over-year in 2024. Peer-to-peer crypto trading in Nigeria, despite the central bank's ban, exceeds $50 million monthly. These are not speculative flows. These are people solving real problems with the tools available to them.

David: And they are solving those problems on centralized exchanges, with custodial wallets, through counterparties they trust on the basis of reputation — all of which undermines the "trustless" narrative. They are using the blockchain as a settlement layer, not as a decentralized system. The decentralization is optional, and most users are opting out of it.

Mara: [Long pause.] That is a fair point. And it is one I struggle with. The users I study do not care about decentralization as a principle. They care about access and cost. If a centralized service gave them the same access at the same cost, most of them would use it. What the blockchain provides is not decentralization for its own sake — it provides resilience against the centralized services being shut down. The Nigerian central bank banned crypto trading in 2021. The market moved to peer-to-peer. If M-Pesa were banned in Nigeria, there would be no peer-to-peer fallback. The decentralization is the insurance policy, even when users don't consciously value it.

David: That is the best version of the argument I have heard. And I think it is probably right — for this specific use case, for this specific population. My concern remains that the industry extrapolates this argument to contexts where it does not apply, and uses it to justify projects that are, frankly, scams.

Mara: And my concern is that skeptics like you throw out the genuine value because of the noise surrounding it. We are both right, David. The industry is full of garbage. And the technology, for specific problems, is genuinely important. Both things are true at the same time.

David: I can live with that. Another round?

Mara: Another round.

Analysis Questions

1. Identify the framework dimensions at play. Which dimensions of the Decentralization Value Framework (Section 3 of the chapter) are Mara and David primarily debating? At what points in the conversation do they shift from one dimension to another?

2. Evaluate the counterfactual. David repeatedly argues that non-blockchain alternatives (M-Pesa, UPI, Wise) can solve the same problems. Mara responds that these alternatives do not serve the same populations. Using evidence from this book, evaluate who has the stronger argument. Are there specific populations and corridors where blockchain-based solutions serve users that centralized alternatives cannot?

3. Assess the insurance argument. Mara's strongest point is arguably her final one: that decentralization functions as an "insurance policy" against centralized services being shut down, even when users do not consciously value decentralization. Is this argument supported by the evidence in this book? Can you identify specific cases (from Part IV or Part V) where this insurance value was demonstrated — or where it failed?

4. Identify the steel-man moments. At which points in the conversation does each participant genuinely engage with the strongest version of the other's argument, rather than deflecting or changing the subject? What makes those moments effective?

5. Evaluate the dot-com analogy. David argues that the dot-com analogy is misleading because the internet had visible mass-market adoption trajectories by 2000 that blockchain lacks. Mara argues that David is measuring adoption by the wrong population. Who is right? What evidence from this book supports each position?

6. Locate yourself. After reading this conversation, do you find yourself more persuaded by Mara or David? Identify the specific argument that was most persuasive to you and explain why it shifted (or reinforced) your position. Then apply the intellectual honesty test: what would the person you agree with need to be wrong about for the other person's position to be correct?

7. Consider what is missing. What important arguments or evidence does neither Mara nor David raise? If you were a third person at the table, what would you add to the conversation?