This is my second day watching a tech video from Token2049. Yesterday, I watched Edward Snowden talk about privacy and decentralization as countermeasures against surveillance and control. Today, hearing Vitalik Buterin talk, I stumbled upon another strange idea—cryptocurrency as digital concrete. He delivered this message in September last year, and I heard him sing three crypto songs that I don't understand. The tune was terrible, and the message was incomprehensible, but I assume his audience understood him well.
The idea of cryptocurrency giving us the ability to construct "digital castles in the sky" is the type of idea that many in the mainstream will consider strange. However, for people like Buterin, the metaphor is accurate to describe the resilient digital structures that blockchains provide.