I fear @TheStalwart is falling into the trap a lot of crypto pros have over the years, which is to swing from one extreme view to the other based on "what's exciting in crypto today."

The problem with the "blockchain, not Bitcoin" narrative is not that it violates some naive maxi view of Bitcoin being the only viable application of blockchain tech, it's that it ignores the reality that the only safe and useful blockchain (for any application) is one secured by a protocol-issued & censorship-resistant native coin.

If you read the Bitcoin white paper, it's clear that Satoshi didn't create the components we collectively call blockchain to enable a digital hard currency. He was trying to invent a peer-to-peer payment system, and realized the only way to secure it was to give it a native coin.

(The paper is surprisingly non-ideological and talks a lot more about the flaws of intermediated payment & settlement than it does inflation or fiat money).

The first application of P2P and censorship-resistant settlement was Bitcoin. Then came Ethereum which abstracted the service to any asset (tokens) and made them programmable (smart contracts).

But you still need ETH (or SOL or HYPE or whichever native coin) to make P2P settlement of stablecoins, tokenized securities, perps, and any other asset, along with their smart contracts, secure while decentralized.

The "blockchain, not Bitcoin" approach originally decided to do away with the coin, which also meant it had to do away with permissionless consensus, and as a consequence, the pure P2P settlement and censorship resistance.

This was Corda, Fabric, Quorom, DAML etc etc. Billions of dollars got plowed into them, lots of hype was generated, but it all failed.

Why? First, permissioned networks have none of the end-user protections of a decentralized system. Their use of consensus and cryptography is mostly performative. The gatekeeper that rules who is allowed to validate is all powerful: it can shut down the network, censor specific users, or reverse settlement. It can be forced by a government to do this. It can also be hacked.

Second, even if such a network succeeds, it becomes a monopoly, and the gatekeeper now has total control over pricing and access, which it will monetize, because that's what happened with card networks, exchanges, and clearinghouses.

They all began with the same egalitarian goals of permissioned networks. Many were none profits or mutually owned at the start. Today, they are more valuable than the companies that founded them.

The latest wave of enterprise networks pretending to be blockchains (Canton, Tempo, Ark, likely many more to come) are just rerunning the same playbook. Some have a coin, but its existence is more about monetization and signaling than utility. It has nothing to do with consensus (since that's permissioned) so it doesn't enable P2P activity. Access is controlled by the whitelisted validators, who are controlled by the gatekeeper.

The other problem with such a coin is that it has no supply guarantees. Bitcoin's 21m hard cap only works because it's set by the protocol and nobody has the power to unilaterally change that (possibly to a fault - see quantum threat). In a permissioned network the gatekeeper can order the supply increased tomorrow and it'll go up, guaranateed.

The purveyors of these networks, some of whom own billions of $$ of its dubious coin, act like their systems offer tokenization and smart contracts, too.

But they don't. They are just databases with a button, so they can offer asset and code - same as any other clearinghouse with a ledger and APIs. Every enterprise network is just an unregulated clearinghouse, with all the counterparty risk and vendor lock-in of any clearinghouse, but without regulatory protection.

Going back to Joe's original point, what makes stablecoins, tokenized assets, and non-custodial perps on real blockchains interesting is the way they can flow freely, from anyone to anyone else, sans interferences.

This isn't about decentralization ideology, it's about diminished counterparty risk, guaranteed settlement, and knowing that should your solution succeed, you won't get a knock on the door from the gatekeeper saying "nice business you got there on top of my network, I'm afraid it's going to cost you $100m a year to keep running it. You know, because maintenance costs."

I'm sure that will happen because it has already happened on every privately owned social media platform, payment system, and clearinghouse.

But if you issue stablecoins on Ethereum, or build a useful application on Solana, or build a perps market on top of (a future) Hyperliquid (when it's more decentralized) then you'll never get that knock, because nobody has the power to give it.

This is only possible on a permissionless system empowered by a native coin - Blockchain, and Bitcoin.