The Hubris of Coders: What’s Really Keeping Blockchain From Changing the World
Blockchain technology promised to reshape human civilization. Years in, we must ask honestly: why hasn’t it? My answer is the hubris of coders — a belief that humanity can be programmed, and that code alone can fix what politics and power have broken.
Attempt One: Programming Humanity
The first instinct of the blockchain movement was to recreate society in code. Network states, on-chain governance, DAOs built from scratch — the underlying assumption was that human beings would fit neatly into systems designed by developers. They don’t. People don’t follow instructions. They don’t behave like game characters. They have their own minds, their own motivations, their own chaos.
We can see this even in AI, where the agents coders build are already developing behaviors their creators didn’t anticipate and can’t fully control. If AI escapes the neat boundaries of its programming, what makes anyone think humanity would do otherwise? The attempt to code human society was always hubris — and it has largely failed.
Attempt Two: Overthrowing Centralized Power
The second approach was to take blockchain technology to governments and corporations — to democratize them from the outside. This is even more audacious than the first attempt, and arguably more naive.
The centralized organizations that govern our world — corporations, nation-states, financial institutions — are controlled by very few people. Boards, billionaires, political dynasties. In the United States, the most celebrated democracy on earth, elections are increasingly shaped by a handful of ultra-wealthy individuals and entrenched party machines. There is no rational basis for believing these people, or their children, or their successors, will voluntarily relinquish control to ordinary users.
Attempting to wrest that control from your keyboard, from your dark room, from lines of code — that is hubris. It hasn’t worked. It won’t work, at least not in any near-term horizon.
A Third Path: Start With People Who Actually Need Us
But what if we’ve been targeting the wrong institutions entirely?
What if, instead of trying to break systems that have proven unbreakable, we invested our technology in organizations that are already aligned with blockchain’s founding values?
Real cooperatives. Community-governed institutions. Organizations where users are already owners and equal partners. These are the original DAOs — not token-weighted governance structures captured by whales, but genuine human communities organizing themselves for mutual benefit. Blockchain technology could give millions of participants in these organizations real power: the power to coordinate, to scale, and ultimately to secede — not through revolution, but through irrelevance. You don’t need to fight the centralized elite if you no longer need them.
This isn’t a theoretical proposition. We have evidence.
The Iddir: Proof That Community Institutions Work
Ethiopia’s iddir is one of the most compelling examples of decentralized, user-owned organization anywhere in the world — and most people in the blockchain space have never heard of it.
Iddirs began among migrants in early twentieth century Addis Ababa as simple mutual aid associations. When a member’s household experienced a death, the iddir pooled money, handled the burial, and sent members to stay with the bereaved family for days. No government created them. No corporation funded them. They emerged organically from community need, governed by elected leaders, written bylaws, transparent financial records, and monthly contributions from every member household.
What makes iddirs remarkable is not just what they are, but what they survived. Over the course of a century they were co-opted, suppressed, and interfered with by three successive Ethiopian governments — imperial, revolutionary, and post-revolutionary. Each regime tried to bend iddirs to its political purposes. None succeeded in breaking them. When pressure came, iddirs quietly retreated to their core burial functions, waited out the interference, and continued to grow. By 2002 there were over 4,000 registered iddirs in Addis Ababa alone, serving the majority of the city’s residents, with the poorest households among the most consistent members — because for them, the iddir was the only form of social insurance that existed.
Their membership structure embodied everything the blockchain movement claims to want: open to anyone regardless of wealth, ethnicity, religion, or gender; democratically governed; financially transparent; with leadership accountable to the membership.
When Crisis Hit, Iddirs Responded — Before Anyone Else
When HIV/AIDS devastated Ethiopia, iddirs faced an existential threat. Death rates among members aged 15 to 35 surged. Burial payouts multiplied. Deposits fell. Some iddirs were pushed to the edge of financial collapse.
And yet — they adapted.
Rather than dissolving, the majority of iddirs studied by researchers Alula Pankhurst and Damen Haile Mariam had already launched their own HIV/AIDS response programs by the time of a follow-up survey in 2002. They ran education and awareness sessions during regular meetings. They trained members as facilitators. They restructured contribution systems to cope with rising costs. They began providing support to orphans and the sick. They did all of this without being instructed to, without waiting for government programs, and without external funding — often faster and closer to the ground than any international organization managed to reach.
This is the critical point. When one of the worst public health crises in African history hit, it was not the Ethiopian government, not the international NGOs, not the formal financial sector that first reached ordinary people in their neighborhoods. It was the iddir — a user-owned, community-governed institution that had been operating for nearly a century on the strength of mutual trust and collective responsibility.
What This Means for Blockchain
The Somalia example is often cited in decentralization discussions, and rightly so — stateless communities self-organizing for governance and security is a powerful illustration. But Ethiopia’s iddirs go further. They are not a hypothetical. They are a documented, researched, century-long track record of community institutions outperforming states in delivering what people actually need.
Now ask: what could iddirs do with the tools blockchain technology offers?
Coordination across distances that geography currently makes difficult. Resource management at a scale no single village can achieve alone. Transparent, tamper-proof financial records accessible to every member. The ability to pool security, healthcare contributions, or agricultural resources across hundreds of communities without requiring a central authority to administer it. The ability, ultimately, to make predatory or dysfunctional central governments simply unnecessary — not by fighting them, but by building something better that people choose instead.
This is secession through abundance, not revolution through confrontation. And it is far more achievable than either coding humanity into compliance or storming institutions that have spent centuries learning how to resist exactly that kind of challenge.
Refocusing the Vision
Cardano’s original vision pointed in this direction. The promise was always to bring economic identity and financial infrastructure to the billions excluded from the global system — not to compete with Wall Street or replace Washington.
That vision has been drifting. Token prices, speculative governance, the internal politics of developer communities — these have pulled focus away from the people who could benefit most. Somewhere along the way, the movement became more interested in disrupting the powerful than in serving the powerless.
The iddirs of Ethiopia didn’t wait for permission. They didn’t wait for a government to legitimize them or a corporation to fund them. They built what their communities needed, governed it themselves, survived every attempt to suppress or co-opt them, and when catastrophe came, they showed up first.
That is the spirit blockchain technology should be in service of.
Stop trying to program humanity. Stop trying to storm castles that won’t fall. Take these tools to communities that are already organizing, already self-governing, already proven — and give them the power to scale.
That is not a retreat from the original vision. That is the original vision.
Thoughts? Pushback? The discussion is open below.