This is a ridiculous fallacy, one that gets people killed. Many a failed revolution, ill-fated coup or catastrophic invasion began by assuming the state was just people. The Battle of Stalingrad, the Vietnam War, the Soviet-Afghan War, the Gulf War. The state is a giant apparatus that doesn't know right from wrong, it just responds in the way it's supposed to like a sheepish animal. It happens in Congress, in the CCP Politburo, pretty much anywhere. The inhuman indifference of the state is a feature of modern legislation we call Rule of Law.

Technology is similarly indifferent, and it's common that cryptocurrency is deliberately designed to exacerbate the fallibility of people. Unpegged stablecoins, shit memecoins, rugpull tokens... that's what I would call "consumer fraud" in a functioning economy. Or "gambling" at the very least.

There is no solution, everything is bad, but this new thing yah it's worse than everything before it. So we must keep the horrible old bad thing while impotently critiquing it.

It seems that this is a quintessential argument that's often made and is, plainly speaking, entirely stupid.

What do you think "people" means? "People" means an organization of humans.

How that organization structures itself produces various different kinds of results.

Religious organizations, political organizations, corporations, etc. are all People, but the results are very very different from organization to organization.

Why? Because of incentive structures.

The Enlightenment "indifference of the state" can actually then be extended to the "indifference of organizations".

Cryptocurrencies/the internet are no different in that sense as it is a new organizing principle for groups of people.

But what it is deliberately designed to do actually is to facilitate transactions.

What you're actually interested in is Fascism/Authoritarianism, where the state takes a paternalistic stance to protect the poor and stupid, the "masses", from the freedom to transact among themselves.

What actually needs to be prevented is the monopolistic and excessive accumulation that concentrates transactionary powers.

Limiting transactions is then the real authoritarianism, whether that is from a government or through the accumulation of wealth to a small segment of the population.

The issue simply that there is an asymmetry where certain people should have greater powers than others because they are verifiably better, but how much better and to what extent can such persons actually accumulate that power is a difficult question.

That's where the organizations of various kinds come in. They accumulate for themselves so as to protect the individual through the collective. This is the feature of any organization but again it ends up in the same situation. Organization can accumulate excessive powers and limit the freedoms of others, just as an individual can.

This dynamic is the problem. How to resolve? Can it be resolved? Who actually knows.

Cryptocurrencies, really the internet and computer technologies as such, are just another instance where we're re-evaluating the values and re-organizing ourselves around those principles. It'll address some of the old problems, it'll create new ones, but it's not any different than any other previous technological revolution.