The psychology aspect is a part that's the most impressive. You have incentives -- everybody likes money -- and proof-of-work -- consensus that solves the byzantine generals problem. But if you combine them all to produce a new trustless kind of money then this innovation itself serves like a socially scaleless memetic payload.
It's like what Nick Szabo talks about in his social scalability article. That the design of Bitcoin offers high social scalability, allowing anyone to participate in the system across cultures, languages, customs, and laws. It kind of ties everything together under a single model.
I also agree with you about the "Synecdoche" thing, too. It seems like we're arguing about the same thing. As you say, you can interpret "blockchain" as the chain of blocks that is outputted from the consensus system or as the whole system itself. But I guess in the context of this article it was confusing whether this poster was having a genuine misunderstanding or was just talking about a part of the system.
It's like what Nick Szabo talks about in his social scalability article. That the design of Bitcoin offers high social scalability, allowing anyone to participate in the system across cultures, languages, customs, and laws. It kind of ties everything together under a single model.
I also agree with you about the "Synecdoche" thing, too. It seems like we're arguing about the same thing. As you say, you can interpret "blockchain" as the chain of blocks that is outputted from the consensus system or as the whole system itself. But I guess in the context of this article it was confusing whether this poster was having a genuine misunderstanding or was just talking about a part of the system.