The blockchain paradox: Why DLTs may do little to transform the economy

This is not actually true. The concept of money (quantifiable debt in a standard unit, such as coinage) was created by early states to lock subjects into what anthropologist David Graeber has called the "military–coinage–slave complex". Money cannot be separated from state violence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years

That said, we'd need to agree on definitions of "state" here. Some kinds of money surely existed before anything recognizable as a "state", but then again, such notions of money are likely as meaningless as this kind of unrecognizable state.

Proponents of blockchain tech argue its revolutionary quality is its ability to act as a decentralized and trustless database. But I don't ever hear them sort through the issue of how to agree on the schema for this trustless database.

For a group of people to use a decentralized DB, they have to agree as to what to store in it, and how to store it. They need to form consensus about how the system will work, and how the data will flow.

For example I've seen people on here mention applications such as a decentralized stock exchange, and a decentralized hotel rooms marketplace.

For either of these, it's necessary to get all the users of the system in a room and agree what is in scope and what is not, and in general what can be done with the system and how. At this point they already have a consensus, they trust each other, they might as well just set up a centralized database run by a 3rd party that manages the system, keeps it up to date and adds upgrades, instead of building it on the blockchain and hoping there are no major bugs in the cloud code and that it will live off gas.

For the stock exchange, that's exactly what we already have. We have institutions that are dedicated to running exchanges, which act as neutral arbiters. They use regular old centralised databases. When they have bugs in their code or the system makes a mistake they can even roll back trades, which they couldn't do on the blockchain.

Essentially this is the same argument as OP. The 3rd party's act of ironing out issues, deciding what the rules are and how they interact is synonymous with OP's term "governance". We agree that using/running the system is different than defining/implementing the system and the latter can't be done trustlessly.

And also governance gets a lot easier when you also run the system centralized ;)

the very first fusion reactors arent all that efficient, either.

I've read David Graeber's book. I do agree with him that the common (e.g. John Locke) narrative about money arising from direct barter is probably wrong. Money actually comes from credits/debits (aka delayed consumption).

However, I disagree you need government enforced violence for the basic apparatus of money. Perhaps it's a matter of defining "money" in different ways. I'm talking about "money" as a more basic expression of human bookkeeping.

If you have a small community where everybody knows each other, the people can cooperate to keep track of "accounts" of who owes what. They can write the debts/credits on a public church ledger or hypothetically leave it to the reliable memory of a trusted village elder. (E.g. you don't need government for women to spontaneously start trading scrips for future babysitting hours.) What governments enable is scalability. With government standardized money, strangers can transact the units of account across a larger administrative area.