Michael J. Casey is chairman of CoinDesk’s advisory board and a senior advisor of blockchain research at MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative.
The following article originally appeared in CoinDesk Weekly, a custom-curated newsletter delivered every Sunday exclusively to our subscribers.
Cryptocurrency advocates are constantly trying to convince non-experts of the advantages of permissionless blockchains, typically by explaining how a decentralized system of consensus-based record-keeping produces an immutable, censorship-resistant ledger.
But this doesn’t exactly square with reality.
There’s a strong…