The question of trust is the fundamental question for the future of our civilization - and Universe as a whole.

The economy is made of contracts. They either must be enforced through central authority (thus trusted) - or in a trust-minimized way by some technological means. However trust to central authority means unification, always leading to loss of adaptivity and extinction.

The idea that “blockchain technology” can solve the trust issue is a fallacy: even if consensus protocols can solve some aspects of trust (like in PoW), the solution is unscalable - and all other aspects of trust can’t be solved at all.

Contracts, as well as an economy, can be seen as a computation in a multi-agent system. The way one agent can prove something to the other agent without leaking sensitive information (i.e. preserving privacy) is by providing zk-proofs of its own state (or computation on a contract). Unlike blockchain, this can scale - and doesn’t leak privacy into an informationally-centralized (i.e. transparent) public ledger (aka blockchain).

Economy means computing. Economy can’t exist without heterogenous autonomous self-sovereign agents - thus not only humans, but also AI-based agents - or other species after humanity will fork into multiple species or will face other civilizations. Privacy is fundamental. Zero-knowledge computing - and not blockchain - is the solution.