Let's take a networking protocol: is it in that sense "made of people"? I'd say mostly no: it just defines behaviours that any participant can follow. When it comes to money, the nuance is I guess that since we have to have a *consensus* that's so global (now i think about it, DNS does have a similar problem, hence namecoin, lol), the behaviour of people at large scale (think 51% attack) matters, and so, we want a system that has the minimum expectation of "good" behaviour (so we expect something like economic rational actors). Now I think about it like this, it's obvious that one can go further than what I just said before: Bitcoin only really works *because* community doesn't work, at scale: if enough bitcoin users coordinated properly such that they trusted each other fully, they could steal from the minority. So Bitcoin's design reflects (correctly imo) the failure of the concept of community, at scales >> Dunbar's number.