Fair points about the American Wild West and lawlessness, genocide, etc. But I think a better analogy would be the medieval era. The economic similarities between cryptocurrencies and feudalism have been fairly well discussed already, e.g. the privatisation of money creation, proliferation of decentralised currency fiefdoms, the crypto-VCs and crypto-oligarchs the new feudal lords and the "hodlers" the new vassals, etc. But the potential social impact hasn't really been discussed much. If the crypto-lords, supported by their crypto-serfs, do succeed in breaking down the social contract, we do risk returning to an era when life was "nasty, brutish and short". Life in the medieval era, before the Age of Enlightenment, when magic and superstition ruled everyday life, when there was the ever-present threat of plague, pestilence and famine, makes the Wild West sound not so bad after all, and is not something I would have thought many would consider aspirational.