And then there's the people who think blockchains could save us from things like the Lehmann crash. (As many would know, the cryptocurrencies took off in part as a response to the financial crash 10 years ago.)
Anybody suggesting this is being ridiculous and doesn't understand at all what happened. Sure, the Lehman brothers crashed because they had tons of things on their balance sheets that had no actual value. But they didn't fake those sheets, which is the only thing a cryptocurrency offers protection from. Yes there was a crisis of trust in who was financially solvent and who wasn't, but the crisis of trust wasn't created by anyone fudging the books and pretending to have something they don't.
That crash happened because financial institutions had created (likely intentionally) opaque financial instruments, the value and functionality of which most people didn't understand. Then when those financial instruments were primarily traded by people who did not understand (or care about) their value beyond the current trade value, this created a situation where the value of those instruments could end up being massively overrated, and some fundamentally incompetent institutions gathered tons and tons of them because they saw easy money in them. Then when that bubble popped, nobody knew what was the right value for those instruments anymore, especially since there were a lot of similar but not exactly the same instruments, so just because one of them had no value didn't automatically mean that another one had no value... but it might. That's a situation that will take time to sort out, and in the meantime you have a fundamental lack of trust over who's able to pay their bills.
One might notice that blockchain currencies actually look a lot like the thing that caused the 2008 financial crisis.
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