Ask HN: Do you think ledger technology will have a massive impact on society?

None.

Because in the end humans are the weakest link in any system, computerized or otherwise. I don't mean that in a flippant way or sarcastically. We're error prone and forgetful, emotional and spiteful. IMHO no bit of technology (hardware, software, law, or culture) is going to usurp our born-in biases and write a new chapter of history. In broad strokes we're already repeating history for the umpteenth time.

Ledger technology has had a masdive impact on society, it's also very old.

But I think you are asking about blockchain technology, which is a different thing.

> What if they somehow pegged a token to their metrics, allowing them to remove a layer of abstraction and unlock value based on something closer to what really matters: the utility it provides people.

What makes you think any particular metric of theirs is a better measure of utility than stock price? If you've got a clearly-correct way to measure and aggregate utility, that's a bigger revolution than blockchain technology.

The problem is pegging the token. It's a right old challenge pegging a crypto token to USD, let alone some company KPI, because the market decides what a thing is worth. And hype will push the price up, fear will crash it, and the underlying KPI might have something to do with the price, but probably not.

It's the new math of money

Honestly? Not really.

The hype around cryptocurrencies reminds me a lot of the hype around the Wii when it came out. People called its motion controls revolutionary, and collectively hailed Nintendo for ushering in a new era of motion controls. Consumers who saw exciting early examples of work like Wii sports bought the Wii in droves.

All of it, in retrospect, was mostly for naught. The technology for motion controls, (if it could ever be implemented satisfactorily) just wasn’t “there” yet. Even if motion controls were there, game designers faced the issue that they had no idea what exactly to do with this exciting new interface, and mostly they settled on just taking motion and “throwing it in”, giving everyone a lot of games that didn’t need motion, especially not the hare-brained “waggle” variety on offer. In the end, a lot of token efforts were made, and some successes and good games were made, but at large, today people mostly agree that motion controls, as made for the Wii, were mostly disastrous and had no real use case.

Crypto currencies seem to have a similar issue of a solution created without a problem it was meant to solve. They also seem to be getting just as “thrown in” to otherwise standard existing products and service workflows, have tech that isn’t “there”, and otherwise do not seem to be meeting their hype. I expect the discussion around them to follow a similar pattern.