I've recently seen a lot of arguments about the uselessness of encryption, with claims like "Qianwen can still order milk tea smoothly without encryption." I completely and strongly disagree.
If the "Web2 is enough" theory held true, Bitcoin would have been killed back in 2009, and DeFi would never have grown to a trillion-dollar scale. Their success precisely proves that efficiency is not the only measure. Crypto doesn't offer a replacement, but rather a "retained option" that can never be taken away.
From an AI perspective, this argument also demonstrates a lack of understanding of true autonomy and the potential future form and scale of the agent economy. Attempting to use a system of actions, financial systems, and legal frameworks designed for human society to drive a future massive, high-frequency agent economy and the gradually forming agent society is inherently absurd.
Perhaps encryption isn't the only option, but it's certainly the most promising one among current technologies.
Agents certainly need encryption; they just don't need a bunch of scammers running crypto platforms and gamblers.
