For example say if it’s Tuesday and the temperature is below 60 degrees, then send the money.” At the time, I realized that my example was useless, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that you could program money, and that’s just inherently cool. Right? The person I was talking to was probably thinking “Why the hell would I want this?”.

I think your example doesn’t quite get the point across. Why not give examples of

• distributing welfare payments in which the money can only be spent on certain food items
• Upfront compliance when dealing with insurance claim payouts
• IoT devices managing transactional relationships with each other

These are not useless usecases.

Still, this is a provocative article to make a specific point, which I think was done well. Kudos