What limits the cognitive capacity of our species is our capacity for trust, which is very low. Trust is a scarce resource, which is reflected in how other resources are managed. The tendency to distrust forms a sort of vacuum, where memes fail to make connections, and that causes phenomena like thought systems based on binary opposition, or ideology and religion which signal certain traits to be able to filter out certain others.

With extra-cerebral trust, like nation-states and blockchains, our cognition increases, moving towards what @BitNation conceptualises as "Lucy", hybrid cognition with the exocortex. As Gavin Wood says, the use of one-way function cryptography, together with linking state transitions through hash signatures to easily verify the integrity of a state, produces a commodity that approximates trust, and increases the availability of trust as a resource