While economics 101 often talks about the rational person, when you go deeper you should discover that the rational person is much like the "spherical cow" in physics: everyone knows it doesn't exist, but it is often a useful fiction anyway. How the irrational person affects economics is a complex question.
I don't think it's quite as bad as that. Especially in systems that are tied to monetary value, where irrational actors are punished monetarily, you can assume that the irrational actors vanish from the system over time. Those models often come with a specific bound on how many actors need to act rational (usually 33, 50 or 66%) for it to hold up.
I'm curious though how many actors act rational in specific economic systems. Especially with cryptocurrencies I feel like the low amount of rationality might be a significant hurdle to establishing a robust economy, even if everything else is ironed out (proper use case and incentive system).
Humans are not rational. People pay money to have pictures of their kids - this is completely irrational, but we would all agree that someone who doesn't have pictures of their kids is lacking sanity. People pay a lot of money for clothing that is in style when something cheaper would be just as good - sometimes better.
Irrational actors are only punished when their irrationality exceeds a threshold, which is rare in these days where we don't let people starve to death easily.
