The objections you go through in the post seem a bit weak to me. When I think about whether crypto is good for the world, apart from the speculative bubble objection, the main concern I think of is “Isn’t crypto a scammer’s paradise and isn’t it going to stay that way given that ‘decentralization’ is much uglier in practice than the naive rosy view would have you think?”
We’ve just seen a bunch of crypto entities blow up and hurt people badly who thought (and were promised that) their funds were safe. The highest-volume stablecoin (tether) still looks like a massive fraud and yet many of the biggest crypto exchanges keep dealing with it.
I know that some people in crypto would welcome better regulation, but is that going to work in practice and don’t you lose part of the appeal of it when governments have to get heavily involved after all?
I’d like to see more engagement with these sorts of questions.
(Another point I’m unconvinced about is “Why bitcoin?” as opposed to other coins. Bitcoin has some supremely annoying exponents. Smart contracts seem like an interesting invention with use cases. Wouldn’t the fact that something has a lot of use cases arguably make it safer as a store of value? (I mean, I bought mostly bitcoin at first but by now most of my crypto is ethereum because I can gamble with NFTs and that’s more fun.))
The objections you go through in the post seem a bit weak to me. When I think about whether crypto is good for the world, apart from the speculative bubble objection, the main concern I think of is “Isn’t crypto a scammer’s paradise and isn’t it going to stay that way given that ‘decentralization’ is much uglier in practice than the naive rosy view would have you think?”
We’ve just seen a bunch of crypto entities blow up and hurt people badly who thought (and were promised that) their funds were safe. The highest-volume stablecoin (tether) still looks like a massive fraud and yet many of the biggest crypto exchanges keep dealing with it.
I know that some people in crypto would welcome better regulation, but is that going to work in practice and don’t you lose part of the appeal of it when governments have to get heavily involved after all?
I’d like to see more engagement with these sorts of questions.
(Another point I’m unconvinced about is “Why bitcoin?” as opposed to other coins. Bitcoin has some supremely annoying exponents. Smart contracts seem like an interesting invention with use cases. Wouldn’t the fact that something has a lot of use cases arguably make it safer as a store of value? (I mean, I bought mostly bitcoin at first but by now most of my crypto is ethereum because I can gamble with NFTs and that’s more fun.))