Is Crypto Bullshit?

Perhaps rather than 10x better, the correct way to think of crypto is as 10x weirder. This is an entirely new financial paradigm with no historical precedent. We have no idea what all of this will do. Maybe, like the ICO boom, everything will be fraudulent garbage! Or maybe we will all get rich! 

Crypto has this speculative, casino-like underbelly to it, but the technology making that possible has some fantastic uses. Bitcoin is slowly but successfully establishing itself as a store of value akin to digital gold. Ethereum is powering an increasing number of decentralized applications. Stablecoins are clearly the first major one, but many mo

... See more

Crypto, still largely valued on nothing more than the collective belief of its users, is the ultimate example to date of the power of a network, in every sense of the word. That that collective belief is a point of leverage for companies that can aggregate believers is the most natural outcome imaginable, even if it means that the lack of technical... See more

The first part isn’t entirely unfair; scams and ponzi schemes are everywhere, and it seems clear that we are in the middle of an ever-inflating bubble. It’s also the case that an entire set of legitimate use cases are in reality regulatory arbitrage; crypto advocates are far too quick to ascribe all of the issues with the current monetary system to... See more