The Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto (Published 2022)

But as much as crypto fans want to believe they’ve created something startling and revolutionary, in reality, the experience feels: unfamiliar (payments happen off-platform), overwhelming (you end up in a confusing maze of wallets - jumping from Coinbase to Metamask to Uniswap, often unclear what you own), and pyramid scheme-y.

Crypto has now evolved beyond bitcoin and its libertarian roots. With the rise of Ethereum and many other protocols, the focus is less on notions of private currencies and more on how the technology can be used for different applications. So while decentralisation remains an important component, the wider community is less maximalist about it and t... See more

As a consumer technology, cryptocurrencies are a hot mess. They’re extremely difficult to purchase, the networks are slow, the transaction fees are high, the community is full of trolls, hackers, and scammers, it’s far too easy to lose your funds or have them stolen, and even if you win the battle to secure your funds or use a custodial service lik... See more

For a technology that’s billed as an architecture of the future, crypto is powered by a discourse that’s rooted in the past. Perhaps that’s why so few cryptocurrency-based, Web3-style projects meaningfully address big, future-facing problems. Instead, they seem to want to re-create financial structures that already exist, only with new people at th... See more

In crypto, an entire generation of alienated tech workers saw potential to have their cake (create a better, decentralized internet) and eat it too (get very wealthy).

It also makes intuitive sense that we’d have digital money that’s programmable. We'‘re programming everything now; mRNA is basically running a program on the cellular level. Many of the current problems in the digital economy -- lack of trust, misaligned incentives, controlling gatekeepers, treating audiences as a resource to be exploited -- arise ... See more