It's time for us in the tech world to speak out about cryptocurrency

I can see how people in their twenties would fall for this argument because they can’t remember. The reality is that the internet was immediately extremely interesting (either useful or fun) for practically everyone who got access. Email and ftp alone were killer apps. A bit later came Usenet and IRC and MUD gaming. There were things to download, people to meet, flame wars to participate in. People would stay up until 4am to get a chance to go online in university shared facilities.

With cryptocurrency there’s nothing to do. You could pay $100 to buy a “cryptokitten” or whatever, but then you’d be stuck shilling it on somebody else somehow. The community is a mix of Scientology-like groupthink and multi-level marketing sales pitches. The early Internet was infinite times more fun.

- The Internet emerged from a community in which it afforded real and tangible benefits, without any one single locus of control. (Research universities, along with a number of government departments and a few major tech and defence contractors, principally.) Perhaps an alternate payment mechanism might emerge similarly.

- The Internet tools which did emerge ... were well-suited to a small-world network in which local reputations could be assessed and acted on (loss of campus-based access with administrators overseeing populations of a few dozens to hundreds, rarely more than 1,000, through the early 1990s). Effectiveness at larger scales and in more hostile environments has proved ... problematic.

- A clear statement of the problem(s) posed by present currency and payment systems is still lacking. Statements as do exist tend to be ... weakly grounded in emperical truth, strongly ideological (not necessarily a fault, but often one), and strongly resistant to actual demonstrated superiority after decades of effort.

Lol. Talking like that obviously shows that cryptocurrencies are not for you. This tech has cypherpunk and crypto-anarchy roots, regulators/governments are not the intended users for this tech, even if you like it or not. If you do not view cryptocurrencies from an cypherpunk perspective you will not see their social benefits, it is an entire way of life an alternative view from the centralized shit show we have now. Yes the tech has flaws, just like how digicash, hashcash, b-money etc had flaws, this is an evolutionary process and nothing you or your government says can stop it.

Oh yeah? Let's find out.