The Handwavy Technobabble Nothingburger of Crypto

First of all decentralization is not a property solely confined to cryptocurrencies. The traditional banking system is decentralized, there are thousands of banks that are all separate entities. There is no single central bank, even central banks are not unique, every country has one. Additionally the traditional banking system and cash have a huge advantage, no global consensus is required, Iran still has a banking system much to the dismay of the American government.

> *Control by a majority, not a minority. (democratic)

It's a majority of hash power in the case of PoW and a majority of capital in the case of PoS, since hash power costs capital in both cases it's a majority of capital that has control, oh and the systems devs of course a small group that essentially decides the future of the system.

> * Open ecosystem that visible and able to be analysed by anyone (transparent)

That is not necessarily a good thing, the fact that all the transactions are public means that they can be analyzed to identify people, this is bad not for criminals that will use sophisticated anonymizing techniques. But casual users that don't know any better and maybe identified doing either illegal (buying drugs), compromising (paying for sex) or simply being associated with other known users. In the traditional banking paradigm these problems are usually circumvented by using cash, or relying on the institutions privacy guarantees when no law enforcement is involved.

> *Immutable

All these schemes while claiming to be immutable are really not, firstly the last block is always subject to being overridden by a longer chain with more blocks, thus everyone waits for multiple blocks(confirmations) before accepting a transaction as committed, secondly even if the development team / or the majority of the miners does not like a specific transaction they can always revert it, by controlling / or being the majority as was the case with the events that lead to the existence of ethereum classic. So these schemes are not really immutable, they are only immutable when a single users tokens are stolen.

As for me, I don't believe that cryptocurrencies are completely useless. I just don't see why everyone is so excited.

Thank you for sharing in detail why you think the article is so low quality. What can be stated without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.

Are you implying that no rational person should ever buy Bitcoin? That seems a bit far-fetched, no?

At this point, considering that it's stronger than ever and it's pretty clear it's not going away, I would expect a rational person to allocate even a small percentage to it for diversification, in case they happen to be wrong on their conclusions or understanding of Bitcoin.

The authors example use cases about a database doing everything except crime summarizes it well. One persons crime is another persons freedom. If you rephrased it as saying, the only thing blockchains provide that a database doesn't is freedom, I think the resounding response would be: Yes.

What I think anti-crypto people object to is the freedom of others, because it represents a limit and undermines the necessary absolute and total Hobbesian sovereignty and dominion of the systems that provide them with their own status, which is based on something other than consent and desire, and when I read these objections, most of what I interpret is that implicit humiliation.

Gambling provides opportunity for people to live independent of being subordinate to an employer, as if your employees suddenly don't have to work for you, it's hard to build and scale social stability and wealth. I sympathize with the morality of reducing gambling as being appropriate for over a thousand years ago, but today? You also can't use shame to control people who can afford to walk away.

The current financial system is designed by-and-for creditors as a means of leverage over debtors, and crypto is explicitly not. The only problems of gambling are really problems with debts, and better laws limiting the power of creditors would solve that. The interests behind the criticisms are clear, but to me dressing them up and carting them around as moral is a bit much.

Bitcoin is smart engineered gold. It's perfectly rational compared to the endless printing in fiat. Most engineers just accept keynesian economics because that's what they were taught.

They have a narrow world view beyond their tech expertise. I saw somebody criticize BTC because they couldn't imagine using so much energy "just to secure money". I was like what you just took for granted is perhaps society's most important need and unsolved problem.