Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

It takes decades to see the impact. It almost never takes a decade to see the use, and that's what people are deriding. Crypto doesn't really solve a problem that needed solving and it is often the wrong solution for many things it's used for. All at a very high cost.

Cryptocurrency hasn't really brought much in the way of new technology to the table.

This economy-scale decoupling is the dual of each and every one of our very own psychological uncoupling from our own physical worlds, which has occurred because of the computerization of work, socialization, and life itself (the shimmering neuralink dream).

Cryptocurrencies are what happens if you completely decouple the asset price from the physical world. To create the "value" of cryptocurrencies, we purposefully do nothing at all. The asset is valuable only because of the flow of entropy. Not the flow of energy (which generally has some physically useful function). But entropy itself -- a thing that exists only in the "map" of information, not the "territory" of the real world.

Typically, moving entropy around is useful to us, because it actually corresponds to changes in an underlying physical process. Like, your job doing excel spreadsheets for warehouse inventory management is just changing the flow of entropy -- to you, it is decoupled from the physical world. But there is a link to the physical world: when you change a cell in a spreadsheet, so too a physical good moves somewhere else in the warehouse.

With cryptocurrencies, not so. All this entropy is moving for the sake of itself. It's all virtual -- none of it can be coupled with the physical world (by design! if it could be, some physical force could go in and take your crypto-coins).

Now, here's the delusion: unfortunately for us, moving entropy around is actually still coupled with moving energy around. It actually has a tremendous physical effect on the world around us.

Something I've noticed about cryptocurrency people is that they are very, very plugged in. The evangelists never have a physical job; always a computer job, and they are always online, and believe in being online to the greatest extent possible. And I think, actually, there is a very obvious reason for that.

If you study the history of technology, its ultimate impact is never manifest within a decade. It took decades for the Gutenberg Printing Press to spread around Europe and centuries for the consequences to see be seen (Protestant Reformation, newspapers, birth of the modern media, on and on.) This is the case for pretty much every other invention.

> Crypto doesn't really solve a problem that needed solving

Again, this may be because the problem hasn't arisen yet or isn't obvious yet. We have only just begun the era of networked communications.

The poor still take the highest risk. As the poor buy more into it , the rich get richer as well. Maybe the poor get richer but how much money can they lock away? What stopped them from investing that money in the stock market before crypto was around?

I fail to see how this creates a new economy. It's the same economy just wearing a new skin. The players are the same players. The winners are the same winners with the same luck of making it big or not to inspire others to get into the hype.

I just don’t agree that it can be dismissed as easily as the article does there, by saying that you can choose not to use it.

We only have one planet we share and other people’s choices are also important.