Is this the end of crypto?

Is this the end of crypto?
economist.com

So no, it is not the end of crypto, no matter how many scams, rug-pulls, bans, etc, etc.

Sorry to burst the bubble and to give the answer you didn't want to hear, especially for those who have been begging for its end after 14+ years for it to all be banned and to be 100% totally shutdown.

Crypto is here to stay.

They repeat the same scam-artist lies, crypto is somehow an innovation in "trust", somehow more "efficient" than existing infrastructure, somehow "smart contracts" are more reliable than actual contracts. Things "become possible".

How can an article like this, at the moment the Emporer's clothes start to fall off, be written? By the economist.

It is just as-if homeopathy falls away and The Lancest is still interested in "innovations in water science"! This is, in my view, genuinely unconscionable.

The problems blockchains solves are highly academic csci issues around "trust" and "programming" in absurdly distributed systems. They have nothing to do with trust, risk, contracts, ownership or rights in anything like an economic, political or moral sense.

Repeating these lies now is such an awful betrayal of their obligations to their readers. They should be the ones informing the public on the actual economic meaning of these terms, and not participating in trying to keep the flame of these pyramid schemes alive.

EDIT: since the article is paywalled, consider the following quote:

> Amid the wreckage of the past week, it is worth remembering the technology’s underlying potential. Conventional banking requires a vast infrastructure to maintain trust between strangers. This is expensive and is often captured by insiders who take a cut. Public blockchains, by contrast, are built on a network of computers, making their transactions transparent and, in theory, trustworthy. Interoperable, open-source functions can be built on top of them, including self-executing smart contracts that are guaranteed to function as written. A system of tokens, and rules governing them, can collectively offer a clever way to incentivise open-source contributors. And arrangements that would be expensive or impractical to enforce in the real world become possible—allowing artists to retain a stake in the profits from the resale of their digital works, for instance.

For this to appear in a serious article on crypto outside of the scamming community is outrageous. The economist here is repeating a fraud.