It's in it's infancy. In two decades we will know what it means to us as mankind. Cars were also dangerous, unregulated, expensive and excessively polluting. It got a lot better on all these points, and not all due to the cars: some of it was a mind shift that mankind had to make. Same will hold true for cryptocurrency.
But cars had value. They have value. They had value from day 1. Cryptocurrencies just don't. It's all smoke and mirrors, where everything would be better without the blockchain. Without irreversibility. Without everything about it. There are whole books about how terrible and useless it is. And please do what the article said: How much of your own money is dependent on you selling the lie of cryptocurrency or smart c…
This is so true: cars have massive externalities but the 20th century was spend rebuilding the world around them because they were useful. You saw that immediately and the true costs only became more apparent years later.
Cryptocurrency is as if Robert Moses had redesigned NYC around pet rock warehousing on the theory that someone would later find a use for them, and the warehouses needed to burn coal continuously.