Crypto Is Money Without a Purpose
wsj.com
wsj.com
The opinion is on crypto trading. And I agree with a lot of what he is saying.
But that does not make crypto money without a purpose.
Look no further than to what “Satoshi Nakamoto” wrote in the the first sentence of the abstract of the original white paper [1] about Bitcoin:
> A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.
That is the purpose for which Bitcoin was made.
Then a whole bunch of people started looking at what else we could use blockchain technology for.
Some came up with things like platforms for smart contracts. [2]
Others realised that they could just ride the hype waves to scam people. [3, 4, and many many more]
Some found that it greatly enhanced the ability to perform wide-scale cyber attacks for financial gains.
And some, like the author of the opinion rightly points out, like to use these technologies as a glorified gambling system.
But to state that crypto is money without a purpose like the title says, is nothing short of wrong, imo.
[1]: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
[2]: https://ethereum.org/en/whitepaper/
Curiously, the most practical and reliable way to make Bitcoin usable by say, a hundred million people, is to set up many big Lightning hubs for everyone to open a channel with, and connect those hubs with a smaller network of superhubs, to make Lightning routing efficient, reliable, and with plenty liquidity.
This would then resemble the current financial banking system with its many banks and fewer central banks. But with several crucial differences. The banks don't custody any user funds, they just relay them. Users always remain in control of their funds. The banks also don't control issuance.
Still, this would work better if Bitcoin's emission wasn't deflationary.