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Is crypto a briar patch that will fail or is it an ingenious technology that will kill traditional banking? Only time will tell. More competition is a good thing. Right?

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I haven't been following crypto space in that detail, but my understanding is that what crypto is/does boils down to in traditional banking terms is payment settlement and (leveraged) trading/gambling. Unfortunately for crypto, these are a tiny, tiny fraction of traditional banking. How is crypto going to kill traditional mortgages, M&A, corporate bond market, car loans etc?

Mostly I was outlining two possible extremes but there is some reality behind them.

Coinbase was planning on creating a lending product but the SEC called that a security and Coinbase has delayed its plans.

There are collateralized loan products already in decentralized finance apps such as Curve and MakerDAO (oasis.app). There aren't many artificial limits to what a Turing complete smart contract can do as long as it has access to the underlying information.

Time has already told: it won't. Bitcoin isn't even a competitor to most of what banks do. At best it's a competitor to PayPal, and even there it is doing at terrible job.

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