Crypto Is for Criming – By Paul Krugman

Its not that all crypto is for crime, its just that its hard to verify the funds came from legitimate sources if it comes from outside the walled garden of banks.

I do like to be debanked in the sense that it gives me freedom from bank runs and allows me to have private money.

I think people who want bitcoin checking accounts are against the ideology behind the technology and just want to cash in on the market volatility, they are pretty much the worst.

One thing is for sure, nobody really likes crypto bros.

I often wish crypto was just a quadratic funding mechanism for FOSS because its excellent at that but oh well, the swarm have taken over long ago.

I've had various levels of interest, optimism and investment in crypto from 2011 (quite a lot) to now (zero). Much of its promise has been undelivered and yet it has prospered. The people that I speak to who are involved have changed from developers/entrepreneurs/tech-savvy financiers into almost exclusively deadlegs, hustlers and grifters.

At the same time, I feel like it's a race as to whether Bitcoin comes tumbling down before it's revealed that a significant amount (most?) physical cash is being printed by adversaries, and the national mints merely act as a top-up/shredding service.

I wrote this eleven years ago and it's largely proven to be accurate. https://web.archive.org/web/20160305014736if_/http://alexmui...

The main function seems to be "number go up" ie. speculative investment. If you know friends with crypto I bet that's why they bought it.

So is fiat paper.

With crypto there is not even the pretense of ethics or oversight.

Which is why central banks are interested.