<
https://medium.com/@Stephen.Diehl/crypto-is-not-here-to-stay-5671721cf3ac>
"“Crypto is here to stay” is the favorite catchphrase of the reluctant and
resignatory crypto apologists, and yet it is most often muttered with one’s
hands in the air as they refuse to discuss the topic anymore. Under this line
of reasoning, crypto is like death and taxes, an eternal fixture of human
existence that, despite all of its negative externalities and incoherence, we
must learn to live with it.
And yet this could not be further from the truth. Crypto has no future for a
simple and irrefutable reason; it is based on logically incoherent ideas and
serves no legal purpose. The existence of crypto assets is absolutely not a
brute fact of the universe, it is merely an institutional fact of a corrupt and
impotent regulatory environment, and a moment in the political landscape where
people distrust institutions so profoundly they would instead place their faith
and hope in a future built on scams. Yet, neither of these institutional facts
is eternal or sustainable in the long term; these ideas will pass just as other
incoherent ideas throughout history have passed. Crypto exists merely because,
relative to the size of other existential harms to the economy, crypto scams
are a drop in the bucket, for which governments could quickly end the madness
tomorrow if needed.
Crypto is best compared to other pre-scientific models of reasoning about the
world, such as the phlogiston theory, phrenology, miasma theory, or homeopathy.
Crypto is based on folk reasoning about economics much in the same way that the
idea that homeopathic notion that hyperdiluted substances can cure human
ailments. Crypto and homeopathy are ideologies that have substantial followings
and yet have no basis in scientific thought or are assailable by reason. And
yet both ideologies are popular simply because they are based on an underlying
ideology that is explicitly anti-orthodox and which appeals to people who have
lost faith in traditional institutions.
Folk reasoning will perhaps always exist in some form. However, individual
forms of it are necessarily always ephemeral because they have no coherence to
reality, make no falsifiable claims, and are, to a first approximation, as
equally empty in their predictive power as any other form of folk reasoning and
thus subject to eternal replacement. The miasma theory of medicine has strictly
zero adherents today for the simple reason that it has no explanatory power
next to the modern germ theory. And the crypto theory of sound money and
inflation has the same level of explanatory power concerning the economy as the
notion that disease is caused by bad air."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
