Your article has a greater amount of honesty than the vast majority of other believers’ writings typically contain. However, it still makes enormous and vague assumptions that completely distort reality. Such statements in the beginning, such as “…as their increasing popularity…” and “…while the number of regular users is growing every day…” And the degree of unproven or vaguely reasoned projections of how things are evolving almost amounts to fraud. They imply that crypto is being used buy groceries or gasoline or cars or houses…. Simply nonsense.
Apart from HODLRs, there are only 2 use cases that amount to 99% of crypto’s “popularity”: nefarious uses (money-laundering, child porn, human trafficking, blood resources, ransomware, etc.) and the investors in this activity via speculating on crypto exchanges. There is no measurable amount of crypto that is used to buy and sell things just like “fiat”.
It is good that there is a recognition, however, of this fact and its problematic nature. But then something completely absurd is offered:
“[Any new legally acceptable crypto-currency] would also need to be decentralized enough that it can still be recognized as adjacent to its original form while still having checks in place to ensure that unsavory activities like tax evasion and money laundering can’t proceed unchecked.”
How do you get to and what is “decentralized enough”? This is like saying: we need to make killing white rhinos look more like herd culling. There is a general delusion among “reasonable” crypto fans that decentralized currencies can be made “respectable” and that governments will figure a way to let people use them without the downsides.
This delusion often conflates “digital national currencies” with BLOCKCHAIN. Digital currencies can be created and distributed and managed now and there is no need for “blockchain”. Blockchain is not now nor will it ever be scalable. See projects such as bloXroute.com that are using a huge network of private routers and “sidecar” technology at every transport point/wallet to make Bitcoin Tx’s incrementally faster (very cool, but stupid). Or the vast undertaking that is the Ethereum roadmap or the sprawling Consensys undertakings. Rube Goldberg would be proud.
These and others are a terrible waste of technical talent and effort and can thereby never be used for improving cost/enabling more efficient flow of money, whether there is only one block-generator or all the ones in Mongolia, Armenia, et al. If the objective is only immutability, there is plenty of great technology out there than can solve this way easier and scale. But the hypnotic effect of the word “blockchain” has totally deranged huge numbers of otherwise sensible people — usually because of the money that is to be made and some for the presumed technical challenge.
One must really at some point say, stop the nonsense.
And, in the end, when Russia and China are trotted out as places where the action is on something so intimate to peoples lives, at a minimum, you have to really step way back, down some coffee and vigorously shake your head.
If this describes the future, then the future is truly stupid.
