Rebuttal to "Why Crypto Just Won't Die"

This is a response to Why Crypto Just Won’t Die .

I like The Atlantic , and not because I agree with everything they publish. Rather, there is a strong "old journalism" resonance (in a good way): thoughtful, educated writers researching complex topics and then attempting to illuminate what they discover as best they can.

Often, the things I disagree with are the most useful for me, as they help me understand an opposing perspective without the usual villainization or strawmen.

So I was disappointed to stumble over this condescending dismissal of an entire industry, an industry I've been grateful to be a part of for the last four years. Rather than thoughtfully assessing how people find real value in something new, the article instead asserts that its participants are indulging a "collective delusion". This is simply, obviously false.

Public blockchains have a very clear and incredibly useful function: they are ledgers; logbook; systems for keeping reliable records.

This function is so important to humans that various, disparate civilizations independently developed entire social classes devoted, in part, to maintaining these types of records. Today, we take for granted a world built on the venerable practice of keeping good books. It is a critical part of how we practice ownership, trade, law, and governance, and plays a key role in how we preserve information, detect corruption, resolve disputes, prevent conflicts, and so on. Maintaining reliable records is a cornerstone of human civilization.

That we now have a way to maintain those records programmatically, verifiably, publicly, at the speed of digital compute, without requiring punitive controls, and with guarantees more robust than ever before... is kind of a big deal.

What the author seems to be upset about is "crypto culture". The problem with trying to frame crypto in the context of its cultural idiosyncrasies (rather than the civic and economic implications of the technology) is that those qualities are not actually peculiar to crypto. Rather, they are hallmarks of our time that crypto happens to illuminate.

That crypto is indulged by nihilists likely has more to do with its connection to systems of social meaning. Because "maintaining reliable records" undergirds so much of our communal life, playing with crypto is like playing with civics at the atomic level - it's illuminating and, in its own distinct way, fun. But the nihilists were here long before crypto, and will persist in their meme wars and YOLOing whether we legislate crypto into oblivion or not.

Anyhow, I'm hoping for a more balanced perspective next time.