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Circling back on the crypto FTX fiasco, Noah Smith has a new piece out theorizing, what happens if crypto just dies? Unfortunately it's paywalled so I couldn't read the whole thing, but I have been wondering this myself. More and more crypto exchanges have been dying off, especially over the last couple of years. FTX seemed to resemble one of the last exchanges embodying the spirit of crypto, and now it's gone.
By spirit of crypto, I mean the original cypherpunk, decentralized idea of a currency that operates outside the bounds of the State. As @aqouta and others have mentioned, big exchanges like Binance are actually more centralized, and if they continue to grow they can easily be incorporated as organs of the existing State apparatus.
As someone who has always been wary of censorship and centralized power, especially in light of the recent escalation in terms of woke social norms being shoved down everyone's throat, this is troubling to me. Both the right and left seem to care less and less about the overreach of the powers that be - in fact folks like Tyler Cowen think that the main difference in the 'New Right' is that they are more trusting of elites.
I'm curious for takes on either side of this issue. If you don't think we have anything to worry about with regards to State power, why is that so? Do you just think that with the rise of the internet/technology States are impotent, or is centralized power a good thing?
If you disagree with the premise above, then how can we work to push back on centralization? Especially with the rise of powerful tools like LLM and the rise of AI, is there any hope for the individual classical liberal ethos to survive the next century?
If Crypto was going to die due to exchanges failing, it probably would have happened back when Mt. Gox imploded. That was a situation where people could have thrown in the towel completely and maybe Bitcoin dies an awkward early death as people stop mining it and delete their keys and eventually forget about the whole thing, and there is no early hype to drive the market into mainstream awareness at all.
Or when The DAO (the original one) suffered that legendary hack which might have soured people on the Ethereum blockchain.
Real OGs remember, and hopefully learned their lesson all that way back about 'trusting' centralized exchanges. AND about trusting decentralized ones.
Ultimately there are major hurdles to maintaining the decentralized aspect of crypto that makes it worth considering as a censorship resistant method of transferring value.
I'm not a bitcoin maxi but I am a crypt-optimist (and I mean ALL of cryptography) but it is certainly hugely frustrating to me that the projects that get the most attention seem to be the ones that fail the most spectacularly.
And the projects that actually leverage the decentralized public ledger in a way that, to me, makes actual sense tend to be ignored since they're not flashy and glamorous nor do they promise to 100x your money.
So I'm a little bitter that we're not getting actual useful products out of this mess so far, but I do think crypto will survive and useful projects will, eventually, be the only reason they can continue to exist and operate. Centralized exchanges may eventually become obsolete in this magical future world.
Mt Gox and the Dao hack were bad, but there where so few people involved compared to now, and those that got burned where more ideologically committed. Now with the implosion of Celsius, Luna and FTX a huge number of normies are getting burnt, and they (and their families, friends etc) will never look at crypto again and always think of it as a scam.
Is that what happened to the traditional financial system after the 2008 meltdown?
That involves a huge chunk of the population of the entire world losing money.
It certainly did after the great depression, lots of old people (who lived through the depression never trusted banks again).
I've yet to see in it argued that we're experiencing the crypto equivalent of the great depression, but there may be a case for it.
I think it's more like the panic of 1907, but that may just be me.
I'd believe it. Crypto has reinvented, among other things, wildcat banking and Tulip Mania.
Any retrospective of Crypto's history (whether it lives or dies) is going to be able to draw ample historical comparisons.
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