When the Adderall-addled Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) lost control of his crypto-trading platform after defrauding users, many had their priors confirmed.
Crypto bad! they cried.
This, of course, is rather like saying DOTCOM bad! in 2001 or, post-Enron, -Bernie Madoff, or -Elizabeth Holmes capitalism bad! Of course, the Web survived, and the mixed economy went trundling along.
Hypostatization is too big a word for the crypto bad group. “Crypto” is not a concrete thing that can be evaluated as such. You have to look at the particulars, such as the value of what technology, represented by which token, traded on what exchange—centralized or decentralized—run by which actors, and by what means. …
Yes, “crypto” has attracted scam artists, hackers, schemers, and other ne’er-do-wells. But so has traditional finance. In fact, I was recently the victim of a card-testing scam. Wherever there is value, there will be scumbags: private criminals and public predators.
Though scumbags are scum, their existence is a selection pressure for the crypto ecosystem.
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