The Case Against "Against Crypto"

Over the recent months I’ve come across a lot of negative comments aimed at the entire Crypto space, blaming Bitcoin (and other projects) for seemingly all the evil that’s been present in the news: ransomware attacks rate increases, global warming, retail investor scams, etc. The general impression one could get after being presented with such allegations is that Blockchain is simply a useless waste of energy at best and dangerous criminal activity accelerator at worst. So, the action to take here is clear: we should just ban all Crypto projects (or practically regulate them out of existance by banning Crypto-to-Fiat exchanges), abandon research in this area and simply forgot about this “Internet money” stuff, right?

I first heard about Bitcoin around 2015, and at that time I thought that it was a cool idea - entirely digital money with no central control. I didn’t dive deep into the technology side, so I pretty much forgot about it after some time and went on with life. During the 2nd year in college, after taking classes in Distributed Systems, I read some technical papers about Bitcoin and Blockchains in general. It is at this point that I really got hooked and started to realize just how big of a revolution this probably was. A globally distributed data and code platform with consensus enforced via clever mechanism design and properly devised incentives in the form of simple supply and demand. One could even go as far as to say that Bitcoin is to the global financial system, what capitalism was to economics. No more central planning, no more 100% trust for the people in power, no more middle men controlling the flow of information. Instead, a system in which everyone contributes to the whole by simply following their natural insticts of egoism and personal gain. That was my thinking at that time, which eventually lead me to taking facultative classes in cryptography and game theory. I even decided to pick a Blockchain implementation with educational visualizations as my Bachelor’s thesis.

Since then, I’ve became a bit more pragmatic on this matter. I still think that Blockchain (or bizantine fault tolerant distributed consensus in general) is one of the greatest innovations of our time (maybe right next to deep learning), but I also realized that the transition to a economy/society based on trustless smart contracts will not happen over night. Nor am I actively advocating that it necessarily should. That’s why I picked this parituclar title for my article - I’m not a radical 100% pro-crypto maximalist, but I’m also not standing passively when others obviously try to (out of ignorance or personal interests) picture Blockchain as an evil creation brought to this world by insatiable libertarian capitalists. In fact, I acknowledge some of the shortcomings of Bitcoin mentioned above (especially concerning the egregious waste of energy of Proof-of-work and, of course, questionable scalability). But I refuse to accept a future in which we simply decide to forget or even ban Crypto. In my view, the benefits of Blockchains vastly outweight even their current limitations and drawbacks. We should, at the very least, try to continue working on the main issues blocking mainstream adoption (I’m looking at you, scalability) and possibly be a little bit more audacious in the roll out of practical solutions based on Blockchains in the coming years. If all goes well, the payout for society will be huge. For centuries most interactions between two or more entities were based on the premise of there being a trusted third party which would approve or simply control the transaction. A third party that can be biased, corrupted, hacked, selfish, error prone or simply costly and slow to operate. Thanks to Blockchains, for the very first time in our modern history, we will have the potential and tools to create a future in which openly available automated smart contracts are running our business and institutions, in which everyone is on an equal footing and everyone can easily access the rules of the game. A future with algorithmic hard money not tied to the government in which the fear of keynesian inflation is no longer. A future in which politicians are held accountable for their promises and court verdicts are more objective. A future without censorship and de-platforming. A future which empowers the individual and embraces the collective, distributed nature of human activity. A better future.

#CutTheMiddleMan