The fascinating thing for me to watch in real time is Crypto Bros discovering in real time exactly why the financial system works the way it does. It didn't happen by accident. It's 5000+ years of incremental changes. Reversible transactions? Feature, not a bug. Expandable money supply? Feature, not a bug. Fractional reserve lending that essentially creates money? Feature, not a bug.

I remember saying this about Google Wave: it was a solution in search of a problem. Cyrpto specifically and blockchain in general is absolutely a solution desperately in search of a problem. And I honestly think not enough people were honest about their motivations. They saw Bitcoin go through the roof and were eager to be on the next rocketship, which never happened (well, there's Ethereum but it kinda happened at the same time although it started later).

It's been a sea of shitcoins and rug pulls ever since. Anyone rmemeber NFTs? Just another scam on top of a scam to sell more crypto.

Sometimes there's an advantage to an outsider's perspective on a problem space. It's the essence of disruption. But way more often than not, it's just snake oil salesman looking for a quick buck. And trying to disrupt the financial system without understanding it has shown itself to be a dismal failure, kinda like the graveyard of "Google killer" search engines in the 2000s and early 2010s.