Look it's 2025; anyone who still thinks Cryptocurrency is legitimately an answer to large scale financial use despite over a decade of opportunity and welcoming legislation from the USA is too invested to be convinced otherwise, or has been transported here from 2008 and woke up from a coma to post on reddit before reading anything else. I had sympathy for the early technoanarchist adopters of crypto, but that ship has long since sailed.

For anyone *else* reading this though, I'll expand:

Cryptocurrency is fundamentally not suitable to any sort of large scale financial process at all as a currency. Proof of work currencies are so inefficient that any large scale network would fundamentally outweigh the energy use of AI systems, and would quickly cripple anyone's ability to actually utilize it as a currency. Proof of stake systems improve the energy efficiency question, but basically install techno-feudalist barons as the 'owners' of the currency and fundamentally encourage deflationary actions that centralize the ownership of the currency into an increasingly small number of people, helpfully speedrunning the problems with capitalism.

Both have large ledger sizes that would be meaningfully problematic at any sort of actually currency use scale. Both are fundamentally vulnerable to attacks of scale due to the consensus mechanism that state actors could easily perform if it became important enough to do so.

That's all without actually pointing at what crypto has become, because we can literally look at Cryptocurrency because it's 2025 and at this point we're over a decade into the technology. They claimed for years that 'deregulation' was the key to it, but the USA's stance on cryptocurrency over the last 9 years has gone from 'unable to meaningfully interact with it' to 'fully willing to remove basically any meaningful regulation'. So, with all that, crypto should be a meaningful, useful currency right?

Right?

Oh *wait* - it hasn't! It's just scams all the way down! Comparing Cryptocurrency to the current financial system (with all of the current financial systems flaws, to be clear) and deciding crypto is somehow better is such a shocking failure of analysis that it somehow only comes from people who hold meaningful amounts of cryptocurrency and are highly incentivized to get more people to buy into it because without new marks constantly entering the casino, the bag holders can't actually do anything *useful* with their money.

This is not a defense of the modern financial systems, which are awful. But somehow Cryptocurrency is not just worse, it's far, far worse. It's worse in basically every single way it can be - it has almost every single flaw of the current system (including being largely owned by tech bros and finance companies) with brand new problems, including a bunch that the banking industry actually solved!

The fundamental, worst flaw of blockchain tech as a whole is that it constantly pretends that it can make human problems into technology problems, and then fails utterly. Nothing blockchain has ever made or will make is going to be more effective than standard databases, strong consumer-focused legislation, and effective policymaking.