I think that the original idea behind crypto is still the most interesting. It's programmable money. Large swaths of the finance industry exist to make money pr

I think that the original idea behind crypto is still the most interesting. It's programmable money. Large swaths of the finance industry exist to make money programmable. Why not build it into the monetary system directly? The general historical trend is to make money more abstract and to be able to perform more complicated functions with it. But fundamentally money is a social technology that consists of three things: An abstract unit of value in which money is denominated, a system of accounts, which keeps track of the individuals' or the institutions' credit or debt balances as they engage in trade with one another and the possibility that the original creditor in a relationship can transfer their debtor's obligation to a third party in settlement of some unrelated debt. [0] Crypto seems to satisfy the essence of that in a pretty cool way. DeFi projects are experimenting with the question of, "can we build the financial instruments and capabilities that a complex economy require on top of, and directly integrated with, this type of monetary system. Like any technology that requires a large network of users to be valuable it has a difficult bootstrapping problem. But it seems to be gradually working its way to larger and more important transactional contexts. First with illegal digital marketplaces and now in countries with weak monetary system like El Salvador (and with unbridled speculation along the way). Maybe all of the current crypto projects will fail but it will be interesting to see the nature of monetary systems in 10, 20 and 50 years from now. What aspects of these current experiments have been adopted? [0] Money: The Unauthorized Biography