... and isn't what it says it is. It's not decentralized. It's not free or self-sovereign. It's not honest money. It's not a store of value or an inflation hed

... and isn't what it says it is. It's not decentralized. It's not free or self-sovereign. It's not honest money. It's not a store of value or an inflation hedge. It's also not free of nation state influence. Any nation state that wanted to invest the money could 51% attack or more likely sabotage these systems in a more covert way. Nasty dictatorships like North Korea or Putinistan constantly scam and hack the cryptocurrency ecosystem to siphon off money to fund their regimes. Any state could place regulations in the way of the actual use of cryptocurrency and kill it even if the tech worked fine. It might have been some of those things when it was small. Since then scaling problems inherent in this first generation of the tech led to all forms of hidden centralization, industrial economies of scale led to mining cartels, and perverse economic incentives (some built into the crypto system) led to it being dominated by scams, gambling, and pyramid schemes. Its goals were not necessarily bad. It just failed to achieve them. Edit: social media also failed to achieve many of its goals, becoming instead a cesspool of bullshit and a dragnet for surveillance. I think there's a lesson in here about how totally unique unknown unknown problems tend to manifest in interactive information systems at enormous scale. Systems behave very differently when you scale them out to millions, hundreds of millions, or billions of participants or nodes than they do at toy or early adopter scale. It's not just decentralized systems that are bitten by this. Centralized media are bitten too, just in different ways by different sorts of problems.