The Non-Innovation of Cryptocurrency

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2021-07-08 07:00:06

These days I spend a great deal of my time writing about and helping inform public policy on the global cryptocurrency crackdown. Ending this scourge on civilization is one of most important political problems facing the international community these days, and marks a new era of global cooperation on financial regulation that now necessarily transcends borders and nations. The fight against cryptocurrency and ransomware is now a fight for the cause of democratic norms and the continuation of the rules-based international order.

The consistent pushback many of us see from lawmakers and the tech community is the appeal towards not wanting to stifle “innovation” that might occur as a result of cryptocurrency. This argument is based on a mistaken beliefs and not supported by any evidence, but it begs the need to elaborate on why these quirky ideas about databases and digital money have not yielded any value or successful companies like other technologies have. There is a vast disconnect between how the chattering class, the investor class and software engineers talk about blockchain; with engineers normally being highly critical that there is even any worthwhile technology associated with blockchain.

Appeals to “the potential for innovation” are always amorphous and hand-wavy rhetorical gestures towards the potential for some tech that could exist but which we don’t fully understand the implications of. However bitcoin is a technology which did not arise out of an engineering effort directed towards a specific problem or market inefficiency, but instead out of a anarchist political narrative that views democratic control of the money supply and law enforcement as the problem.