Banks are literally closed source. Crypto is literally closed source. So, yes, it is.

> and loss of money is never irrelevant.

Loss of money from centralized exchanges is irrelevant to the decentralized consensus technology. These are completely orthogonal concerns. Normal financial institutions get hacked, and they also operate ponzi schemes. The fact that this can happen to comparable centralized crypto services is orthogonal to the technology.

> It's the alignment of what I value (security, safety, government guarantees) versus what you value, which is ... well I don't know.

I think i've pretty clearly articulated what I think the technology is for. Just go back and read what i've said.

> I just feel like people should know who they're arguing with.

Of course i'm invested in it, to a degree. Anyone who believes in a technology should be invested in that technology. You shouldn't trust them if they're not, because if they haven't invested, they don't actually believe in it.

That being said, crypto very well may not turn out to be useful for the world. It enables new possibilities for social and economic organization. Technologies like that are very rare, and they are usually transformative and tremendously economically valuable. This one could be an exception, but it'd probably be the first.

Awesome. I appreciate that. That tacit acknowledgement is lacking in all pro-crypto posts.

Most silicon valley companies want to make a shit ton of money with their VC capital. They say things like, "We'll make the world better..." but that's really just what they tell themselves so they can feel better about making a metric shit ton of money. And there's nothing wrong with that since that's what drives the economy.

But it's unchecked greed that caused 2008, and that was human behavior.

If anything crypto appears to enable more bad human behavior: money laundering for drugs and human trafficking, rug pulls, stable coins that may or may not be literally printing money, payoffs for ransomware and blackmail...

At what point do you check your greed and want to solve the unsexy problems that crypto creates in our society?

To put a more fine point on it, i'd say about 10-15% of my net worth is exposed to crypto.

> Most silicon valley companies want to make a shit ton of money with their VC capital. They say things like, "We'll make the world better..." but that's really just what they tell themselves so they can feel better about making a metric shit ton of money. And there's nothing wrong with that since that's what drives the economy.

This is certainly true, but I think it's a little misleading. If you actually believe a technology is transformative, investing in it probably makes sense. So the fact that VCs are talking their own book IMO is mostly just evidence that they believe what they're saying.

Certainly it's true that occasionally people say things they don't believe in order to offload bad assets on unsuspecting retail investors. And some of the crypto VCs might be doing that sometimes, but if they believed that, they wouldn't keep investing in the category, I don't think.

> But it's unchecked greed that caused 2008, and that was human behavior.

True, but unchecked greed also caused the industrial revolution, so, it has some benefits too.

> If anything crypto appears to enable more bad human behavior: money laundering for drugs and human trafficking, rug pulls, stable coins that may or may not be literally printing money, payoffs for ransomware and blackmail...

Crypto definitely enables lots of bad things. No question about that. It also enables some good things though, like the ability to safely (in relative terms) store value outside of kleptocratic and/or irresponsible regimes (e.g. venezuela).

It also facilitates a certain kind of forced transparency. For instance, let's say a country has problems with government officials seizing property deeds. The officials simply change the title and say "sorry you actually never owned this land". A citizen has no recourse here, they can't even prove the government did this, because the government warehouses all the records. If, instead, every property transfer had to be recorded on a decentralized blockchain to be considered legitimate, then at the very least any citizen to whom this happened could prove to the public that it was stolen from them. Of course, that doesn't mean they get it back, because physical possession still flows to the people with the guns. But it does mean they can no longer effectively deny it, and I think that has a lot of value in regions of the world with less trustworthy governance.

> At what point do you check your greed and want to solve the unsexy problems that crypto creates in our society?

Well, a lot of the problems crypto has created are really revealing problems that were latent anyway. Ransomware is really the problem of insecure software, for instance.

The problem of money laundering is an interesting one, and I think sort of poses a philosophical problem about event ordering. What I mean by that is that what crypto really gives people is genuine monetary self-sovereignty. Having that self-sovereignty enables money laundering and tax evasion, for sure.

However, I have to believe that in a world in which monetary self-sovereignty was the norm before the surveilled financial system (e.g. supposing crypto was created before SWIFT), we would view that sort of sovereignty as a fundamental right.

As a thought experiment, consider a world in which DNA sequencing was invented 100 years ago, and up until 10 years ago the government had been collecting everyone's DNA at birth. They had then been going on to solve all sorts of crimes with it, and probably occasionally harass protesters and dissidents and other undesirables and so on. But then in 2010 someone invents a pill that you can take that alters the DNA base pairs that are used for that surveillance (without side effects). This pill would re-establish the biological privacy that we accept as a natural right today. However, undoubtedly people would make the same arguments you're making now, that this is a great step backward in our crime fighting ability, etc, And they'd be absolutely right.

But I think the question we want to ask here is what makes sense as a set of natural rights in this context?Should people have sovereignty over their own money? Transactional privacy? If not, why should they have biological or medical privacy then? It seems to me that the lack of financial privacy is a contingent artifact of the evolutionary path of technology, not some moral truth arrived at through democratic means.