Second, crypto boosters -- I am not one, but interested and not pessimistic -- would say that an economy or a monetary system is nothing but a closed, self-referential bubble that has the useful property of sometimes correlating to predictable real-world activity. It's an abstraction over the real world: not the real world itself, but a way to influence it. It it were the real world, you would presumably have a much easier time determining whether and how much inflation is actually rising. As it is, you have a debate over it today because numbers say one thing, and people experience another.
The crypto people are attempting to bootstrap just such another system, except one that doesn't rely on central banking. So I don't think self-referential is an effective critique then, because that's the intention.
Maybe the core question of this entire endeavor is whether the legal system is a necessary component for layering a system of abstraction on top of the real world, or merely a useful one.
> self-referential babble