What problems other than "how to sell drugs to suburban teenager online", "how to blackmail companies", and "how to run giant global ponzi schemes" has crypto actually solved in its 13 years of existence?
13 years after the invention of the WWW, there were almost a billion users, and it was increasingly transforming the world. If any of these crypto/blockchain ideas were actually useful, they would have been widely adopted by now for more than just criminal activity. The reality is that it's an interesting idea, but it's utterly useless for any worthwhile use cases.
Crypto does have to compete with alternatives that are protected and funded by the govt itself. And the main problem is the slow transaction processing as I understand it. Still not technologically competitive for big systems.
I hope so. The past 10 years have been absurd IMO. I am of the opinion that returning the Fed Rate back to "more than zero" has begun to unravel a lot of these "money goes up" schemes.
Now that money actually costs money to borrow (up from 0% to 3.75%), you can't just keep borrowing for infinite amounts of time and hoping for the best. You actually have to be doing something substantial with the money: building factories or buying servers or using R&D funds to hire programmers to make new things.
"Line goes up therefore I buy" is one of the _LEAST_ "meritocracy" things I've ever seen in my life. Be it crappy stock from some companies, or cryptocoin.
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I want cryptocoins to return to the days about solving financial problems in new innovative ways. Can we go back to talking about how to use 3-out-of-5 bitcoin wallets to implement new protocols of exchange and/or escrow? When did we become so focused on "number goes up" and "inflation hedge" and "have fun staying poor" ??
When the damn coin can do something that physical money can't do, and when people build businesses on top of that trick, that's when we move forward as a society. Not just this weird hype-fest, buying out of stadiums (Miami Stadium / others), or buying out Superbowl ads.