I don’t see anyone in Finland paying for coffee with crypto. Or paying their employees. Or paying their mortgage. Or raising money for their company. You know, any of the many things that happen every day in the actual financial system; the things that make an actual economy work and produce wealth and wellbeing.

So what does crypto actually do, if it’s not used for anything productive even in the most crypto-friendly countries? The best that its proponents can offer seems to be “one day it could do X” and variations on “it will work when everybody does it right”, a position oddly similar to true believers in Communism.

Many years ago I used to be quite positive about crypto. Smart contracts sounded clever and useful. The more I looked at the technology and the people involved, the more obvious it became that it’s fundamentally deficient and controlled by scammers. Crypto has had many, many chances to prove itself, and as far as I’m concerned, it failed at everything and doesn’t deserve yet another chance.

How so? The KYC/AML attitude and invasive banks seem to make it basically impossible to function a business. Can't even use a cryptocurrency ATM without identifying yourself through a Finnish bank account and being a long-term resident, making them useless for travelers. Localbitcoins was originally one of the biggest services and it was destroyed by Finnish regulations: a "local" p2p trading service that hilariously banned people from even using cash because of the hostile Finnish environment