I wasted years of my life in crypto

I've never understood the initial arguments about Bitcoin, no matter how many times they've been explained to me.

The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database. How anyone, especially many intelligent people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top of such a unwieldy piece of technology is beyond me. Maybe it goes to show how few people understand economics and anthropology and how dunning-krueger can happen to anyone.

Now the uninformed gambling on futuristic sounding hokum? THAT is easy to understand.

That being said, I'm sorry the author had to go through this experience, the road of life is often filled with unexpected twists and turns.

It's an ingenious solution to achieve a "trustless" currency that prevents double-spending without a central authority. Unfortunately, this solves the wrong problem. Spending money usually involves getting a good or service in return, which inherently requires "trust" (as does any human interaction). Your fancy blockchain is not going to help you if you order something with Bitcoin and no package arrives.

The issue isn't that it solves the wrong problem.

The issue is that crypto boosters (including a few already here) claim it solves a whole host of other problems without thinking things through, kind of like some communists. Then if you argue enough they'll point out that things can be fixed ... but bitcoin is now indistinguishable from any other currency, other than its payment system that will no longer be widely used.

Like, you can make it easy to use if there are banks. And those banks will be subject to regulations. Boom, now you have banks and regulations.

You can get a loan from those banks. Now there's fractional reserve banking, with something like a virtual gold standard.

If it ever gets big enough, the fed can write bitcoin denominated bonds, and it's now prerty much a fiat currency, not even virtual gold.

Yes you still have a shadow sector where you can use bitcoin to buy drugs or dodge the taxman. But all the other supposed benefits have gone.

Your argument here appears to be "crypto is no better than fiat, because you can build the same systems on top of them."

What you put on top is not the core value proposition of cryptocurrencies? It's what's underneath that's different, that was always the point. Fiat currency is built on a foundation of gov't control, whether it's the physical currency or the money in your bank account. Cryptocurrencies, fundamentally, are under no such control. If you're stupid enough to go get a 5mil loan in bitcoin from a bank who is only holding 1.7mil, and the delivery of said bitcoin is a slip of paper saying "iou btc lol" that's not the currency failing you, it's you acting stupidly.

No; the argument is much closer to "if you don't make cryptocurrency basically the same as fiat, by building the same systems on top of it, it's useless to the vast majority of people."

That is just an observation, not an argument against building, improving, and using crypto.

Cryptocurrency doesn't need to do everything for everyone at all times to be a useful thing to have in the world. It only needs to be helpful to a subset of people, in a subset of situations, some of the time.

I'm happy paying by card for ~100% of my daily transactions, but I want cryptocurrency to exist should the need arise. The rise of authoritarian governments and policies across the world should've made that obvious by now. What's legal and perfectly moral today can become a crime tomorrow.