astralcodexten.substack.com
I made this a top level post because I think people here might want to discuss it but you can remove it if it doesn't meet your standards.
Edit: removed my opinion of Scott from the body
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Notes -
This may be true, but as Aqouta pointed out, trust has to be earned. Doubly (or triply!) so when you are an institution in a democratic nation. The US Dollar is the world's reserve currency, and while I can grant that fiat currencies are not The Devil, the US Dollar is pretty much held up by confidence in the US Government (or perhaps its value is directly a measure of confidence, even).
So imagine what happens when the country I was born and raised in has been pissing away international goodwill, domestic goodwill, treasure, blood, and competence for practically the entirety of the 21st Century, while private industry finds new ways to exploit the bad decisions made by the Reagan and Clinton admins. Every 5-10 years, there's been some new bubble blowing up, whether that be in tech, housing, or even Crypto. Meanwhile, the Internet, a product of American innovation, has become the new agora, only to be colonized by the same corporate forces colluding with the government to ruin everything. (For God's sake, Visa and MasterCard are pushing Pixiv around. Pixiv! A Japanese company having to self-censor because it made the mistake of connecting itself to the West's payment-processing duopoly!)
I'd like a world, or at least a US, with strong regulations and well-considered laws enforced consistently, where dumb financial shenanigans and abridgement of our God-given rights in the name of profit never happened, but we do not live in that world. We live in the Cheems world instead.
I don't want to act like a defectbot, but our world is incredibly defective, and you do not cooperate with the defective.
Not that I have any true objection to what you just said, but the USD-market has its share of bad actors, then crypto is crawling with them. It would be charitable to say that most of the space is full of scams preying on dumb money.
Just because a system is bad doesn't make its alternative automatically better! Crypto enthusiasts are baffled at the lack of uptake of their ecosystem - it is because for the vast majority of users, they lose their entire investment or come away losing money. An unregulated, legally opaque market is the perfect environment for naive investors to lose their shirt.
(And being a 'grudger', in the defect/cooperative axis, is a suboptimal strategy.)
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