Let crypto burn
I take issue with this part of the article:<p>&gt; Absent clear and easily enforceable property rights, relying solely on private investors to monitor and discipline the behaviour of opaque intermediaries has never been safe and effective. There is no prospect for a technological solution to these age-old problems.<p>The technical solution to opaque intermediaries is already here, and it&#x27;s transparent intermediaries (enabled by smart contracts.) They let you replace an opaque piece of code running in a company&#x27;s back room with a transparent piece of code that can be publicly read, understood, and audited. It can make an interaction with an intermediary very predictable and reliable, because you can trace&#x2F;simulate the intermediary&#x27;s exact code execution path (and thus know exactly what they are going to do with your money) before you even send the request.<p>It&#x27;s striking to me that the author doesn&#x27;t state his opinion on smart contracts anywhere in the post. It makes me wonder whether he really thought they weren&#x27;t a topic that readers would naturally use to contextualize his post, or whether he&#x27;s ignorant of their existence.<p>That&#x27;s aside from the entire premise of the article being based on this idea that &quot;crypto&quot; is some monolithic corrupting force, rather than simply a messy emergent series of public databases that are as unthinking and uncaring as MySQL or Git.<p>&gt; Both crypto and traditional finance are simply combinations of a database and computer code. It would be straightforward for a group of technicians to convert any set of conditional cash flows from one into the other.<p>The author seems so close to &quot;getting it&quot;. If only he asked the question &quot;now what changes when the general public has unfettered real-time read access to those databases and computer code,&quot; perhaps he could see the uniqueness of the design space, and appreciate that there&#x27;s much more emergent game theory to work through before writing crypto off as being on a path of implosion into irrelevancy.