Wow, this is one of the most confused articles about cryptocurrencies that I have ever read. He runs off the rails almost from the very beginning:<p>"currencies are systems of value exchange"<p>No, a currency is a <i>physical</i> token issued by an institution that is a proxy for money, usually bank notes and coins. Money is the system of exchange. The dollars in your bank account are money, but they aren't currency. The dollars in your wallet are both. Old Zimbabwean dollars are currency but not money.<p>It just goes downhill from there.
A guy who advocates blockchain solutions yet dismisses cryptocurrency surely misunderstands both.<p>Also whatever main "fallacy" (to use author's word) is at work in both of these is ultimately rooted in confused and ambiguous notions of decentralization.<p>It's really not the tech that's the problem, it's the assumptions and premises it is derived from, which is why every year blockchain tech spirals into greater and more layered complications in the hopeless pursuit of resolving this impossible conflict; very much a modern day geocentrism-epicycles disciplinary failure mode.
I used to be a believer in cryptocurrency, and I still it think it has practical applications, but not as currency. When my credit card got skimmed and the thief started to make unauthorized transactions, I was immediately informed of this, called my bank and eventually got my money back. This is the moment where I realized if I have my all my money in crypto, when it gets stolen or otherwise, I will never get it back.
My concern with fiat money and the benefits that cryptocurrency provides align very well. My concern with fiat currency is that it is entirely possible that tomorrow we will wake up to discover that the digital systems banks use to trace and account for money, systems we know are antiquated and maintained and expanded with the least effort and expense physically possible, are meaningless. The discovery of a persistent system of exploitation which has made the balance numbers held by all banks into nonsense is entirely possible. If it is discovered that large economic players or criminals have EVER manipulated the values recorded as an 'account balance' to represent instead pure fiction - game over. I would expect this observation to be announced first by a nation foreign to the US, followed by that nation no longer accepting digital transfers of any kind in US dollar denominations, as their basis for value, solely trust in the digital accounting systems of US banks, evaporated overnight.<p>There is no possible way for a bank to 'prove' that the billion-dollar balance of a Walmart account represents anything of value. They can show that their systems reflect it, but it ends there. They can not prove that, say, $500 million of that balance is invented 'funny money' that represents absolutely nothing. Cryptocurrencies can not have this happen, as they manage their reliance on trust. I can prove a bitcoin is legitimate mathematically, and I need ask nothing of the other party for them to be able to verify it themselves. I can not prove a dollar displayed as part of my account balance at a bank is legitimate. And, as far as I understand matters, neither can anyone else. I must ask the other party to trust my bank, or trust the FDIC, or trust the US governments computer systems, or something along those lines.<p>The ideal situation, of course, would be a government-backed cryptocurrency with the government guaranteeing that the cryptocurrency would be honored as legal tender. But the political clout of banks makes such a thing very difficult. It would place banks in a position of actually earning their profits through the lending and borrowing of money, rather than actually profiting from garnering nearly every single monetary transaction which occurs (solely those which are conducted purely in cash exempted) in the economy in an act of cryptotaxation (the crypto prefix here meaning 'hidden', not related to cryptography).