Wow this article is just flat out wrong about Milton Friedman. He was not an Austrian school economist. He was part of the Chicago school of economic thought. Also, he was not for moving everything back to the gold standard. They could not even get these simple facts correct.
Crypto currencies (or atleast DeFI) is trying to solve a pretty pragmatic problem: There is 1.7B unbanked people in the world and banking services are outdated and unavailable for large portion of humankind.<p>I mean that is pretty good problem to work on IMO. I think articles like this that talk about monetary politics are missing the point a bit.<p>I live in Denmark, and even then it takes approx ~10-24 hours to transfer funds between banks, imagine if we could reduce that time to mere seconds- or minutes?
I don't know much about cryptocurrency, but have been investigating Storj recently for backup storage space because a HashBackup customer asked about it.<p>Storj created an Ethereum-based token and one of its purposes was so they could cheaply issue micropayments to a distributed network of international storage node operators. The issuing micropayments part appears to work, but getting tokens converted to fiat, ie spendable money, appears to be difficult and expensive according to many posts on their forums.<p>So the idea of cryptocurrencies enabling micropayments, while good in theory, seems to not be working so great in practice. Most of the responses to this problem are "It will get fixed with Etherium 2.0" or something like that. It's funny how most problems in life are "to be fixed later".