There is no logical argument against crypto, because crypto is a secular religion mixed up in a Wall Street cash grab — There are many debates about crypto happening across many forums. Personally, I get invited to do debates all the time for an endless amount of podcasts and panels. Except for a few non-public events behind closed doors, I almost exclusively turn these offers down because I’ve found the experience to…

Crypto is the financial equivalent of astrology mixed with homeopathy — “Crypto is here to stay” is the favorite catchphrase of the reluctant and resignatory crypto apologists, and yet it is most often muttered with one’s hands in the air as they refuse to discuss the topic anymore. Under this line of reasoning, crypto is like death and taxes, an eternal…

What two pathological zero-sum markets can tell us about risk — When we look into the space of investment opportunities for things that look like crypto, considering even all pseudo-assets and any synthetic position one could possibly invest in, there aren’t many comparables to crypto assets. People have accurately compared crypto assets to absurd financial products like zero-coupon perpetual bonds and…

Dark Money and Crypto Super PACs are Warping American Democracy — It is an open secret that the crypto industry is spending a metric tonne of money to influence American legislation. The industry’s end goal is straightforward; they want to rewrite the rules of the land to favor themselves and to pick their regulator. Furthermore, their regulator of choice is very…

Fictional commodities: Crypto and its absurdist derivatives — In every gold rush, one group of people always makes a killing, the people selling the picks and shovels. In the California gold rush, the people selling lodging, mining equipment, and mining rights made a killing regardless of whether there was actually any “gold in them hills”. The crypto mania…

I do a lot of podcast interviews these days, and the question that keeps coming up when I discuss the complete uselessness of blockchain solutions is that they can’t be useless — because Walmart Canada or HSBC is using “the blockchain” for some project they did a whole press release…

Whenever talking heads on CNBC talk about crypto, they always bandy around numbers like $1 trillion or exorbitantly high market caps of like $10 billion for an investment in a talking dog coin. And these numbers sound impressive, but they’re completely meaningless. The actual amount of money sloshing around in…

Everyone always brings up land registry use cases when asked about potential real-world use cases of blockchain or NFTs. Someday, all land registries that track titles for houses will be stored on some hypothetical public distributed digital ledger. This almost kind of makes sense until you think about it for…

Last week in the Senate Banking Committee on Housing and Urban Affairs, Senator Warren made a very poignant and directed statement about the entanglement of prominent institutional money actors with crypto: “Crypto is an industry that is built to favor scammers, and some of the biggest players in our financial…