There are only three rules to cryptocurrencies: scale, scale, and scale
The recent spate of scandals, bankruptcies and crashes doesn’t augur the brightest future for cryptocurrencies, and risks creating a vicious circle that could see their value stabilize at relatively low levels, compared to the peaks they enjoyed until recently.
At the same time, we’re seeing a weeding out of the many profiteers, crooks and speculators attracted by the promise of getting rich quick. People who, at a given moment, believed that cryptocurrencies offered constant growth and that they could bypass control mechanisms… until they found that, coincidentally, many of those mechanisms were there for their own protection.
What happens when, for example, we see that a cryptocurrency, intended in principle to be completely decentralized and independent on a single company, becomes overly centralized? This has happened several times, most recently, with the bankruptcy of FTX: a company thinks it can play the system, and decides to issue its own currency, a move that should raise alarms, but curiously does not, or does but attracts those looking to make a killing.
Issuing a cryptocurrency is a tempting move with very low entry barriers: all you need to do is copy another cryptocurrency. Sometimes, not even that: some issuance mechanisms we have seen fail were as crude as…
