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Every central banker is basically required to publicly keep this opinion. Otherwise they would be undermining their own authority and autonomy. The thing that eats you is always initially dismissed as a toy.

Ironically, central bankers are the best informed about how broken fiat and monetary policy is. Cryptoassets must be something they spend a lot of time thinking about.

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I doubt anybody in an important position would lend much thought to crypto. A glance at it and you can see that its just a Rube-Goldberg machine trying to replace the trust and authority of central banks with "decentralization". And for what? So you can get your wallet hacked and have nobody to go to for restitution?

So you can get a bug found in your smart contract and have no way of fixing it? So you can lose your net worth by gambling on DogeCoin?

Crypto is a big bucket of problems, and the fact that a small group of idealogues call big bankers names and call their little toys "assets" doesn't change that the entire ecosystem is garbage. It will never replace the financial system.

Sure. It's just a toy for nerds. It breaks often, is hard to use, has a limited audience. You can't do anything interesting with it, just put numbers and data on it. Why would companies, let alone governments, be interested in this?

Oh I'm sorry, you must have thought these were critiques of blockchain. I was talking about the first personal computers. What a terrible idea that turned out to be.

The thing is, early PCs were solving actual consumer problems fairly early in their life cycle. Even if the problem was "I don't want to have to pay a quarter and walk to the arcade every time I want to play Space Invaders."

Blockchain solves an interesting technical problem. The question is finding the right application FOR that problem. A decentralized currency is a good demo application because it demonstrates the problem well, but it fails to answer the question "Why is it better than a classic centralized system" outside of some niche cases.

The existing financial system has left itself open for disruption, but that means there's a lot of potential for them to deliver the "faster horses" style solutions people want (faster settlement, lower fees, easier onboarding, less international hurdles) without completely scrapping the ecosystem.

Conversely, if you want to treat today's cryptocurrency platforms as analogous to early PCs, what's their answer to the 1984 Macintosh, or a modern Threadripper workstation? By the time cryptocurrency's polished to a mainstream consumer product, will we have filed off a lot of the things current enthusiasts celebrate? Maybe "unreversible transactions" and "no-recourse self-banking" will be as quaint as "storing programs on standard audio cassettes" and "toggling in boot code from front panel switches"

I think you're both right and that there's a lot of nuance.

Central banks (who, let's be honest, are not terribly tech savvy folks nor advised by such) are still coming to the realization that a currency can be replaced with code, compute, and apps. Yikes. That sort of disruption is a kick in the teeth to folks who previously have held significant power (a currency is an expression of power). A monetary hegemony works until it doesn't. I will be the first to go on the record as a huge crypto skeptic, but I can buy crypto through my brokerage and am (unintentionally) invested in it by way of SPY->TSLA->Bitcoin, so the financial system has lent credibility to crypto (you can also trade bitcoin futures on the CME, the same exchange you can trade soybeans, oil, eurodollars, and all sorts of "legitimate" financial derivatives [1]).

Crypto is best suited for trustless systems. Can you trust central banks to not race each other to devalue their currencies? You cannot, nor is it likely their interests are aligned with yours. Their allegiance is to the system and the status quo.

I don't know what the future holds, but if technology can provide a store of value that can't be devalued on a whim, I believe there will be a demand for that service. Bitcoin and similar are the first iteration, one should expect improvements as the technology evolves. At the highest levels, this is less about a currency you can spend and about power and control, with such struggles previously confined to relations between nation states, and historically it is very rare anyone with this amount of power gives it up willingly [2].

[1] https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/products/

[2] https://www.lynalden.com/fraying-petrodollar-system/ (long read, worth it)

"I doubt anybody in an important position would lend much thought to crypto"

I don't think you're deliberately being absurd unless I missed the sarcasm?

Joe Biden's nominee to head the SEC, Gary Gensler, is an MIT professor who teaches a course on blockchain and Bitcoin. Would you consider SEC chief an important position?

Did not know that, I'll have to check it out! I feel like the news cycle makes a lot more sense in light of that.

Ok no coiner. How is my ledger going to get hacked?

I can gamble on doge, sports, games of chance, etc. Why do you care that some people are into gambling?

Crypto is the future. Half of my net worth is in crypto and if it goes to zero, whatever, yolo. But for real decentralized finance is the future.

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