That said: the sooner we can get rid of these weird centralized exchanges and weird messiah figures the better.
The next thing I thing will explode is Cardano, which appears to function approximately like a cult, with no actual product (as far as I can tell).
Ethereum, LINK, and Bitcoin. Everything else is a distraction.
i don’t think you can really say this until the DNMs meaningfully shrink in size.
US govt has had like one major success that i know of in shutting down DNMs — Silk Road — since then there’s always been a dozen or so in operation that serve most/all the big countries whose govt you would expect to track crypto.
Humans are messy, so the solution we’ve arrived at is a database enforced by a complicated legal system + state power/violence (and arguably private power/violence via the mob). This works pretty well and powers trillions of dollars around the world.
Crypto is a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes modern finance hard. It’s not about trust, it’s about enforcement. I don’t need to trust my bank, but I need to trust that somebody will make things right if my bank takes my money. That allows me to trust my bank with my life savings, even though I’ve never met my banker or even know a single employee at the bank.
Crypto is missing this point and it’s why, despite following it since the beginning, I’ve never thought it has a future. It’s fundamentally solving the wrong problem.
Of course, this still falls short because no amount of mathematics will bridge that gap. At some point, the financial system (whether classical or based on blockchains) has to interact with the mind boggling mess of the real world. In the real world, 2+2 is not certain or deterministic at all. It can be debated, social implications weighed and the judge might say it's 4 and a bit, or slightly more than a pie.
In some sense it feels like crypto would work perfectly in a world that is completely deterministic, measurable and is populated wholly by algorithms interacting with each other. The second order question then is: would such a world even need crypto?
Though that raises the interesting question, why were so many folks, some of them quite credible, boosting cryptocurrencies the idea regardless?