You don't need to dig into the ideology of crypto to make the argument that Binance's business was essentially money laundering and sanctions avoidance. But if you do, you'll have no trouble finding people arguing that ducking state financial regulations is a huge and core utility of crypto (let sex workers get paid, buy drugs, etc). You can disagree with the regime, Patrick does and so do I, but it doesn't change the fact that the whole thing was just crime, crime everywhere.
Yes well that’s why I think it is a nuanced topic. Decentralization is appealing to a lot of people, including myself, but it also obviously has a ton of negative outcomes as well.
Acknowledging this and exploring the complexity is interesting; calling everyone evil Bond villains is childish and at the ethical level of a Marvel movie.
I'm keen on decentralised cryptocurrencies, particularly ethereum, and I am fairly pleased about Binance's problems. What I'd like to see succeed is easy to use wallet apps running on an ethereum zk L2 with low transaction costs, social recovery, account abstraction, stable coins, and most transactions happening peer to peer on decentralised exchanges.
Centralised exchanges are not about cryptocurrency or decentralisation or democratising access, or innovating money to be programmable, they're just about finding yet another source of risk for people to play with in exactly the same ways we've been playing with risk in tradfi for millenia. Pretty boring.
Still, I assume that Binance's woes are at least partly because of an antipathy towards all forms of finance not controlled by the current system, and so the fact that they are taking down Binance probably doesn't augur well for the chances of my preferred outcome succeeding either.
Yeah I mean, I think I'm a little in the same boat as you. I think they're cool too. I do think there are uses (anti-spam, authentication of ownership/authenticity), though I think any use needs the transactions/sec number to go way up, but that seems doable.
I'm actually a little bitter that this stuff got rolled up with "real" money. It twisted the essence of distributed ledgers/contracts/computing and infested it with grifters. Like you, I worry that this entanglement will take down decentralization with it, though I hope it doesn't.
