Crypto's Failed Promise

At every party in San Francisco, you’ll hear the same argument from dudes with ponytails: 

Crypto is important because it “financially incentivizes human coordination mechanisms.”

I want to give crypto the benefit of the doubt—I am an unabashed technology maximalist that is all in favor of anything that gives the human species better chance at avoiding extinction—but this statement, so painfully ivory tower that it makes a Harvard professor blush, is a bunch of jello words. They have no meaning or shape to anyone who doesn’t have a severe case of Twitter brain.

But underneath the word salad there is an important insight: society faces many hard problems that capitalism as it currently exists does not seem capable of solving. Perhaps new ways of organizing the flow of value could help?

I’ve watched carefully over the last 5 years, waiting, reserving judgment. And so far…I’ve been disappointed. 

A few random samplings of news stories over the last few months:

• $25B+—yes, BILLION with a b—was lost over the last 72 hours by crypto traders of Terra and Luna. Numerous retail traders have lefts posts across social media contemplating suicide after losing their life savings. 
• $182M was stolen from the Beanstalk protocol in less than 20 seconds without a single hacked password.
• $625M was stolen from Axie Infinity, a play to earn crypto video game that has become the primary source of income for many folks in developing countries.
• A NFT gaming project that charged new users ~9K to mint their initial NFT. They are currently trading for ~$500. This project initially raised ~$90M. 

I recognize that I am cherry-picking the bad things (there have been lots of good things too!) but these incidents taken together, along with the dozens of other concerns, have raised the question: Why isn’t crypto living up to its lofty ambitions?