Crypto Is Pointless. Not Even the White House Can Fix That.
By Ryan Cummings and Jared Bernstein, New York Times Opinion, Feb. 26, 2026
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If this technology is that revolutionary, why weren’t any of the giant tech firms using it? Were they too shortsighted to see the technological revolution unfolding before them? Or was the technology — which we learned was essentially a painfully slow and expensive database — just not that special?..
Crypto is at best a form of private money, which has a long history of ending up in financial ruin. At worst, it is a speculative and highly volatile asset with almost no practical use, whose backers were (and still are) constantly trying to embed it into the financial system, both to increase its adoption and, should the market nosedive, stick taxpayers with the bill…
Trump helped push through legislation that brought stablecoins firmly inside the regulatory perimeter of the U.S. banking system. …
The administration is also working to pass a bill known as the Clarity Act. Not only would it give the government’s regulatory blessing to an additional set of cryptocurrencies, it would allow small cryptocurrencies to pitch themselves to ordinary investors without any of the consumer protections that commonly accompany such securities — a recipe ripe for disaster…
Yet in all this time, with the exception of individuals using it to wire money to recipients in other countries, crypto seems to have mainly proved itself adept at facilitating criminal activity…[end quote]
“Cryptocurrency” was never a currency since it could never be used as legal tender to buy things. In its many incarnations it has been a speculative asset. Speculators are backing away from speculative assets.
I have $100 ETH sitting around. I do not cash it in because my accountant does not want to know about it. He is about to retire and has no interest in mucking about with ETH. Neither do I. It is like a football for getting audited in all likelihood.
Crypto is not a technology. The technology is blockchain, which isn’t that groundbreaking but does have some good real world uses. Currency, however, is not one of them.
Does it? When people provide examples of blockchain use cases they always bring up theoretical applications or pilot studies.
Chris Dixon is a venture capitalist at Andreesen Horowitz who specializes in blockchain. He wrote a book a couple years ago about how Web 3.0 (which is what the crypto maxis call blockchain) was going to revolutionize everything.
He was interviewed on Rick Rubin’s podcast about his book, and all of his proposed uses for blockchain sounded…stupid. There’s just no other way to put it. Either his use cases solved no existing problem, or there is already a better solution.
If there is a legit use case for blockchain I’m all ears, but if they guy whose job it is to fund blockchain uses still can’t think of anything, there might not be anything there.
Blockchain is basically a non-mutable database. We already have those. As just one example, Oracle SQL Server Ledger Tables.
Blockchain is also horribly energy inefficient and SLOW. And requires numerous third parties to run. (thus ruining the whole “no trusted third party needed” thing the crypto bros love to talk about).