Bored of the coins

Something strange is afoot in the world of cryptocurrencies. For the first time since Satoshi dropped Bitcoin on us like a benevolent bomb, this painfully new, highly bizarre field has become … well … boring. The true believers will tell you that great strides are being made, and the mainstream breakthrough is just around the corner, but they’ve been saying that for long enough that it’s beginning to seem reasonable to start wondering if these wolves were ever real.

I know, I know, it seems especially weird to be saying this at the same time that the President of China and CEO of Facebook have both become blockchain advocates. But China’s cryptocurrency, if it happens, will be a panopticoin, a tool to centralize monetary control even more firmly in the hands of the Communist Party, nothing like the decentralized censorship-resistant programmable money that the crypto community is theoretically all about; and Facebook’s, while making technical progress, keeps losing partners and gaining enemies.

The crypto community is currently all agog about “DeFi,” for decentralized finance, a movement which basically expands cryptocurrencies from “censorship-resistant money” to “censorship-resistant financial instruments,” such as collateralized loans and interest-bearing investments, along with “staking” (not really DeFi, but often treated as it.) Inside the c