If Bitcoiners and Etherocrats quibble about the sizes of their respective slices of the pie, to outside onlookers, it only really draws attention to how measly the whole pie still is.

Or, as Henry Kissinger put it, academic politics are so vicious precisely because there is so little at stake. (All the ink spilled over crypto is proof of work, not proof of stake.)

When the smoke clears, crypto may be used to transfer trust-based stablecoins. Money created on any basis other than the value of future transactions (aka credit) simply cannot compete as a medium of exchange or unit of debt. That’s why bank-made money has replaced every other kind. All of the downsides of trust can be allocated to risk-tolerant guarantors and risk-absorbing insurance pools, resulting in a far more efficient use of resources than crypto trustlessness.

The arc of finance is long, but it bends toward trust, because the technology of verifying trustworthiness has improved over the centuries. From Gutenberg forward, the dissemination of information about creditworthiness has been the key to the expansion of credit-based money. Now, crypto wants to throw that all away because every eighty years or so bankers misbehave and make a mess. That’s nuts.

Smart contracts? I don’t see what big improvement crypto brings, at least in a way that disqualifies trust-backed stablecoins as the token. I mean, imagine if Tether were created by someone almost everybody trusted, like, say, the central bank of the world’s largest economy? How could anything else compete? Crypto-verification may be useful, but non-credit crypto is a self-driving horse and buggy.