The Crypto Elites Are Plotting a Wall Street Merger (opens in new tab)

I thought the overall "shadowy Wall Street elite cabal" in this article was bizarre and a bit nauseating.

I actually mentioned this somewhat recently, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31156677, but the one place where crypto and blockchain actually does make sense to me is as a replacement for our (in the US) insanely outdated and antiquated settlement systems for banks.

I was a software developer well steeped in the "API world" of modern software development, and when I got into fintech/banking and learned about how our current banking technology works I had about 64,000 WTFs. The thing that finally "clicked" with me is when I understood that our current banking technology is really just a digital implementation of paper processes from basically the 1950s and 60s. That why so much of the stuff is big, batch-file-processing-based, and why things that seem like they should be quite simple and straightforward have loads of confusing and arcane rules (just see the NACHA specs for ACH transfers).

So seeing that large financial institutions are making use of blockchain technology (but without some of the stuff that is the achilles heel of many current cryptocurrencies, like proof-of-work) I see as a great thing to modernize our financial technology. This "crypto anarchists vs. wall street elites" bullshit is just something that plays out in a comic book-view of the world.

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

George Orwell, Animal Farm

This blog post goes off the rails in the second sentence.

> The crypto movement, the very rebellion that set out to defeat [WallSt/TheFed] hegemony, has provided them with the necessary new-age tech to enhance their existing order.

Like what tech do banks or the government need from the crypto crowd? Trading has been electronic for decades, the credit card networks are orders of magnitude more scalable than any blockchain, ACH exists.

The modern tulip bubble, but 1000x worse. I cannot wait for crypto-everything to die.

This doesn't give any examples of crypto "going legit". Circle, Gemini, and Coinbase were set up to be legal from the beginning; they never tried to "fight the system". Tether/Bitfinex, Binance, etc. would like to be recognized as legal but so far I don't see any progress.

This has a lot of hype and opinion but very little substance. Respectfully, whoever wrote it needs to actually talk to people building things in the space instead of telling them what they are doing. There are small/partial examples of the clickbait title happening but they're few and far between and I saw none of them cited here.

Also of note, open dialogue, while not stylish in our current zeitgeist, is absolutely necessary and should be actively encouraged among all stakeholders even those that may have opposing views of the future. This is in regard specifically tho not exclusively to the Brian Armstrong/Pelosi convo. Anyone that's been around crypto long enough has seen someone finally grok the potential it brings for disparate, and disagreeing people to work together to accomplish shared goals / public goods.

Goodness - so much wrong in one headline!