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A common criticism of my arguments against crypto is that they assume too much knowledge or that my prose is too dense. So a friend challenged me to rewrite ‘The Case Against Crypto’ using mostly the 1500 Simple English words and short sentences version that perhaps a well-read twelve year old could read in a 6th grade history book from the future. About the financial disaster of the 2020s. --- The economics of bitcoin were also bad. When people use money they want to buy things with it quickly and they want to know that the price of the thing they want to buy won’t change drastically. Bitcoin is bad at both of these things. Bitcoin was bad at being stable money because the technology was not designed to do that, because it didn’t want to have a central bank. This was unfixable because the entire project was based on a bad idea. […] Crypto was a story about giving people new money, but instead it just stole people’s old money and destroyed their lives. Unfortunately the world figured out crypto was a bad idea far too late.

Reading this makes me viscerally angry. It’s only my first day, but it’s clear this is not the Burning Man-style celebration of the liberatory potential of decentralization I was promised. This is a locked-room, hard-sell pitch session to a literally captive audience of high-roller crypto investors, whose only escape is the lifeboats. The whole place smells of aftershave and insecurity. But if you want to know how power actually operates in any community, watch the women.