At Ruar Street Food, a hamburger restaurant in Barcelona, there is a framed drawing of a hand proudly showing the middle finger. The image captures the defiant mood at a gathering of a couple dozen men and women ages 20 to 40, all employed in the world of cryptocurrency.
With spectacular losses ($2 trillion worth of crypto assets), resounding bankruptcies (Terra, Luna and Celsius) and fraud accusations against the industry’s most preeminent entrepreneur (Sam Bankman-Fried of the now-bankrupt FTX platform), few industries were more beaten in 2022.
The reputation and promise of crypto has been sullied. Once touted as the future of money, they now reek of disaster.
Despite this, interviews in Barcelona and with executives around the world suggest that a full year of fiascos has done little to dampen the enthusiasm of the true believers.
Many compare this moment to the dot-com crash of 2001, a calamity that wiped out even more wealth—around $5 trillion—and, over time, spawned some blue-chip companies.
Attendees at the Ruar Street meetup, hosted by a crypto community called Web3 Family, are pumped up and ready for whatever 2023 throws at them.
The herd includes 27-year-old Maria Rebelo, who works for Ureeqa, a Canadian company that helps artists monetize NFTs, or non-fungible tokens.
These are digital assets—photos, music, sports memorabilia, etc.—registered by the blockchain, the virtual ledger that enables everything to do with crypto to exist.
There are many candid declarations of the ways that blockchain will transform the world—help solve climate change, optimize supply chains, transform work in a way that allows more people to find jobs they enjoy, etc.
While advocates focus on ambitious goals in an imagined future, critics point to debacles that happen all the time. Like the theft of $3 billion worth of crypto last year, according to Chainanalysis estimates.
Then there’s the uncomfortable reality that cryptocurrencies make life easier for criminals — smugglers, drug dealers, ransomware extortionists, mobsters, and the North Korean government, which employs hackers who steal crypto all day, every day.
“Terrible things happen in crypto all too often, yet crypto loyalists are very good at separating it from their perceived crypto ideal,” said Molly White, who runs Web3 Is Going Just Great, a website that makes a Chronicle of the tribulations of the cryptos.
The public bashing of cryptocurrencies has forced companies to reevaluate their strategies. In early January, Bitcoin mining company Riot Blockchain became Riot Platforms.
In November, the Australian Securities and Exchange Commission canceled plans for a blockchain-based system to authorize trading, and Danish shipping company Maersk took its blockchain platform offline.
These failures do not surprise Lee Reiners, policy director at the Duke Center for Financial Economics in North Carolina.
Blockchain is essentially database software, and not a very popular one, he notes. He would never have attracted such devotion, or billions of dollars in venture capital, without his connection to crypto.
“Imagine if all the money and talent that has flowed into crypto in the last 10 years had gone to combat climate change or cancer research,” Reiners said. “It’s a tremendous misuse of social resources, and it’s all because people wanted to make a quick buck.”
By: David Segal
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6542050, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-01-23 20:10:07
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