[Details here:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/10/majority-of-americans-arent-confident-in-the-safety-and-reliability-of-cryptocurrency/
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Crypto is an odd post-Great Recession response. Why odd? The 2008 Great Recession was the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Between 1933 and 1999, Glass Steagall helped to regulate financial markets while also slowing financial innovation that could so easily disrupt markets. Deregulated financial markets took less than a decade to produce the worst recession since 1929.
(And from this recession we got the most extreme elements of our current politics: the right-wing Tea Party that was anti-government and has morphed into MAGA boys and the left-wing Occupy Wall Street crowd.)
Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 - during this financial crisis - imagined that the problem was not deregulation but instead that deregulation hadn't gone far enough. With a deep distrust of fiat money, Nakamoto claimed that algorithms could create the monetary stability that had eluded Central Banks. He helped to invent bitcoin. And of course in the 15 years since, bitcoin has been more volatile than any currencies since the Confederate dollar, more subject to wild bouts of inflation and deflation than any fiat money.
It seems that Americans have learned that crypto is less - rather than more - trustworthy than the US dollar and are moving away from it. And good thing, too. There are so many legitimate investments we can make - from exciting startups that could transform or create new markets (urban air vehicles and mRNA still seem wonderfully promising) to public investments that could change future GDP growth rates by one-half to one and a half percent a year. (A rate that could accelerate the doubling of GDP by a decade.) Some "investments" actually have a shot at helping to create a new world and some simply divert it. As it turns out, crypto had about as much to do with investing in a new world as does sports betting.
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