The main issue for outsiders is that the industry is surrounded by snake oil salesman and people that don't know what they're talking about (the 'evil central bank' types), but the underlying tech is real and the potential is real (imo). If you look at it quickly you might dismiss it all, but I think that'd be a mistake.
The ability to manage decentralized state is very cool, but there's a lot to build to make it viable (and as a result, there's a lot of opportunity). When something is hard, there's often value in making it easier.
There's also a lot of stuff in legacy finance that requires humans to do and is slow. Multi-day financial transfers for clearing and high associated fees for wires (at some banks) - crypto options are much better and modern implementations of the legacy stack. The current state is still a bit unstable, and the UX is a disaster, but the future is clearly better (imo) in a way legacy systems will have trouble competing with.
As an aside, 'wealth inequality' is a feature you want in effective capitalist systems (you can still protect the lower bound). http://paulgraham.com/ineq.html
In 1999 a lot of people recognized the value of the internet (though many still dismissed it [0]), but there was also a lot of dumb money and failure - loud people who didn't know what was going on. The web obviously became extremely economically relevant despite all of that. There's some similar potential here - I think it'll just take a while to shake out.
[0] "By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s." -Paul Krugman (1998)
Irony of the above quote is it's wrong on two levels - the internet, but also the impact of the fax machine (also huge).
The DeFi tech is real, but early. Vitalik Buterin is a really good leader for Ethereum and development.
Vitalik Interview: https://www.stitcher.com/show/rationally-speaking/episode/in...
This is a worthwhile list to read through: https://danromero.org/crypto-reading/
The main issue for outsiders is that the industry is surrounded by snake oil salesman and people that don't know what they're talking about (the 'evil central bank' types), but the underlying tech is real and the potential is real (imo). If you look at it quickly you might dismiss it all, but I think that'd be a mistake.
The ability to manage decentralized state is very cool, but there's a lot to build to make it viable (and as a result, there's a lot of opportunity). When something is hard, there's often value in making it easier.
There's also a lot of stuff in legacy finance that requires humans to do and is slow. Multi-day financial transfers for clearing and high associated fees for wires (at some banks) - crypto options are much better and modern implementations of the legacy stack. The current state is still a bit unstable, and the UX is a disaster, but the future is clearly better (imo) in a way legacy systems will have trouble competing with.
As an aside, 'wealth inequality' is a feature you want in effective capitalist systems (you can still protect the lower bound). http://paulgraham.com/ineq.html
In 1999 a lot of people recognized the value of the internet (though many still dismissed it [0]), but there was also a lot of dumb money and failure - loud people who didn't know what was going on. The web obviously became extremely economically relevant despite all of that. There's some similar potential here - I think it'll just take a while to shake out.
[0] "By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s." -Paul Krugman (1998)
Irony of the above quote is it's wrong on two levels - the internet, but also the impact of the fax machine (also huge).