Matt Levine might be onto something here:
"
Mostly what I think is interesting here is that there is a story about crypto that says it is a
reaction to the 2008 financial crisis. In this story, people lost confidence in the traditional banking system because it was opaque and overlevered; people thought their money was safe but then it turned out that their banks were putting their deposits into scary hedge funds and losing their money. People draw a line
between Occupy Wall Street and crypto: Crypto, the theory goes, is a financial system that (1) does not rely on the evil legacy banks and (2) addresses some of the worst tendencies of those banks.
For instance, crypto avoids fractional reserve banking: A Bitcoin is a Bitcoin,
not the debt of some bank, so there is no buildup of leverage in the system as investors hunt for safe assets. Crypto avoids the opacity of traditional banks: Crypto transactions occur on an open transparent blockchain; there are no hidden obligations that can bring the system down. Crypto is decentralized and open; “code is law”; mistakes lead to failures, not bailouts. “The basic philosophical difference between the traditional financial system and the cryptocurrency system is that traditional finance is
about the extension of credit, and crypto is
not,”
I wrote earlier this month.
But the current crypto winter shows that this is amazingly untrue in practice. There is a ton of leverage and interconnection, and who owes what to whom is surprisingly opaque, and when it causes problems it is addressed by negotiated bailouts from large crypto players. Crypto has recreated the opaque, highly leveraged, bailout-prone traditional financial system of 2008.
I don’t know what to make of that. Mostly I just want to say: What an accomplishment! Rebuilding the pre-2008 financial system is a
weird achievement, but certainly a
difficult one, and they went and did it. One other possible conclusion is that that system was somehow … “good” might not be the word, but “natural”? Like, something in the nature of finance, or in the nature of humans, tends toward embedding opaque leverage in financial systems? Crypto was a reaction against that tendency, but as time went on, that tendency crept into crypto too.
"