The Cancerous Crypto

The following is a chapter in Part 2 of my two-volume book: BIT & COIN:  Merging Digitality and Physicality, Vol 1.

The Cancerous Crypto

After the fall of BTC, the entire crypto space has gone astray and wasted over a decade and many billions of dollars building on wrong blockchains and ineffective infrastructures, business models, and subsequent ecosystems.

Many causes have contributed to the failure, but unregulated crypto exchanges can easily rank among the top three.

The unregulated crypto exchanges catalyzed the crypto frenzy and drew monetary and human energy into the death of Ponzi-style speculation cycles. Consequently, few resources have been directed to fundamentally sound infrastructures and applications. Who wants to do it the hard way when you can freely print your own money by issuing coins and tokens?

The way these unregulated exchanges are organized and have operated, they only fuel get-rich-quick schemes and pump pure speculations of speculations. They cannot create a productive economy. They kill innovation and destroy opportunities for real development.

The current unregulated crypto exchanges are cancerous and must be removed in order to make room for real blockchain/DLT innovation and development.

A crypto-induced near-total failure.

The entire crypto world has become an irrational Ponzi-laden frenzy. The crypto industry went in the wrong direction long ago and went too far by turning the original Bitcoin, one of the greatest inventions ever made, into a multitrillion-dollar gamble of speculations over other people’s speculations.

Despite creating many great use case ideas, the crypto industry has almost entirely missed what the inventor of the Bitcoin blockchain envisioned.

Instead, fueled with unregulated crypto exchanges, the crypto industry has become a power-function to kill, constituted of multiple multiplications to magnify the effect:

Cult (of tech-buzzwords) x Ignorance x Greed x Recklessness x Cleverness (of manipulations).

If you look at these multiplication factors, you will identify the common themes that exist everywhere and something quite unique with crypto.

First, no tech buzzword other than “crypto” has created such a large, blind, devoted, cultish following. Things like AI and quantum computing appear contemporarily, but there is no comparison because AI and quantum computing may stimulate cultish thoughts but barely any mass actions. 

In contrast, crypto is extraordinarily actionable for the masses to participate in. It is not merely available in a neutral and passive sense, but rather actively lures people fueled by greed and ignorance.

Second, I can’t find another tech or business field in which the level of open ignorance is comparable to that in crypto. Judging from how influencers talk about crypto and how investors’ money, even from top VCs and famous home offices, poured into the space, a crazier and more foolish scene cannot be imagined.

Third, greed, recklessness, and cleverness, for some reason, also seem to have reached rather distinct levels in crypto. This is a mystery. It will take the combined work of anthropologists, psychologists, historians, and technologists to explain. But one thing seems clear: crypto’s unique ability to hide corruption, fraud, and dishonesty behind the ironic veil of the term “trustless” is unsurpassed. It gave a new meaning to the word.

Do not assume crypto is equal to blockchain and DLT. The latter can do better without the former. Contrary to what many assume, the whole crypto frenzy has been the biggest enemy of the real technological development of blockchain and DLT. So, there is hope in the bad news.

Promoters and supporters of crypto have failed to understand the following two eventualities, one philosophical and one technical:

1. Get-rich-quick schemes based on speculative trading cannot create a productive economy. They kill technological and business innovations, hinder economic progress, and, in the long term, destroy culture and moral capital.

2. The great use case ideas will not become a reality on a large scale without a unified base blockchain that has unbounded layer-1 scalability, extremely low transaction fees, true PoW-based decentralization without re-centralization, true peer-to-peer transactions, and eventual integration with the IPv6 Internet at the base IP layer.

This is not what Bitcoin is meant to be.

Crypto-inspired speculative assets trading on unregulated exchanges is not what Bitcoin blockchain is meant to be.

Bitcoin started as a peer-to-peer cash payment system (it’s in the original whitepaper title), focusing on utility and solving real economic and technological problems. See the chapter “The Birth of Bitcoin.”

Unfortunately, Bitcoin came under an inside attack and was perverted. See the chapters “An Insider Attack on Bitcoin” and “BTC Became Fundamentally Different from Bitcoin.”

As a result of misguided developments, many now mistakenly equate blockchain with ICOs and ITOs, or at least think that without ICOs and ITOs, there would be very little technological development.

After the crash of FTX, one of the largest crypto exchanges, people even worry that if these exchanges fail, the whole advancement of blockchain, DLT, crypto, and DeFi will die.

But the opposite is true. Crypto is an obstacle to blockchain and DLT. The speculative nature of the crypto world is the biggest distraction and suffocation of real technological development.

For more in-depth analyses, see the following chapters:

• “The New Internet and Blockchain”
• “The Necessary Scalability Of Layer-1 On Blockchain”
• “One Blockchain as the Base Layer of the New Internet”

The law and regulations are ineffective.

As far as crypto exchanges are concerned, they have started and continued in an environment nearly free of regulations. Although major countries like the US, China, India, and many European nations all took an unwelcoming gesture toward cryptocurrencies, the largest crypto exchanges have taken advantage of crypto-friendly jurisdictions and used the power of the Internet to operate globally.

The US, with its Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), is among the most cautious nations watching the crypto industry’s growth. However, a lack of understanding of the real capabilities of the original Bitcoin blockchain made the SEC uncharacteristically hesitant and unsure about what to do.

On the one hand, the SEC sees that most crypto coins and tokens are securities and need to be regulated. Under the Howey test, even BTC is a security. Only the genuine Bitcoin is not a security but rather a commodity.

On the other hand, seeing crypto being hailed as the new Industrial Revolution, the SEC understandably took a much humbler and low-key position toward the industry, fearing being proven wrong and labeled as the backward obstructionist. While it tries to enforce the existing law with a certain earnestness, the agency also second-guesses what it is doing: perhaps we are unduly harming an otherwise revolutionary technology.

But what is really “revolutionary” about digital gold and cryptocurrencies? The SEC itself doesn’t show signs of understanding the real potential of the original Bitcoin blockchain, just like most others.

If the SEC, and also the public, can see that there is a far more revolutionary and better direction for the industry to move in (see “The New Internet and Blockchain”), the law and regulations can then be more helpful.

What has caused the toxic crypto exchanges?

There are two major causes: (1) the then temporary inefficiency of the Bitcoin blockchain itself and (2) dubious human motivations that didn’t focus on real technology and business development but on pure speculations and get-rich-quick schemes.

While the above second factor is quite obvious, the first one is often overlooked, and the relevant information is poorly understood. The truth is hidden and even actively suppressed because the inefficiency of the Bitcoin blockchain then was temporary and could be, and has been, subsequently solved, thus making the existence of the crypto exchanges in their present form no longer justifiable.

When Bitcoin was first released, there was much debate about the direction in which the technology should go. Even though Satoshi made it unequivocally clear that he wanted a scalable peer-to-peer system capable of micropayments first and eventually much more, an opposite motivation and narrative developed surrounding the core Bitcoin developers.

As the price of bitcoin went up and the mining business became the dominating profit maker, the focus quickly moved away from Satoshi’s original vision and focused on speculations.

At the same time, the rising cost of transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain and subsequently all other blockchains, such as Ethereum, effectively killed the movement of blockchain utility along with any arguments supporting such a movement.

ICOs and ITOs started to explode, and crypto exchanges, after the miners, became the leading profit centers. That part of history seemed like an unavoidable movement, but people don’t realize that it is the high cost of transaction (CoT) of the blockchains at the time that was a significant cause for the type of crypto exchanges we have today.

So, how did high CoT cause speculative asset trading on insecure exchanges?

Short answer: Without a scalable base blockchain, centralization was the only way to lower the CoT and solve the problem of the high CoT of the participating blockchains. Hence, the justification for centralized crypto exchanges.

It led to the irony of an industry that worshiped decentralization swiftly accepting extremely centralized platforms without making any inquiries beyond the surface.

How readily and swiftly people become blind to obvious contradictions in what they believe and do when quick money can be made!

It all started when BTC decided to limit the block size to 1MB to promote its “digital gold” and “every PC is a full node” narratives. The decision directly resulted in a high CoT. Satoshi’s original vision of a peer-to-peer electronic cash system was intentionally mutilated and disabled, moving the crypto world toward speculative trading of useless things, namely coins and tokens collectively called “crypto.”

When the CoT is high, the real utility (if there is any in these new things called crypto in the first place) is ignored or destroyed, and speculative trading becomes the only thing that attracts people into the crypto world.

Then came the crypto exchanges.

Because the whole market consisted of purely speculative trading rather than utility transactions (trading tickets v. buying a ticket to see a movie), they needed large-scale crypto exchanges.

Leaving the legality of such exchanges aside, the crypto exchanges that perform off-chain transactions are all completely centralized, not only the regular ones such as Binance and Coinbase but also the so-called decentralized exchanges (DEX, these being actually centralized is a different topic to cover).

The high CoT of the participating blockchains is the direct cause of such centralization.

See more: “The Structural Impact of the Cost of the Transactions (CoT).”

The real Bitcoin blockchain does not need centralized exchanges.

The assets—bitcoin and tokens created on the Bitcoin blockchain—are commodities of real utilities, not speculative or imaginary assets. Whatever transactions these assets may need, necessary services can always be directly built on the Bitcoin blockchain, with security, scale, efficiency, and reliability far superior to that of centralized exchanges.

With a blockchain that has extremely low CoT and high scalability, there is no need for developing thousands of other blockchains or tens of thousands of coins or tokens without actual utility in the first place.

But more importantly, every transaction of every token created on such a blockchain can be processed and verified on-chain, enabling a truly decentralized exchange if needed and making centralized exchanges unnecessary.

Tokens representing assets of real utility can be created on such a blockchain, but they can all be carried on the same blockchain and traded within the same ecosystem.

For example, with STAS tokens on BSV, all kinds of custom tokens can be created, but they are native on-chain tokens and can be transferred and traded just like Bitcoin (BSV) itself, like peer-to-peer electronic cash. Even with L2 tokens such as Tokenized, every single transaction can be recorded and verified on-chain and only the business logic of the tokens needs to be administrated off-chain.

But a world with tens of thousands of speculative coins and tokens needed centralized exchanges. Because most of these speculative coins and tokens are based on blockchains with a high CoT, the exchanges have no choice but to use high-level centralization to make the transactions less costly.

This is analogous to layer-2 (L2) solutions that have to use centralization to lower the CoT of the underlying blockchain (see “Layer-1 and Layer-2—Why the Current Layer-2 Solutions Won’t Work”). When you start from an erroneous premise, you end up with an incorrect conclusion, even if the rest of your logic is flawless. It is dictated by hard reality, be it economics or physics.

More specifically, with these underlying blockchains having such a high CoT, these exchanges cannot possibly run all transactions on-chain because if they did, the high cost would have driven the customers away.

The illusion of low-cost crypto exchanges

Have you ever wondered why trading BTC or ETH on a crypto exchange can cost as little as a few cents when the CoT of these blockchains is above $1 and can be as high as $50?

For example, if the total transaction value is $10, your cost would be about 2 cents based on a transaction fee of 0.2% on Binance or 10 cents based on a transaction fee of 1% on Coinbase. But all this is masked by the fact that most people probably make transactions of at least $100, perhaps even $1,000 or above. At $1,000, the transaction fee would be $2 on Binance or $10 on Coinbase, and people probably think that is a result of the CoT of the blockchains.

But those are not the CoT of the blockchains. They are just fees charged by the exchange itself.

So, how did exchanges magically make the CoT of blockchains disappear?

They have a clever solution but won’t truthfully explain what they do to the public.

They create virtual accounts for their customers but hold the bitcoins of those customers in a collective (pooled) system account. Other than entering and exiting, customers trading on an exchange do not transact on-chain at all. Instead, they allow the exchange to reallocate numbers from one virtual customer account to another while keeping the bitcoins in the collective system account. Only when the customer transfers bitcoins from the exchange to an external address will the transaction be settled on-chain.

The result is a completely centralized system that creates and manages virtual accounts (completely off-chain) for users. These virtual accounts do not provide a common legal/contractual ownership of the assets contained therein for the users (see below), let alone secure ownership safeguarded by a blockchain.

Due to how these virtual user accounts are set up, users are creditors who have lent the assets to the exchange rather than absolute owners of the assets.

That was the reason why, in a recent disclosure made by Coinbase, it stated that if Coinbase is in bankruptcy, crypto holders may not retain their crypto assets because they will be treated as creditors rather than absolute owners of the assets in liquidation and will have to fight for their priority order without any certainty attached.

Coinbase was not deliberately trying to be mean. They were just telling the unfortunate truth. Given their priority when they designed their exchange, their choice was inevitable and intentional.

Simply put, because the coins and tokens they wanted people to trade were products of high-CoT blockchains, the crypto exchanges have no choice but to create the current business and asset structure using virtual accounts.

The public thought these exchanges had magically and graciously solved their high CoT problem, but they probably didn’t know that the exchanges did it all at their expense as customers. People sold their property rights because of ignorance or perhaps even greed. But on the other hand, what they have may not be genuine “property” in the first place because most property rights are speculative junk created by Ponzi schemes. Therefore, the justifiable rage of customers against these exchanges may not be that high after all.

But it is even worse than that—crypto exchanges are unregulated banks.

Crypto exchanges did not stop at just making virtual accounts. They started to behave like banks (but without being subject to any banking regulations), conducting highly leveraged lending of crypto assets.

Without any regulatory supervision, crypto exchanges’ shadiness and reckless “creativity” became far greater than that of regular banks. The practice further fueled the crypto speculation frenzy and increased customer risks to insanely high levels.

Then, in November 2022, FTX, one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world, collapsed.

How did a crypto exchange collapse? The answer is a liquidity crunch, like a bank run when customers rush to withdraw their assets. But how did a crypto exchange have a liquidity crunch? Because it leveraged financing and trading. But how did it do that without the public’s knowledge? Because they are not regulated like banks are.

In the wake of such disasters, major crypto exchanges such as Binance are boasting about their “cold wallets,” safely storing the deposited crypto assets of the customers. But that is misleading or even deceptive because the cold wallets do not address any of the above-described problems, including the legal ownership and liquidation risk in leveraged financing. If implemented properly, cold wallets protect against external hackers but do nothing to the intrinsic risks of internal structural problems.

But people cheered and thanked Binance for saving the market by showing transparency in reserves, failing to understand a basic fact: keeping customers’ deposits in a cold wallet as reserves is no indication that funds are safe in the event of a bank run or liquidation. It just means that the funds are not stolen or lent out to an external party at the moment of showing. Customers still don’t really own their deposits; the exchanges are still performing leveraged unregulated crypto banking at the risk of customers, and the exchanges are still doing even worse things, as discussed below.

And even worse—crypto exchanges are their own central banks.

As if the unsupervised financing schemes with all kinds of leverages weren’t enough, major crypto exchanges started to print their own money.

So crypto exchanges’ problems are deeper than just unregulated banking problems because they literally create out of thin air their own tokens, pump up prices, and use them as “reserves,” and even then, only with fractional reserves.

Banks never had that kind of power.

Sometimes, the money-printing is done using a blockchain that the exchange has just spun out from itself, but often, even such a cover is not present.

Why does an exchange create its own blockchain? Again, there is a very convenient pretext: people have been misled to incorrectly assume that the Bitcoin blockchain does not scale and, therefore, an “improved” blockchain is necessary when the opposite is true.

But a crypto exchange can be supercharged to build its own blockchain anyway. This is not surprising given how easy it is today to create a blockchain using all the open-sourced codes accumulated since the release of Bitcoin and how lucrative it is to have your own blockchain, especially if you are an exchange that has lured to your own platform millions of people who are in full FOMO mode hoping to get rich quick.

Remember, banks create credit-based money by doing leveraged lending. Crypto exchanges already do that, only without regulatory supervision. But it got much worse.

With just the regular leveraged lending, at least the assets being leveraged (for example, BTC, ETH, etc.) are created and supplied from an independent source. Whether those assets are real or have value is at least a separate question to be answered by others who are not part of the exchange, like the dollar to the banks. For example, commercial and retail banks may be creating credit-based money, but the base currency, such as the US dollar, is not created by the banks themselves but by a higher authority, the central bank.

However, once an exchange starts to create its own money, it becomes its own central bank.

Even with external assets such as BTC, ETH, and SOl, the situation is far worse than that of regular banks and fiat money. The value of fiat money is mostly independent of banks because it is largely determined by a nation-state’s economy and is not subject to market pumps. In contrast, the crypto exchange may choose the type and number of crypto coins or tokens it wants as a part of its reserves. If this itself is not harmful enough, the fact that crypto exchanges play a pivotal role in pumping the prices of these crypto assets certainly is. And the harm goes even beyond that because not only do the crypto exchanges pump the prices of their reserve assets, but they also do cross-lending and double-accounting to create a reciprocal magnifying effect.

As a result, the whole system becomes self-referencing, self-reinforcing, and procyclical, a hallmark of an artificial bubble.

And even more—crypto exchanges are market manipulators.

Just think about all the market manipulations in the stock market—pump and dump, poop and scoop, order spoofing, insider trading, wash trading, frontrunning, and so forth—and multiply that by many times. If licensed professionals in a highly regulated industry (stock market) can do that, imagine what could happen with crypto exchanges.

However, even multiplying the above factor by ten doesn’t adequately describe the power of crypto exchanges to manipulate the market. Take price pumping as an example. Traditional stock market manipulators must rely on assets and resources they actually have in order to manipulate, but a crypto exchange’s power of manipulation is not limited to the actual assets it has. This again relates to the virtual accounts system crypto exchanges operate (see previous discussions). For example, if a crypto exchange wants to do a series of wash trading to pump up the price of a certain asset, it doesn’t even need to actually have the number of assets that appear to be traded. Remember that everything is virtual, and by being virtual, things can be created and made to disappear with zero cost.

But something else goes even beyond that, and few people understand it. Crypto exchanges also get to decide who is the market winner directly. This has further distorted the market, which is already strangely rigged.

Crypto exchanges have had influence or even colluded with the miners for their own interests. The exchanges are not mining nodes of a blockchain (unless the blockchain is their own internal blockchain) and are not supposed to do that. But the history of the crypto exchanges shows that they did just that.

This was most evidently shown during Bitcoin forking. When the miners disagree, a hard fork is formed. As a practical matter, upon the occurrence of a fork, it is the exchanges that decide which chain retains the original ticker. Unlike what the public believes, there is no de novo truth-finding in this matter. It is in the hands of the exchanges, and they decide based on their best interest, not the truth itself. This is exactly how BTC, a severely distorted version of the original Bitcoin, retained the original ticker BTC and the wide public reference of being “Bitcoin.”

The history of BTC speaks for itself. BTC has successfully moved away from its original design and become something that’s almost the opposite of the Bitcoin inventor’s design intention. Meanwhile, it has been able to completely hide the nature of such changes from the public by powerful social engineering. When the major deviation SegWit was introduced, the Core developers and exchanges were even able to keep the name Bitcoin and ticker BTC. See the chapter “An Insider Attack on Bitcoin.”

Due to the open-source nature of the Bitcoin software (but not including the database and tradename), developers are free to create their own version of blockchain (like Litecoin did) using a different database and a different name. Whether doing that is useful or not, it would at least be legal. But what they did to Bitcoin in collusion with crypto exchanges was nothing like that. It was grand theft and criminal conversion performed under a tight cloak. Despite the centralized power of the Core BTC developers, the cloaking couldn’t have been effective without colluding with crypto exchanges. Very few people understand what has happened.

The exchanges thus played a major role in the crypto world’s near-unanimous exclusion and suppression of the real Bitcoin (BSV), not despite but because BSV is demonstrably the true Bitcoin based on the original protocol, solely focuses on real utility, and has qualities that no other blockchain has such as unbounded scalability and extremely low CoT.

The exchanges also helped to create the public’s erroneous belief that BTC was the real Bitcoin. Both these factors jointly made room and created an ideal environment for the disastrous speculative Ponzi-style crypto world.

On top of all that

And on top of all that, there are irregularities in an unregulated business. Just think about it: a system that combines central banks, retail banks, trade exchanges, market makers, brokerages, analysts, marketing, asset management, and investment, all mingled together with no requisite separation, placed under centralized owners with no identifiable legal entities registered in a reputable jurisdiction, operating without any legal and regulatory oversight, not even proper business-grade auditing, and controlled and managed by people would don’t understand or don’t care how legal monetary and finance systems work…

That makes a power-function to kill constituted of multiple multiplications to magnify the effect:

cult (of tech-buzzwords) x ignorance x greed x recklessness x cleverness (of manipulations).

But it didn’t matter. Investors’ money, even that from top VCs and home offices, just poured in. A crazier and more foolish scene cannot be imagined.

Is it legal?

The law will eventually answer this question. However, the people who created crypto exchanges are not unaware of legal problems. Circumvention is the name of the game.

In this respect, Coinbase is not worse than others. It maybe the best among these crypto exchanges due to its roots and establishment in the United States. Other exchanges are on much shakier ground than Coinbase.

However, even if the exchanges did not do shady leveraged business, they may still be illegal because they are trading assets that are unregistered securities. Most cryptocurrencies are unregistered securities, including even BTC. Only the genuine bitcoin is a commodity, not a security (Gao, 2023-1).

The fact that Coinbase itself is listed on NASDAQ does not mean that its crypto trading business is under the SEC’s oversight the way a stock exchange is. As a result, people don’t realize that regulators lack oversight of these cryptocurrency trading platforms, and investor protections for crypto investors are not the same as those built into traditional financial services.

The situation with other exchanges is either the same or even worse. A key difference is that Coinbase was forced to make such a disclosure because it is a publicly-traded company listed on a stock exchange in the US. Even though its crypto trading business does not meet any special regulations, the company is subject to regulations like any publicly listed company.

However, other crypto exchanges enjoy their outlaw status thanks to even weaker regulatory supervision.

Exchanges are not miners.

There are essential differences between the miners and crypto exchanges such as Binance and Coinbase.

Bitcoin miners are not a “money services business” or “MSB” under the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) administered by FinCEN because, other than the mining fee itself, no money is ever transmitted or paid to/from a miner. A miner is, therefore, not a money transmitter or broker. Rather, a miner’s role is infrastructural and truly independent from the transactions.

The exchanges are not miners. Not only are exchanges not part of the miner network, but they don’t even settle transactions on-chain under normal conditions. As discussed earlier, they create virtual accounts for their customers but hold the bitcoins of customers in a collective (pooled) custodial account.

As a result, customers trading on crypto exchanges do not transact on-chain at all. Instead, they just permit the exchange to reallocate numbers from one virtual customer account to another while keeping the bitcoins in the collective custodial account. Only when the customer transfers bitcoin from the exchange to an external address will the transaction be settled on-chain.

An exchange is thus both a money transmitter and a money broker, doubly qualifying as a “money services business (MSB)” under the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA). Therefore, leaving alone the securities laws, a crypto exchange’s business operation should comply with BSA.

Yet, the exchanges have enjoyed freedom from both securities law and BSA so far.

Exchanges won’t voluntarily go away.

As discussed, centralized crypto exchanges built their virtual accounts model due to temporary necessity when the original Bitcoin blockchain couldn’t support low-cost transactions and on-chain tokenization based on smart contracts.

Now that the real Bitcoin blockchain has solved the earlier problems, shouldn’t the centralized crypto exchanges go away?

They should, but they won’t do it voluntarily. Everything is entrenched with existing business models, interests, and incentives.

Given this condition, it should not be very surprising that crypto exchanges intentionally and persistently reject the blockchain that has extremely low CoT, namely Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV), which is based on the original design of Bitcoin by Satoshi.

At the same time, the forthright personality and style of BSV’s leader, Dr. Craig S. Wright (Satoshi), also furnish convenient excuses for such actions.

However, it should be noted that even if an exchange had decided to list BSV, it wouldn’t change the overall picture now. That time has passed already for exchanges. This is because, even though BSV itself can allow every transaction to be settled on-chain with negligible cost and no impact on its capacity, the exchanges will not make such an exception for BSV. Making such an exception would cause an inconsistency in the exchange’s system and may also expose the secret of what the exchange does.

Besides, doing the right thing for the customers, in this case, is not a crypto exchange’s priority. The priority of a crypto exchange is to profit from speculative trading rather than fairly representing useful assets. This in itself may not seem to be so egregiously wrong, but one should remember that if a stock exchange did what crypto exchanges do, it would be in big trouble because stock exchanges are highly regulated.

It is time to focus on the true blockchain and distributed ledger technology.

Trading speculative assets on insecure exchanges will not create a good future. Unfortunately, it’ll take disasters like the collapse of FTX, perhaps even something much worse, for people to wake up to this fact.

The true Bitcoin blockchain envisioned by Satoshi does not depend on unregistered centralized crypto exchanges. It will advance faster and more healthily without them.

Despite the above-described dire condition, the blockchain ship can still be steered in the right direction, with proper recognition of the true values and utilities in a productive economy ranging from consumer to enterprise.