Crypto Is Pointless. Not Even the White House Can Fix That. (Ryan Cummings, Jared Bernstein, 3/01/26, The New York Times)
In our role as government economists, we initially kept an open mind about crypto’s potential merits. From 2021 to 2022 we sat in dozens of meetings in which crypto firms and their backers assured us that the blockchain, the technology underlying crypto, would do everything from increase access to the financial system to replace the internet as we knew it.
Yet when we asked independent experts about these claims, we encountered sharp pushback. If this technology was that revolutionary, why weren’t any of the giant tech firms using it? Were they too shortsighted to see the technological revolution unfolding before them? Or was the technology — which we learned was essentially a painfully slow and expensive database — just not that special?
As economists of the Council of Economic Advisers, we aired our concerns in the 2023 Economic Report of the President. Crypto is, at best, a form of private money, which has a long history of ending up in financial ruin. At worst, it is a speculative and highly volatile asset with almost no practical use, whose backers were (and still are) constantly trying to embed it into the financial system, both to increase its adoption and, should the market nosedive, stick taxpayers with the bill.