this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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No, no one is forgetting they're built on cryptography. It just doesn't matter. The underlying technology of a thing doesn't have much bearing on the properties of the thing as far as practical usage goes.
You don't care what your car is made of as long as it has good fuel efficiency and crash rating. Steel ceramic and aluminum are just tools to that end.
Research into cryptocurrency started long before 2008. Academics and odd crypto enthusiasts have been working on it since the 80s.
The intent from the beginning has been a mix of curiosity, paranoia, and buying drugs.
Bitcoin was hardly a "for the people" project. It was initially used almost entirely for black market purchases, largely via silk road. "The people" did not give a fuck about perfect anonymous digital cash. It solved a problem that most people didn't and still don't have.
The adoption order was: Math nerds > drug lords > finance > small investors. It's still not actually adopted as currency by people.
When you create a thing for the purpose of making monetary transactions untraceable, and your first major users are all using it to hide where their money came from from the government, it's really fair to say that you created a money laundering tool.
Bitcoin wasn't taken over by finance people, they're the reason it didn't taper out like previous cryptocurrencies, which either fizzled or were shutdown for being nuggets of financial crime.