Put the Bitcoins in the Box

Programming note: Money Stuff will be off tomorrow, back on Monday.

I began yesterday’s column by saying that I used to write a lot about crypto, but I am trying to do less of it these days. The main reason, I wrote, is that crypto used to be a laboratory for rediscovering central intuitions about finance: Crypto was building a brand-new alternative financial system from scratch, and crypto enthusiasts were discovering solutions to financial problems for themselves. Sometimes those solutions were better than the traditional solutions, and sometimes they were worse, and sometimes they just used new terminology to re-describe solutions that traditional finance discovered years ago, but in any case they were fun to write about. Better, or worse, or the same, they provided a lens through which to see traditional finance; seeing why crypto did something, and why it did or didn’t work, could help you understand why traditional finance does things the way it does.