Whenever a new technology appears on the scene, people who are more excited by it, than thoughtful about it, declare that it is magic! It will solve this, that, and the other problem, because, well, they're so excited. If only life was that easy. Unfortunately for these folks, at least, it is not. Has this happened with crypto? You bet.

First, some people seem to think that crypto will solve income inequality. Let's break that down a bit -- are they saying that crypto will make everyone earn the same wage? I sure hope not. The answer to poverty is not making everyone equally poor. Nor does money mean you are happy. Hewro? How many miserable rich people have you read about, seen on the telly, or seen in movies? And if you look back across history, most people were not rich. Yet somehow they survived and produced offspring and didn't commit suicide en masse because they didn't have moolah.

The worldview that money = happiness, so a lack of money = unhappiness is childish and obviously doesn't work. It reveals a mindset of people who are obsessed with money. Most of these people are not rich themselves, and worse, they are eaten up with envy and jealousy over Other People's Money (what I call the OPM disease). You see, it's not enough for them to have it; you must also not have it. However, if you do have it, they want to control how you spend it, what you spend it on, what you can and cannot own. Clearly, these people are enemies of economic freedom. Isn't crypto about economic freedom? Well, if crypto is about economic freedom, then that means that we all won't be paid the same wage, because we'll all be doing different things with our money. So crypto will not solve economic inequality, and that's a very good thing. (Why should the lazy person earn the same amount as the dude who busts his hump doing something .005% of the world can do?)

Second, some people seem to think that crypto will remove the "problem" of US sanctions on communist countries. I think we need to think carefully here, and understand that the people of a country aren't the same thing as the government of the country. Look at Venezuela. The government is an oppressive, murderous, human-rights-violating machine that is directly responsible for destroying the economy and plunging millions of people into destitution. Are the Venezuelean people this? Of course not. Yet some people can't seem to understand the difference between the two. I can say that most Americans don't have any love for the Cuban government, but they sure don't want the Cuban people to suffer or go without. That explains the rather generous asylum policies the US has always had for Cuban refugees.

So, if your goal is to solve the "problem" of the US penalizing repressive regimes, what you really want is the encouragement of repressive regimes. Either that, or you think that giving bad guys money somehow makes them good. This didn't work with Mao, with Ho Chi Minh, with Iran, with Venezuela, with the PLO, with Hamas...surely, most people have figured out by now that giving money to bad people not only encourages them to be bad, but subsidizes their behavior. So what is the goal of the people wanting to fund evil regimes? I shudder to think, but I know that at least some spectrum of the left has always been obsessed with genocidal fantasies (think: Che Guevara and Pol Pot). Will crypto solve the "problem" of sanctions on evil regimes? No, because crypto is about economic freedom, and repressive regimes cannot bottle that genie once they officially recognize crypto. It will end up destroying them and freeing the people; it will not march in lockstep with their plans.

So here's to all the things that crypto won't solve. Huzzah!