> I often joke that crypto has been run by gold bugs
You're not wrong. Crypto is the natural evolution of the gold bug.
Gold bugs funamentally don't understand the finance system. The gold standard was never about fully backing your currency with a global commodity (fun fact: the US dollar was never 100% backed by gold reserves). A gold standard is actually just a peg, a promise by the government to exchange dollars for gold (and vice versa) at a fixed rate. And you don't technically need any gold for that.
Yet gold bugs harp on about gold reserves and that's the least important part of the gold standard. Either way you have a trust issue. FDR famously performed a sovereign debt devaluation, for example.
Likewise, my experience with crypto people is they too (generally, not always) don't understand why the TradFi system is the way it is. Worse, they seem to use wilful ignorance of that as a badge of honor (while muttering something about "disruption").
So gold bugs who (rationally or irrationally) hate TradFi find a natural home with similarly minded Crypto Andys.
You're not wrong. Crypto is the natural evolution of the gold bug.
Gold bugs funamentally don't understand the finance system. The gold standard was never about fully backing your currency with a global commodity (fun fact: the US dollar was never 100% backed by gold reserves). A gold standard is actually just a peg, a promise by the government to exchange dollars for gold (and vice versa) at a fixed rate. And you don't technically need any gold for that.
Yet gold bugs harp on about gold reserves and that's the least important part of the gold standard. Either way you have a trust issue. FDR famously performed a sovereign debt devaluation, for example.
Likewise, my experience with crypto people is they too (generally, not always) don't understand why the TradFi system is the way it is. Worse, they seem to use wilful ignorance of that as a badge of honor (while muttering something about "disruption").
So gold bugs who (rationally or irrationally) hate TradFi find a natural home with similarly minded Crypto Andys.