[palmotea]

> People could have invented crypto versions of real-life things like insurances and mortgages.

Was there every any demand for such things? Those products presume people would use cryptocurrency as money for real economic activity, which turned out to be very, very rare (and wild swings in value caused by speculation would make that very foolish).

The core problem with cryptocurrency seems to be an that it's an elegant technology that is not appreciably better (and in many ways much worse) than the technology it sought to replace (fiat currency). So there's sort of no point to it, but the technical elegance made too many software engineers go bonkers and fail to see it for what it really was.

Also, it turns out the obsessions of very online libertarians aren't widely shared in the general population. So things designed to cater to those obsessions don't actually work as designed. They don't understand their "customers" for their vision.

[belZaah]

Oh, but it is “better” in one very crucial way: it enables global transactions, that are difficult to trace yet accessible. Without crypto, we would not have the scourge of ransomware

[palmotea]

Which makes sense, because very online libertarians basically imagine themselves to be criminals (either they imagine a totalitarian government out to get them, or they don't think the law should apply to them).