Speaker 2
If it goes down that route where everyone has to do that, it won't become mainstream. No, right. Most people aren't going to bother with that. And it kind of gets to the heart of the question of what is crypto for? I still don't have an answer to this question, Roman. When I'm thinking about mainstream finance, what it's for ultimately is capital allocation. It's to funnel capital to build the bridges, to research the medicines, to create great works of art. Like, those are the things, the productive things that are actually happening. And finance is just a way to enable that. Whereas with crypto, like, what's the underlying productive stuff that it's enabling? Right? It doesn't make sense to me. I kind of think of the metaphor of like a body, right? We've got our hands and the brain is there to make the hands, you know, play the piano or build your table. Right? And then we've got a new stuff where it's crypto. It's just like a brain in a jar. It's not doing anything clever as
Speaker 1
it is. It is a technology looking for a use. But I think a lot of the excitement around crypto was that it was kind of an alternative to, you know, your mum and dad's traditional finance. You know, that's the way many people saw it. It was a kind of new exciting thing, which would sweep away all the old stuff and reinvent the way we conduct business. But as you say, they're just reinventing a lot of the stuff that you had with TradFi, but just clothed in new format.
Speaker 2
I saw that CZ is now talking about creating what is effectively a central bank. Yeah, it was a set up a crypto recovery fund, the lender of last resort effectively. Yeah, which is like a central
Speaker 1
bank. That's what we said earlier that like crypto is learning the lessons of traditional finance on a speed run. But it's doomed to, you know, because if you have similar problems, you'll come up with similar solutions. In some ways, it's good. So for example, right? If you are living in a country where it's very difficult or expensive to transmit money, then things like Tether do provide a way to do that. So if you have a stable coin, which is linked to the US dollar and it does manage to keep the peg, then you can send money very quickly across the world and very cheaply. So it does have some uses. Now, you don't necessarily have to do it with cryptocurrency. There are other ways to do it. But the options are limited for some people.