Is cryptocurrency the future of money or a scam?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Is cryptocurrency the future of money or a scam?". Your opponent's style: Nassim Taleb

Hey

You're saying crypto is the future? Wrong. It's a solution searching for a problem while the emperor has no clothes. Volatility killed it as money years ago. Nobody prices lunch in Bitcoin. And the "decentralization" myth? Ninety percent of holdings concentrated in whales' wallets. You've traded the Fed for criminal oligarchs running exchanges that collapse overnight. FTX wasn't a glitch, it was the system working exactly as designed for insiders. Real money doesn't require you to understand blockchain. It just works. Crypto demands faith in code written by anonymous people with zero accountability. That's not the future of money, that's the past of alchemy. What's your actual argument here?

You're conflating three separate things and pretending they're one problem. Yes, FTX collapsed—that was fraud by a specific person, not a flaw in the technology itself. By that logic, the 2008 financial crisis proves traditional banking is fundamentally broken, yet here you are defending the Fed. On volatility: Bitcoin's been around for sixteen years and is worth more than it's ever been. That's not a failure—that's price discovery in an emerging market. And your "nobody prices lunch in Bitcoin" argument proves my point: we're still in adoption phase. People didn't price lunch in dollars in 1792 either. The question isn't whether crypto works perfectly today—it's whether centralized systems will stay in power when decentralized alternatives keep improving. You want accountability? At least with crypto, the code is auditable. The Fed prints money in secret and answers to nobody. Which system actually has zero transparency?

Stop conflating emergence with viability. Bitcoin at sixteen years is still searching for a use case beyond speculation and ransoms. The dollar works because governments enforce it, yes, but also because it's actually spent on goods. Your "price discovery" is just gambling dressed in tech language. And your accountability argument collapses instantly. Code is auditable, sure, but who audits the auditors? When your exchange disappears, you have recourse against nobody. The Fed at least faces Congress. You're trading a corrupt institution for no institution at all, which is worse—you have nowhere to complain when you're robbed. Adoption phase for what, exactly? Sixteen years and still no real use besides avoiding taxes and moving dirty money.