You may not necessarily agree with his politics or his opinions (although, to be honest, I usually do), but Paul Krugman rarely gets the facts — or his interpretation of their implications — wrong. And this is a pretty good takedown of the entire principle of cryptocurrency and blockchain.

A lot of the more technical criticism of blockchain has been — justifiably — its environmental cost. But something that rarely gets mentioned does at least get that much from him here: “Why go to the trouble and expense of maintaining a ledger in many places, and basically carrying that ledger around every time a transaction takes place?”

Simply put, crypto doesn’t scale. That has been so blindingly obvious to me from the beginning that I couldn’t understand why the supposedly tech-genius “bros” championing this stuff didn’t see it. Another quote, from a very different context, seems fitting here: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Actually, now that I think about it… I wonder if I’ve had Upton Sinclair wrong all these years. Maybe he wasn’t talking about labor when he wrote that, but management.