Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

I remember doing an interview in September of last year with a lawyer who did a lot of work for the cryptocurrency industry.  It was clear already that there was "trouble in River City."  In July 2022, two important crypto businesses filed for chapter 11 protection: Voyager Digital and Celsius Network. Voyager Digital was a crypto broker. Unfortunately, it extended a large unwise loan to Three Arrows Capital, a crypto fund. Three Arrows defaulted, and Voyager never recovered.  So: why did Celsius Network collapse? You ask. Well ... Celsius Network was a crypto lending company that let users deposit their digital assets into a "Celsius wallet" preliminary to pledging them as security for their borrowing. The cause of its sudden failure is a rabbit hole I don't want to go down with you. But two quick points are observable from the surface: this failure was part of the more general cooling-off of crypto activity, in the manner that "hula-hoop lending" wo...

 It has been a fun ride.  But 2022 may well go down in history as the year the cryptocurrency bubble popped. The popping has been going on since at least this summer.  (The Big Bubble here is actually composed of a bunch of smaller related bubbles.) The Big Crypto Bust likely began in Spring, when the whole "Terra" ecosystem collapsed. Terra is a blockchain created by Terraform Labs largely in order to constitute the foundation for two cryptocurrencies: TerraUSD and Luna. These were "stablecoins." In contrast to most cryptos, they were deliberately tagged to the US dollar in value.  Personally, I never saw the point of the stablecoin family. IF YOU BELIEVE that the US dollar is a stable store of value: own US dollars. Why in such a case are you in the market for any cryptocoin? The reason for a sane person to be in the marke t for cryptos is if the sane person believes the US dollar is NOT a reliable store of value. But in that case, why not invest in one of the man...

But of news from Seoul, in the Republic of Korea: a growing number of government officials are leaving their jobs and taking new more lucrative ones in the cryptocurrency industry. A member of parliament from the ruling party, Roh Woong-rae, has suggested stricter rules. Of course there is a problem here. Once a few government officials get better jobs in the crypto industry, others come to see their government services as a way to a golden job later in life. Will they then chance doing anything that would alienated their future bosses? Probably not. The corruption is clear enough even when there is no explicit quid pro quo .   Various solutions to this "revolving door" problem have been attempted in the U.S., and in other countries.  I won;t review them here. The bright reader will infer what my own solution is.