In her Sept. 19 op-ed, “Crypto has hope — and a long way to go,” Megan McArdle shed an ambiguous light on the future of cryptocurrency, highlighting possibilities and breakthroughs, such as ethereum’s new energy-efficient mining method, while acknowledging the challenges that it faces. Though I agree with Ms. McArdle’s opinion that cryptocurrencies have much larger problems than the environmental concerns, Ms. McArdle failed to stress the biggest obstacle of cryptocurrency: adoption by national governments for the faster, easier and safer transactions it promises.
Governments might see “unregulated” cryptocurrency as competition to their national currencies because crypto bypasses traditional monetary policies. Therefore most, if not all, of the thousands of existing cryptocurrencies will likely phase out.
Ms. McArdle pointed out that cryptocurrency has survived for 14 years, which is “far longer than your typical Ponzi scheme.” However, she failed to recognize that for these 14 years, cryptocurrency has failed to solve any of the problems it proclaimed to solve. Cryptocurrency is still, as it was years ago, a fruitless hope.
Sungjoon Kim, Falls Church
