Two opposing narratives about how cryptocurrency might affect leveraging/deleveraging in our debt-based economic systems. 1) The return of sound money will destroy fiat and the unsound credit/debt/leverage system built on top of fiat.
2) Crypto makes it much easier to make new financial assets, including debt-based ones. It will create a Cambrian explosion of new, poorly-understood financial instruments with unprecedented interdependence (since they're networked protocols that will interact).
As usual for paradoxes, I believe both to some degree. I think sound money may destroy fiat (I hope so), and dry up the central bank credit spigot that distorts the economy. At the same time, while crypto could in theory be a huge antifragility upgrade...
It will take time for crypto instruments to be reliable, and at the beginning they're far more likely to add opacity & complexity that makes the ABS/CDO/CDS-s of the 2008 crisis look as simple as an IOU. Look at how bad traders/govts were at untangling the causes of 2008.
And now imagine that figuring out a financial crisis takes the forensic network security skills it took to solve NotPetya, plus a @VitalikButerin-level of understanding adversarial network economics. It seems...unlikely.
In the longer-term, the innovation & stability of private competing financial systems will battle with the increased opacity & complexity of this new tech. The result could be record safety levels, like cars today, or apocalyptic dangers, like media today.
Most likely, both will co-exist, customers will have to make good decisions (about what tech to use, or whose tech advice to follow), and people will (as always) get differing results depending on the quality of their choices. (inspired by ideas from Will Eden)
