"To state the bleeding obvious, a lot of things in our society need to be fixed. But our experience with crypto – and with many of the other business models we’ll explore in this book – makes it clear that many over-hyped technological solutions are at best a crutch and distraction, and at worst downright harmful. Actually improving people’s financial wellbeing, for example, will require us to pursue real, slow, piecemeal, democratic solutions."

"The answer to the question “can this technology actually do this thing?” is “no” when the technology can’t solve the problem at hand; the answer is also “no” if there’s not actually an identified “thing” for the technology to do. In the early days of the internet, it was abundantly clear to people that it was useful, even though the pathways to commercializing the internet weren’t necessarily obvious at first. Today, it sometimes feels like that reality has been flipped on its head. Members of the Silicon Valley elite (people who made their fortunes at the beginning of the internet era, or later, with the arrival of the smartphone) can seem like junkies chasing the dragon of another tech revolution high, pushing any new fad they happen upon, actual use cases be damned."

"Let me put it more bluntly: we are kidding ourselves if we expect the private sector to solve the long-standing and structural problem of economic precarity, and we shouldn’t be surprised when businesses seek to profit from that economic precarity instead – that’s capitalism, baby! But some fintech businesses do claim to be so much more than profit-making enterprises, and then trade on those claims to try and curry regulatory favor and concessions that aren’t available to other financial businesses. Regulation is needed to prevent predatory inclusion, but many fintech business models have obscured or explained away their high costs and problematic practices with a veneer of flashy tech innovation. And when regulators have sought to enforce their rules against fintechs, they have often been accused of being “anti-innovation.”"

"In short, the predominant legal use of stablecoins is not for payments, but for speculative trading. They aren’t as stable as they claim to be, and the stability they do have arises from free-riding on the US banking system and monetary policy – and as we’ll come back to, if stablecoins are able to keep gaining market share, these parasites might eventually endanger their hosts. Stablecoins are typically unavailable to those without bank accounts…and so we come to the question that I keep screaming about stablecoins (in my head, and occasionally on social media), WHY ARE WE EVEN DOING THIS???"

"Just like beauty, efficiency, competition, and security are all in the eye of the beholder. For example, one person’s “efficiency” may be another person’s “dismantling critical government infrastructure.” And yet technological solutions designed to make things more efficient, more competitive, or more secure are often presented by Silicon Valley as neutral and universally desirable. That veneer of neutrality and universality can be dangerous if it disguises the fact that Silicon Valley is solving (or creating and then solving) problems in ways that are antithetical to our values. To illustrate those dangers, we’ll use a particular technological solution: the blockchain. A blockchain is a clunky type of database, and it really is the perfect example to demonstrate the hollowness of techno-solutionism: it promises to do everything but really isn’t very good at doing much of anything (anything other than helping some unscrupulous folks make money, that is)."