In that work, I came to believe that, though there was a lot of hype masquerading as reality in the crypto field, Nakamoto’s innovation is real. This included courses on crypto finance, blockchain technology, and money. Riding the Coattails of Bitcoinīefore starting at the SEC, I had the honor of researching, writing, and teaching about the intersection of finance and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This article is a post-mortem analysis of the multi-billion dollar failure of Terra, which is a cryptocurrency network based around an algorithmic stablecoin. While there are real innovations in the space, such as bitcoin, fiat-collateralized stablecoins, and a number of experimental technologies, there is also a huge amount of speculation, pump-and-dump schemes, technological claims that obfuscate the trade-offs and risks they are taking, and so forth. Large swaths of the cryptocurrency market are basically the modern version of alchemy. Even someone as famously smart as Isaac Newton spent quite a bit of time studying alchemy. On the other hand, there are attempts at things like alchemy and perpetual motion machines– approaches that misunderstand science. In other words, if you were to show a caveman a smartphone, he’d think of it as magic. They organize matter, information, and human activity better than prior innovations. They create something from nothing only in the sense that they make resources go a lot further than they used to, and make it easier to access more resources. On one hand, there are real scientific innovations- new developments that allow us to tap into denser energy sources and increase productivity to improve most peoples’ quality of life. Throughout history, people have attempted to create something from nothing.

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