Andy Mukherjee, Columnist

With Crypto in Retreat, Central Banks Take a Quantum Leap

Monetary authorities are road-testing a new electronic currency that’s fast and anonymous, yet unfriendly to criminals and impervious to hacking by powerful computers. 

David Chaum, finding a use for Big Brother after all.

Photographer: Eoin Noonan/Web Summit/Getty

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In the chaos surrounding the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s empire, it’s easy to lose sight of what has died in this year’s crypto carnage and what lives on. The biggest casualty is “anarcho-capitalism,” championed by engineer Timothy May in the 1990s as cyberspace interactions unconstrained by external regulation, taxation or interference — in short, an absence of government.

That libertarian zeal, coded in the DNA of Bitcoin and every other virtual token, won’t survive the recent turmoil in the blockchain world. If investors must turn to courts to recover their FTX losses, they’ll want intermediaries and protocols to be supervised and made safe to use. Risky shadow banking in the garb of letting people swap their fiat currency for digital assets is coming to an end.