My concerns about the direction of cryptocurrency

I was first drawn to crypto because I liked the idea of a better money system. Controlled by its users, not by banks or governments. The trust would come from open-source code that anyone could check.

I thought crypto was built to take power over money away from big institutions that do whatever they want. The original idea was a way to send money online directly from one person to another, with no bank needed as a middleman. For that to work, it had to be decentralized (not controlled by one group), cheap, fast, secure, and private.

I loved this vision.

But crypto is heading in the wrong direction. If it’s not decentralized, it’s just another bank. A blockchain or token isn’t truly “Web3” if a company or a small team has all the control. It’s just the old financial system with a new name.

Here are the problems I see. There are probably more issues, but these are the ones I can think of offhand:

• Many blockchains aren’t really decentralized. They are heavily influenced or controlled by single companies or organizations. This wasn’t the original plan.
• Developers have special “admin keys.” These keys let them change the rules, pause the system, or make updates. A real money system shouldn’t have backdoors that give a few people special privileges.
• Blockchains have been shut down. Some major chains have been stopped or paused by their creators. This shouldn’t be possible in a system designed to run on its own.
• Blockchain history can be changed. For example, Ethereum’s history was rewritten in 2016 to reverse a major hack. A permanent record shouldn’t be easy to change. Another example is Cronos, whose developers recently reissued 70 billion tokens that were previously burned, demonstrating a similar lack of immutability.
• There is no privacy. Most blockchains have public transactions, meaning anyone can track your wallet’s activity. This isn’t the kind of privacy that was promised.
• Assets can be frozen. While Bitcoin and Ether are hard to freeze, many other tokens (especially stablecoins) can be blocked by the companies that created them. Your money shouldn’t have a “freeze” button.
• The biggest exchanges are just new banks. They require you to submit your ID, they hold your tokens, and they share your data with governments. How is that any different from a traditional bank?
• Companies launch blockchains to make money, not to support the original idea.
• Lobbyists are pushing for a tamer version of crypto. They talk to governments to make crypto legal, but they support systems that are centralized and not private. This only helps them gain more power, while nothing changes for the rest of us.
• The crypto community is full of hype. It’s often driven by influencers and people who don’t understand the tech but hope to get rich quickly.
• Useless “meme coins” are at the top. Better, more innovative blockchains are ignored because they don’t have influencers pumping them.
• Popularity is valued more than technical quality.
• Many projects are designed to enrich insiders. Companies and early investors buy tokens cheaply, pump the price, and then sell, leaving most people with losses.
• Exchanges exist to make huge profits, not just from trading but also from selling other products and charging massive listing fees.
• People believe things without checking. People blindly trust that Bitcoin’s supply can never be changed, but it isn’t set in stone. While it’s unlikely to ever happen, the limit is a rule of the code, not a law of physics. True security comes from verifiable facts, not from blind faith.
• Powerful people are now promoting crypto for their own benefit. The same politicians and companies that once called it a scam now support it but only on their terms.
• People don’t even own their crypto. With products like ETFs and centralized exchanges, many are just buying an IOU, not the actual tokens. This defeats the whole purpose.

It’s becoming a giant money-making machine that drifts further from its original vision every day. Worst of all, people don’t seem to care. They just want to make money.

I’m not saying blockchain is a bad idea. It’s great for many things. But for payments and savings, we need systems that are truly decentralized, secure, private, and not controlled by any single organization.

Maybe it was a lost cause from the start. Maybe the people who control the world’s money were never going to let a true alternative succeed. Instead, they saw a chance to grab a piece of the pie for themselves, gaining power while leaving the original dream behind.