Is this a running joke or something? I've seen the misspelling of Ethereum several times now on hackernews and it's a tell-tale sign that the people talking about it haven't invested much time researching it or delving in to the space in any way.
> Given the regular and massive losses due to breakins, scams, and fraud, I have to wonder if this is the most efficient way to learn these lessons.
Where there is money changing hands, there are scams and fraud. The difference with crypto is that you can follow / track the money at all times. It doesn't mean you can get it back, but it does increase the chances that somewhere along the line the attacker will slip up and reveal themselves once they try to buy something or exit in to fiat currency.
The bottom line is that crypto exists because the banking system is perceived as broken by many. It's slow, expensive and corrupt as far as the average person on the street is concerned.
I agree that fraud, scams, and crime happen everywhere. Which makes it a useless statement. My point is that it seems to happen way more in the crypto space than elsewhere. Are you claiming that it happens the same or less? If so, I'd love to see your data. Because I suspect comparing the failure rate of, say, IPOs vs ICOs would show a significant difference.
And I think you're wrong about why cryptocurrencies exist. Philosophically they're rooted in an anti-government, technoutoptian, anarchocapitalist line of thinking. You could digitally transfer money for a decade before Bitcoin existed, and more if you count things like Western Union.
It of course didn't really get going until the hucksters and the speculators discovered you could make a lot of money. At which point, any real effort to be "electronic cash" went out the window, because although deflation and volatility are bad for currencies, they're great for hype and speculation.
I definitely agree that the banking system is antiquated, and that there's plenty of room for improvement. But cryptocurrencies do almost nothing to solve that problem. In comparison, look at M-Pesa. It started at about the same time as Bitcoin, but has had major success in serving the unbanked.
At one point in US history, it was relatively easy to create a bank, and the banks could issue their own private currencies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcat_banking
This provided relatively little value and quite a lot of failure, so it was taken as a "let's never do that again" lesson.
The Etherium fork after the DAO theft was in my view people rediscovering the value of having a regulator.
Given the regular and massive losses due to breakins, scams, and fraud, I have to wonder if this is the most efficient way to learn these lessons.