The financial press, those perennial stenographers of ruin, are currently vibrating with the kind of misplaced eroticism usually reserved for Victorian novelists describing a particularly shapely ankle. The object of their affection? The so-called 'Big Bang' of cryptocurrency. It is an apt metaphor, really. In the beginning, there was nothing, and then, with a massive release of hot air and venture capital, there was still nothing, but now it has a ticker symbol and a community of 'diamond-handed' simians on social media. We are told that the 'utility' of stablecoins and tokens will revolutionize finance. If by 'revolutionize' they mean the same way the guillotine revolutionized French neckwear, then they are finally telling the truth.

Stablecoins—those digital placeholders that promise to maintain a peg to the U.S. Dollar with the same tenacity that a toddler promises not to eat the paste—are being positioned as the 'plumbing' of the future. The irony is staggering. Our current financial plumbing is already a rusted, leaking labyrinth of corruption and incompetence managed by too-big-to-fail gargoyles in Manhattan. The crypto solution is to replace those gargoyles with a decentralized array of anonymous teenagers and algorithmic 'smart contracts' that are about as smart as a bag of hammers. The real article notes with a straight face that the more 'useful' these tokens become, the greater the risk. This is the ultimate distillation of modern economic thought: utility is merely a precursor to contagion. We have designed a system where the more a tool works, the more likely it is to blow up the entire house. It is like being told that a new brand of toaster is revolutionary, but the more bread you toast, the higher the probability of your neighborhood spontaneously combusting.

Naturally, the political spectrum has divided itself into its usual camps of performative idiocy. On the Left, we see the 'inclusive finance' crowd, those earnest grifters who believe that giving a man in a developing nation a digital wallet full of volatile tokens is somehow a blow against imperialism. They frame this digital casino as a tool for equity, ignoring the fact that the house always wins, and in this case, the house is a server farm in a tax haven owned by a man who hasn't seen sunlight since the Obama administration. They want to 'democratize' finance, which is a polite way of saying they want to make sure the poor have the same opportunity to be liquidated by a flash-crash as the wealthy. It is the democratization of the abyss.

On the Right, the narrative is even more nauseating. Here, crypto is the 'freedom' currency, the ultimate escape from the 'tyranny' of the Federal Reserve. They speak of 'sovereign individuals' while tethering their entire net worth to a digital asset that can be wiped out by a single tweet from an eccentric billionaire or a bored regulator in Brussels. They despise the fiat system because it is based on nothing but the 'full faith and credit' of a government they hate, yet they worship at the altar of a private ledger that is based on nothing but the collective hallucination of a group of people who think 'HODL' is a sophisticated investment strategy. It is not freedom; it is just a different flavor of servitude, traded for a system where the masters are math-obsessed narcissists instead of career bureaucrats.

Historical parallels are, of course, lost on a generation with the collective memory of a fruit fly. We have seen this 'Big Bang' before. It was called the South Sea Bubble; it was called the Tulip Mania; it was called the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. Each time, the 'innovation' was just a more creative way to package debt and sell it to the unsuspecting. The only difference now is the speed and the vocabulary. We have traded the boiler room for the Discord server, and the shady broker for the 'influencer' who gets paid in tokens he’s currently dumping on his followers. The risk isn't a bug in the system; the risk is the system.

As stablecoins become more integrated into the real economy, the 'utility' will create a feedback loop of systemic fragility. When the inevitable de-pegging occurs—and it will, because gravity is not a suggestion—the contagion won't just stay in the digital realm. It will bleed into the real world, into the pension funds and the savings accounts of people who didn't even know they were participating in a global experiment in libertarian fan-fiction. We are building a financial superstructure on a foundation of fog, and the regulators, those slow-moving dinosaurs of the administrative state, are still trying to figure out if the fog should be taxed or given a stern talking-to. In the end, the 'Big Bang' will conclude exactly like its cosmological namesake: with a long, cold heat death, leaving behind nothing but a few wealthy scavengers and a universe of empty wallets. But at least the transactions will be fast.