America’s Crypto Development Lags Behind as it Becomes an Aging Empire

Omid Malekan, a professor at Columbia Business School, discovered Bitcoin in 2013 and now teaches students about crypto at one of the world’s most prestigious business schools. Malekan authored several books on the subject, including Re-Architecting Trust: The Curse of History and the Crypto Cure for Money, Markets, and Platforms. Malekan believes that the US government is ill-informed in their anti-crypto attitude and acting like an aging empire threatened by a new kind of financial system. With the lack of support for crypto in the US, the technology may find a home elsewhere, resulting in jobs and tax revenues accruing to countries beyond the US. Malekan feels that crypto solves important problems and that the criticism of the technology as a solution in search of a problem is dismissive of the millions who use it. He also criticizes crypto’s “speculative excess” and the community’s tendency to treat their favorite coins like football teams, with tribalistic passions.