The Federal Reserve is currently paying banks 5.4% on reserves. Some of those bank reserves come from customer deposits. The average rate banks are paying depositors is 0.43% In any other industry, this would be a scandal. Imagine: The US government sold oil from the SPR to oil firms for $1/BBL while they sold it to the public for $4. There would be protests and congressional hearings. But not in banking. Why am I bringing this up? Because the simplest explanation of the U.S. government's hostility towards crypto (and even FinTechs) is a near obsession at the highest levels with protecting financial intermediaries and their profits. We saw this play out in both 2008 and 2020 when far more resources were spent on saving intermediaries than the general public. There are almost as many examples as there were interventions. This is the point at which 90% of economic experts start yelling at me that I am oversimplifying a complex issue unfairly. "The intermediaries were saved because they serve the public interest" these experts would say. "It wasn't corruption, it was complex econoomic management." Yes and no. While such programs MAY benefit the downstream public, they MUST benefit the intermediaries, because that is how they are designed. Oddly, this is the part of the interventions that is never debated. So the talking heads will argue endlessly about whether the Fed should lower rates by buying Treasury bonds or MBS from Wall Street, but they won't debate whether the Fed should buy those bonds directly from the agencies that issue them. The notion that they should only be bought from a handful of primary dealers is sacrosanct. And yet while you, Joe Shmo public, may or may not benefit from JPM's latest interactions with the Fed, JPM obviously will, otherwise they wouldn't participate. It's not corruption per se, but a form of groupthink and consensus about how the world should be. Crypto represents a different paradigm. Many of the people doing the pushing don't even realize they are trapped within this paradigm. So they'll go on about how blockchain--a technology invented to replace intermediaries--is best utilized to make those companies marginally more efficient. Then they'll tell you that stablecoins are dangerous, while checking accounts at levered banks like SVB (or Lehman, or WaMu) are not. The existing Washington-Wall Street complex is like an organism. And like any other organism, it fights back when it feels threatened. Crypto is the biggest threat it has faced in generations, so it is fighting back fiercely.