«I read your briefing on decentralised finance, so please let me know if I got it straight (“Adventures in DeFi-land”, September 18th). It seems that punters are supposed to buy tokens (streams of digits) of no inherent worth and which may change in value by a factor of ten or more in either direction for no obvious reason. Some tokens take vast amounts of energy to generate, and tokens are stored in ethereal “wallets” which live on Cloud Nine, from where they can be (and have been) stolen at the click of a hacker’s mouse.
The market in tokens is not regulated and no substantial organisation stands behind them. However, cryptocurrency tokens are greatly valued by gamblers and by criminals as they enable the anonymous transfer of ransom money from schools, hospitals and businesses after their data have been encrypted or stolen. You also mentioned possibly cheaper payment mechanisms, but I prefer to stick with my expensive Swiss bank.»
David Myers
Commugny, Switzerland