“I am appalled and shocked,” says Erik Voorhees, founder of ShapeShift, a self-custody crypto platform. “All the mainstream economists, everyone on Wall Street, and much of the public, is enamored and fully supportive of this idea that you can create wealth and prosperity by printing money.”

Twenty years ago, such a proposition was laughable. “If you brought it up, people would recall stories of the Weimar Republic,” he said, mentioning Zimbabwe’s 2007 hyperinflation crisis, too. “People started trying it out more in the 2008 financial crisis, and called it Quantitative Easing, which is an amazing twisting of words. It is just creating money out of thin air and buying bonds from the federal government.”

Instead of complaining, Voorhees wants the crypto industry to continue building the alternative financial system that is cryptocurrency, blockchains, and an open decentralized financial system, which he defines as a system to which anyone can connect, so long as they have a computer or phone.

 “It doesn't matter where they were born, it doesn't matter what passport they hold, it doesn't matter what country they're in, it doesn't matter what race or gender they are,” he said. “It is a totally blind and agnostic system, and anyone can interact with it.” Similar to how the internet itself works, he says.