I think more than "intellectual incoherence", as with everything, differing views about crypto come down to differing values.

> The actual desirable property of a currency is one with a variable supply which a central bank can control to target a specific low inflation rate by measuring the purchasing power of the currency with respective to the domestic costs of goods.

Desirable for who? I think this is desirable for a _state_ which seeks to have a growing and stable economy. That can differ meaningfully from what is desirable for a given large account/wallet holder.

> The value of everyday things like wheat, metals, semiconductors, and even synthetic products like stocks, interest rate swaps and bonds are well understood. We have rational valuation models for these products and there’s a market that purchases these products because of their intrinsic value or exposure they bring to collective human economic activity.

I.e. he adopts the basic assumption that value is defined by how something can be used. That's often a useful definition, but as the 'art' section indicates, it's not comprehensive, and it doesn't acknowledge that the value of those uses ultimately bottoms out at human preferences (e.g. zinc is used in making electronics, but we assign a value to electronics because they facilitate lots of other things that we value).

The people he's criticizing seem to define value as what someone will pay for something, which may be based on just rarity. Certainly gold, silver, and jewels were all highly valued before we had industrial processes that specifically used them.

> Setting all these models aside, there are two far more coherent perspectives on the crypto assets that have far more explanatory power for the behavior we see. Crypto assets are the synthesis of a speculative mania and a financial scam built around an opaque technology, phoney populism, with a tolerance for intellectual incoherence at its core.

"Mania", "scam", and "phoney populism" are at emotionally charged terms that weren't selected for their "explanatory power."

One can have a view of crypto which is intellectually coherent, but still worth criticizing. Its claims are something like:

- something is worth what people will pay for it; here's a thing that people will pay for.

- as with other financial and investing decisions, individuals make choices around what serves them, not what serves society as a whole. Expecting otherwise is unrealistic.

- the marketing for many products is not intended to give purchasers a full understanding of what they're buying and how it works. If that were a requirement, no complex technical innovation could be marketed and sold. How many people understand the working mechanisms of both a computer chip and a prescription drug?

- as with many other industries, crypto mining expends energy to produce something of value, and benefits from a lack of effective taxes on the CO2 emitted. If we're gonna appropriately price carbon, just do it but don't preach at cherry-picked industries.

The criticism should recognize that these characteristics aren't unique to crypto; they're totally of a piece with real estate speculation, complex and opaque financial instruments, and a world economy that built itself around extractive industries. If you want a society where people or organizations receive value commensurate with _doing_ something useful rather than just owning stuff, where forthrightness is present in financial products, and where economic activity isn't based on environmentally unsustainable practices ... you haven't been living in that society for a long time and you should rail against something bigger than crypto.