New Delhi, Jan. 4 -- By Ankit Srivastava, Chief Editor

Why cryptocurrencies failed to overthrow fiat - yet succeeded in reshaping how trust, power, and money are understood.

Every few years, a new technology arrives promising to overthrow money as we know it. In the 1990s, it was electronic cash. In the early 2000s, online banking was supposed to make physical currency obsolete. In the last decade, cryptocurrencies were cast as the final blow - the innovation that would dethrone governments and replace fiat currencies altogether.

That prediction, repeated endlessly at conferences and on social media, has not come true. And it likely never will.

Yet dismissing cryptocurrencies as a failed revolution would be an equally serious mistake....