Crypto has the potential to set all the money on fire

[Bloomberg]( Follow Us [Get the newsletter]( This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, a brutalist amusement park of Bloomberg Opinion’s opinions. [Sign up here](. Today’s Agenda - Crypto could yet [wreck the financial system](. - America was [doomed in Afghanistan]( from the start. - The new [Google suit is the wrong antitrust]( fight. - Waste coal [won’t make Bitcoin greener](. South of Safe Heaven One comfort of our ridiculous investing age is that all the gambling on GameStonk or Dogecoin or whatever feels like it’s being played with Monopoly money. Yes, people are taking losses and getting ripped off, such as the poor saps in this [must-read]( Bloomberg News story on crypto “rug-pulling” schemes. But the sums are mostly small. And if you’re monkeying around in an asset class calling itself “S*** Coin” — and specifically a s*** coin going by the not-at-all-trying-too-hard name of “Safe Heaven” — then buddy, you might just have it coming. A lot of these diamond-hands types are happy to lose money anyway, just for the Reddit upvotes. Still, these things can metastasize. Pets.com was all fun and games until the whole stock market crashed and took the economy with it. Decentralized finance, the blockchain and human ingenuity have infinite capacity to spawn infinite Safe Heavens, including [some that may be sophisticated enough to draw in real cash](, warns Bloomberg’s editorial board. And once big players start dropping, they can drag bigger markets down with them. Lawmakers and regulators can’t sleep on the systemic risks here, no matter how marginal or hilarious they might seem right now. Sometimes a clown is just a clown, other times it’s Pennywise. Or even just a [clown shower](. Nobody wants to see that. Genghis Khan Could Have Told Us People have been fighting over the land we now call Afghanistan for millenniums. It has been kicking their butts the whole time. Arabs, Mongols, Safavids, British, Soviets — all found the territory ruinously painful, if not impossible, to hold. The trouble for all of these people is that they were not Afghan people. [The locals will always be far more invested in fighting off invaders]( than the invaders will be in sticking around, writes Leonid Bershidsky. That’s why the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. both ended up hightailing it out of the place. Some successor superpower — China or India or [Nea So Copros]( — will probably end up doing the same thing. But maybe this isn’t the loss it seems to be for the U.S. Unlike the Soviet Union, [this country did not drown in its Afghan quagmire](, writes Hal Brands. That’s partly because it never fully committed to the bit. It lost thousands of lives and trillions of dollars there, but the cost also could have been so much worse. We chose to hold back and got the results we should have expected from such a limited engagement. That doesn’t mean it was a mistake. Picking the Wrong Big Tech Fight Just yesterday [we wrote]( about how this country’s antitrust weaponry is rickety and underused. And then a bunch of states sued Google over what they claim is anticompetitive management of its app store. Great, right? Not really. Tae Kim points out [Google’s app store is actually less grasping and monopolistic than Apple’s](. The company should have an easy time swatting the lawsuit down, making it a big waste of time and resources and maybe leaving Google even stronger. So to update yesterday’s take: We need newer antitrust weapons. We need them used more often. And also please don’t swing them around wildly. Telltale Charts A company plans to [burn Pennsylvania waste coal to power a Bitcoin-mining operation](, in an effort to make Bitcoin greener. You see the problem with that, right? Liam Denning does, and so does this Elaine He chart. Further Reading The [U.K.’s reopening is a worthy experiment](, as long as officials mind the details to avoid variants and unnecessary risks. — Sam Fazeli The [Republican Party’s unshakeable Trump fixation]( could hurt it in the midterms. — Jonathan Bernstein States are doing a [sloppy job trying to regulate history and social studies]( classes. — Ramesh Ponnuru The Didi debacle suggests a popular VC strategy of [investing in the same tech around the world has big risks](. — Shuli Ren Tempted to [copy Peter Thiel by sheltering money in a special IRA](? It’s not worth the trouble. — Alexis Leondis ICYMI Shipping cows across the world? [What could go wrong](? Nancy Pelosi’s husband [scored big on Alphabet options](. Steve [Ballmer is now worth $100 billion](. Kickers How [sports owners avoid paying taxes](. [Juul bought an entire issue]( of a scholarly journal. (h/t Scott Kominers) The Ever Given has [finally left the Suez Canal](. [Seahorses face extinction](. I [might have inspired]( the “[Cat Person](” story. Notes: Please send AI art and complaints to Mark Gongloff at mgongloff1@bloomberg.net. [Sign up here]( and follow us on [Twitter]( and [Facebook](. Like Bloomberg Opinion Today? [Subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more](. You’ll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, The Bloomberg Open and The Bloomberg Close. Before it’s here, it’s on the Bloomberg Terminal. Find out more about how the Terminal delivers information and analysis that financial professionals can’t find anywhere else. [Learn more](. You received this message because you are subscribed to Bloomberg's Bloomberg Opinion Today newsletter. [Unsubscribe]( | [Bloomberg.com]( | [Contact Us]( Bloomberg L.P. 731 Lexington, New York, NY, 10022