Interesting dystopian story, but I have some thoughts on it.
One of the main ideas of the story is that cryptocurrencies take over the economy, and because their Proof of Work algorithms require increasing amounts of electric power to calculate useless hashes, there are power outages in the world.
While that scenario could be conceivable if Bitcoin or a cryptocurrency based on a similar technology became the de-facto means of exchange on the economy, I highly doubt that would ever be the case.
Bitcoin is the first cryptocurrency, the most widely known even by people who doesn't know much about technology or cryptocurrencies, and because it's been soaring due to speculative investing, which triggers more speculative investing, it will soar even more in the short and middle term. And yes, there are a few whales holding most of it so they can move the market easily. Bu t while Bitcoin can be a store of value in the short term, in my opinion it will never be the preferred means of exchange. Sure, Tesla bought 1.5 billion dollars in Bitcoin, and will accept payments in bitcoin, and will benefit from bitcoin appreciating in price, and buying a $100k car with bitcoin might be reasonable even paying the very expensive transaction fees and waiting the very very slow transactions to confirm, but that wouldn't work to buy potatos as in the story...
I do believe cryptocurrencies will replace fiat at some point, but it will not be Bitcoin.
There are many cryptos already that are so much better than Bitcoin at being a means of exchange, but in my opinion one of the most promising from a technical perspective is Nano, since it has zero fees, it's instant, and uses a lot less power (you can do 6 million Nano transactions with the energy consumed by one Bitcoin transaction). There is an issue with Nano with Spam, since the Nano networked has been spammed with garbage transactions, but I think they will fix the issue, or some other cryptocurrency with the benefits of Nano will.
So I think we're now in a speculative phase but once cryptos are actually used as a means of exchange and they're ready to replace fiat, that speculative phase should stop or be highly reduced, so the cult-like following of hodlers wishing for lambos should go away.
Also, while it raises an important concern that any cryptocurrency that reaches widespread use as means of exchange should not have early adopters and hodlers holding most of it, and that's an interesting problem.
But I disagree that having Banks/Central Banks and Governments creating money and controlling it is better.
Governments will try to create their own cryptocurrency anyway... China has already done it (https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-creates-its-own-digital-c...), and the USA and Eurozone are close to it and are accelerating their efforts to have it, and they will be stablecoins. And of course they will use the features of a Blockchain that make all transactions transparent and traceable, while there are other cryptos that have privacy and anonimity in mind, like Monero and others, government issued cryptocurrencies will have the opposite goals.
That reminds me a bit of Mr Robot and the E-Corp's issued E-Coin.
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