In the world of cryptocurrency, there are two categories of intermediary institutions. The first category contains the exchanges where users buy, sell and store their virtual currency. These exchanges include Coinbase, which the New York attorney general’s report claimed traded on its own platform, and the now-bankrupt Mt. Gox exchange, which lost over 700,000 of its users’ Bitcoins to hackers in 2014. The second category is made up of the people and companies who create and sell their own cryptocurrency, using initial coin offerings. This year, two founders of a virtual currency called Centra were arrested and charged with “conspiracy to commit securities fraud, securities fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and wire fraud.” In May, The Wall Street Journal found that hundreds of initial coin offerings were “using deceptive or even fraudulent tactics to lure investors.”

More recently, social networks such as Facebook promised to connect everyone in the world and give users a platform to speak freely. As we’ve seen, they did not make things free; they opened us up to manipulation by anyone, anywhere. There is a feeling I get when I log in to Facebook and am assaulted by clickbait news, overly intrusive ads and a confusing inability to configure my feed to show me the updates from friends that I came here to Facebook to read. “Free” is not the word for it. Facebook has become less free than an ordinary real-life conversation, not despite the ability to connect to to anyone but because of it.

We saw something similar in peer-to-peer lending, where people could take the savings of one person who needed to invest and transfer it to another person who needed to borrow. The system was supposed to make the economy work more fairly, by removing the arbitrary and inefficient banker middlemen. Instead of following through on its promise, peer-to-peer lending in China has resulted in a lot of lost money for ordinary citizen savers, creating an unstable financial sector.

In software engineering, we have a phrase for this: “That’s not a bug, it’s a feature.” Established systems (such as customs, regulations or software) are the way they are, for many reasons, some of them now forgotten. Sometimes we never know all the reasons a system needed restrictions or limitations until we discover a way to make new systems without them and discover (for better or for worse) what happens without those constraints. Cryptocurrency, peer-to-peer lending, and anonymity and pseudonymity in communication are all impressive feats of engineering. They are also all excellent at showing us the value of a society that requires a stable identity, government support of a currency and oversight of its financial systems.

Bitcoin’s first commercial transaction was in 2010; by late 2017 it had grown to a value of over $100 billion. Facebook grew to one billion users in about the same amount of time. The word “viral” is often used to describe such exponential growth, but viruses grow exponentially for a reason, and it has nothing to do with a benefit to the host. If a new technology grows exponentially, that ought to make us wary, not excited.