Ban crypto. Just ban it. Ban that cartoonish junk right now before it causes some other disas-tah that takes every last American checking account down with it. 

And all those crypto creeps and maybe everyone who has ever invested in crypto, put them on a wire bus and send them to some Oklahoma chinchilla ranch where they can live out their get-rich-quick fantasies in obscurity for the rest of their natural born days.

And crypto apologists? You guys who say it’s the future and the rest of us are just too stupid to understand? I’m not listening to you anymore. I have my hands over my ears, la-la-la-la-la, I don’t hear you.

And nobody else is listening to you either, because you’ve had more chances than you ever deserved. This goes for hedge funds and tech banks and the guy from FTX with the Don Henley hairdo. Nuts to all of you.

You knew it was going to be crypto, didn’t you? That after you scraped the congealed blood off the windshield of this week’s bank collapses you’d see crypto behind the wheel:

“Few banks were as deeply embedded within the cryptocurrency firms as Signature Bank and Silvergate,” wrote The Washington Post. “The institutions offered an air of legitimacy to crypto companies and provided clients key services, such as around-the-clock transactions.”

Air of legitimacy. What’s that, did they give crypto a photo ID so it can buy beer? Or could you use it to buy an actual product, something besides a harem of 14-year-olds from Novosibirsk?

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And please, please, please, stop telling us how much smarter you are than everyone else because you invented a line of pretend money that depends on “data mining” and “blockchains” and a whole manner of other fairy dust that makes Peter Pan look like Peter Lynch.

If you’re so smart, how come you keep winding up in prison or in exile?

You guys like data, so we’re starting to get a real data-driven pattern here, aren’t we? And the pattern looks a lot like this: Everything crypto touches turns to rot. And could it have ended up any other way? Unregulated money, there’s a good idea. Maybe we can have unregulated interstate highways too, where people are free to drive on whichever side they want.

You’ll never have to deal with those stodgy, traditional banks again. I’ll give crypto credit for one thing, something I never thought I’d see in my lifetime: It makes stodgy, traditional banks look good.

According to The New York Times, “Signature Bank, a New York financial institution with a big real estate lending business that had recently made a play to win cryptocurrency deposits, closed its doors abruptly on Sunday, after regulators said that keeping the bank open could threaten the stability of the entire financial system.”

All crypto is the new subprime mortgage scheme that led to the Great Recession in 2009. That’s all. Some way to spin straw into gold and then run out the door with the loot before anyone notices it’s all one big scam. And if it destroys the financial system that has served America very, very well since 1862, that’s none of their concern.

The Times story went on to note that Signature “specialized in providing banking services to law firms” and “One of Signature’s specialties was financing the purchase of taxi medallions, which authorize holders to operate cabs.”

Crypto, lawyers, taxi medallions. Great. This wasn’t a bank, this was a hundred-million-dollar pawn shop.

The real sour beauty of it all, however, was that the first thing all these anti-government tech bros did after the crash was go running in tears to the government begging for salvation.

So the government indeed stepped in and saved their sorry hides, and deftly patched up their shenanigans so that the American banking system wouldn’t crumble. 

But remember, it’s the crypto bros who are smart, not the bureaucrats. And certainly not us.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.