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I got into crypto in 2017 when I came across the phrase "money is a technology". That idea fascinated me. But fast forward several years later, and it's obvious that money might be a technology in the sense that it's a tool, but more importantly, money is a culture.

As an outsider not paying too much attention, how do you beat the ledger problem? Crypto only works if there is a ledger. I don't want a ledger of every transaction I made. Seems like an insurmountable fundamental privacy issue.

I live in less developed countries so it is actually useful for me but I see it the same way as you wrote here.

Low-life businessmen ruined the technology outside of some spaces where there is strong tech leadership. They did too much damage to reputation of the whole industry

They did the same butchering to LLM/AI tech.

> neither practical nor particularly convenient

My only take away with crypto is, think of that one movie "In Time" but instead of the whole time = currency concept and the arm clock, what if crypto could be applied to a physical piece of e-paper like thing, where it says what its worth, and its worth what it says, you can transfer it on a whim from the paper to your phone (to a wallet) and back and forth.

If anyone figured that out, fully seamlessly, fault tolerant, that alone imho would be worth investing time and attention into.

Basically make the crypto real and physical, something fluidly tangible to where everyone can hold it and understand it.

No one can hack your wallet if all your "crypto" is not in it. You can spin up new wallet on a whim.

The only real way I can think is something like how monero works, where whoever owns a coin can "decrypt" said coin (or that's my limited understanding of how monero works).

Technological solutions to social problems only tend to work when the problems are of the type "I wish it were easier to rid people of their money".

When people in a developing country cannot hold foreign currency it is a result of a deliberate decision by their government. That creates a number of issues. They may well be breaking the law holding stable coins. It means practical difficulties in buying stable coins (they need someone who will sell stablecoins in their currency).

Exactly. Cryptocurrency is useful as as a backup system against failing/weak institutions. Just that. Like insurance, it was not there to make anyone's lives better but simply to become a safeguard to avoid complete collapse.

I highly recommend the recently published The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World's Most Powerful Money by Brendan Greeley. It's an accessible look at how individuals, governments, markets, and value all intertwine to create a stable and widely used currency.

> The only real use case that makes sense to me is giving people in developing countries access to a stable currency they can actually hold, trade, and invest in, meaning USDT or USDC. Outside of that, as an EU/US citizen I don't see why I'd hold stablecoins instead of fiat

The logical conclusion of this train of thought (which I agree with) is that people who heavily invested in crypto may significantly benefit from weakening strong currencies and institutions. Make of that what you will.

I use crypto for exchange between friends (US + EU) and myself (SE Asia).

Our options are IBAN (slow!), WesternUnion (fees, denials, hassles) or crypto (10min, cheap). We chose crypto - because it’s the practical path from their bank to mine. CashApp and Coinbase interface with my actual bank accounts, on my end.

If you don’t do international banking, then much of the utility is diminished — so I’m not surprised by your perspective. But once you try to move money between continents, even with ID and documentation, you’ll understand that Coinbase is a godsend.

>The only real use case that makes sense to me...

Cryptocurrencies have a great and really boring application. You have to think "who needs a reliable ledger distributed among many entities?"

The answer is institutional banks the likes of JPMorgan. They have a few cryptocurrencies, you need to be another large bank to use them. Big banks send each other large sums of money constantly back and forth. In no sense do they send each other "real" money, it's just accounting... a ledger.

"Cryptocurrencies" are better thought of as mathematically proven accounting software than money. Plenty of organizations need to be able to keep track of money is between a collection of mostly-trusted peers. With cryptocurrencies they can ditch a lot of the transaction and accounting software.

An emerging use-case is a bank account for AI agents. I read that Coinbase 'Base' Ethereum layer2 is popular for AI banking.

>Outside of that, as an EU/US citizen I don't see why I'd hold stablecoins instead of fiat.

because fiat can be taken away from you.

Though, there’s a part of me thinking that the basic idea of creating artificial scarcity for profit is hard to separate from scamminess. It’s giving De Beers.

You are forgetting Ethereum which is the defacto main standard and driver in the "crypto industry". Most of those chains are in fact EVM based (so outside of Bitcoin, XRP or Solana).

The people in and around the Ethereum Foundation are solving very interesting problems but nobody talk about it on HN. For example I believe they are at the forefront of the use zero-knowledge proofs.

Just dig into [0].

Is the Ethereum Foundation and broader project dedicated to pumping the cryptocurrency ETH? obviously not and they are not by far the top holder of it.

The fact that the crypto is not providing real returns is actually one of the main criticism of the project.

- [0] https://ethereum-magicians.org/

of course you would include bitcoin in the latter, too, right? Right?

I wholeheartedly agree with your comment. Stablecoins are not the problem, they are a symptom. I'm from Venezuela, the country that keeps leading in inflation. Our options are holding a currency that loses half its value in months, buying dollars in the "black market" which is illegal or using stablecoins.

I hate these type of articles because they often come from people that live in a normal country and don't know the struggle to live in a corrupt shithole where you don't have financial freedom nor security

I don't see why those two positions are mutually exclusive?

> it enables people to transact monetary value bypassing for-profit operators such as western union and paypal

You are not even getting rid of that, you are just replacing them with a different set of middlemen in the crypto ecosystem who are demanding substantially higher fees than, say, a Wise does.

I’m ignorant of this but it seems wrong.

30% lost in fees??

Can they not manage to open a dollar-backed account somewhere?

Also:

> being stored in a currency that might lose a majority of its value overnight

I for sure put crypto in this same category. “Stablecoin” or not.

And they also make their place they live and the rest of the planet a tiny bit worse due to the energy consumption of bitcoin, if they support bitcoin in any form even with lightning.

A question though: How do they exchange their crypto into local fiat?

Crypto has utterly failed as a currency. In that regard it's been dead for over a decade. If btc or eth were currency they'd be considered dead by deflationary spiral which is more or less what every economist predicted from the start. Some people got rich by investing but getting rich off of currency speculation is generally awful for people who rely on that currency to live. Crypto has been a success the same way The Room was a successful movie.

>bypassing for-profit operators such as western union and paypal as well as hinders corrupt government institutions from confiscating or otherwise devaluing what you own

There are transaction fees so you're still paying someone. And the it's not government taking what you own, it's scammers!

It is the main use case!

Yes, and: it's not completely exclusive to crypto. The UK FCA had to ban "binary options", a financial instrument using traditional money, due to the high volume of scams. https://www.fca.org.uk/consumers/binary-options-scams

While true about that 'hero' marketing, you can claim the same about literally any marketing campaign, or things like American Dream (TM).

How many teenagers looked with starry eyes into US military recruiting PR campaigns, then get send to Iraq / Afghanistan, and instead of glory and cool adventures that were promised they saw death of peers and civilians on massive scale, they became invaders for at best questionable causes, experienced huge human suffering and destruction... which at the end didn't achieve anything positive at all, neither for US nor for locals, massively in contrary. Heroes look very differently in hindsight.

It's gambling, and it's gambling in dodgy unregulated casinos.

"This guy won big!" is absolutely a part of the marketing that pulls in the other suckers. It's not a counter-example, it's part of the scheme.

I know people who really enjoy a night out losing a 3-digit sum of money in a casino. Somehow they get sufficient reward from that to make the expense worthwhile for them.

The difference is, that unlike the Crypto enthusiasts, they don't afterwards try to convince me at length that gambling can and should replace money transfers, foreign exchange, banks in general, pension funds, the governmental exchequer etc. That would be cultish lunacy.

Ive been saying this for a while. Cryptocurrencies are an index tracker for the underground economy.

They're not without value and theyre not all speculation but what value they do have is almost entirely about facilitating transactions which at least one state considers illegal.

I used to think that this would mean that they'd be outright banned eventually but it seems that the "index tracker for the underground economy" proved to be too profitable an investment for western oligarchs and the chance to undermine rival countries' capital controls proved too alluring for the imperialists in government.

This is a "vice" thing. Vices are things which match this pattern like alcohol or drugs:

    - many people don't indulge at all
    - many people indulge occasionally to no real harm
    - some people indulge in a way that makes a short term recoverable mess
    - a few people get addicted and are unable to stop. May or may not also be harmed at this point, but this tends to lead to cumulative harm
    - a few people really mess up tragically

>tbh that reads a bit like the war on drugs propaganda we got in school back then.

Well, propaganda or not, hard drugs are bad for you.

Propaganda always works best when it's true, but selective. People that ended up homeless heroin addicts 2 years after smoking cannabis exist, the propaganda just neglected to mention that they are a minority.

Just like the failure of the war on drugs, trying to ban crypto and arresting anyone that owns it would almost certainly be a dismal failure.

Well it's not wrong, the solution isn't abstinence though, it's proper education, help for those who struggle with it, and making it legal and regulating it.

> and he is meaningfully poorer at every stop along the way.

or meaningfully richer as the case may be

Just because the methods used by the war on drugs failed doesn’t mean that drugs are somehow good for you. It just means that the methods were ineffective.

The war on drugs, due to its targeting of specific socioeconomic and racial groups, is probably not the best analogy here.

While I do get your point about the FUD it generated, a better parallel might be the rise (and eventual fall) of the tobacco industry. There was a lot of fraud and deception in the 20th century about the health effects of smoking. There were ads touting that more doctors preferred brand X. The idea was to correlate something genuinely dangerous and lethal with good health.

Crypto and betting markets, to the author’s point, are repeating this pattern again today in terms of personal finances.

I read it as another verse of Eminem's "Guilty Conscience".

Yeah like why is Mike thinking he is investing if he is betting on a literal sportsbook? That is delusion and has nothing to do with crypto. I am not pro crypto but the logic here doesn't make a lot of sense.

You can say buying crypto is like gambling sure but it literally is not. It's investing in an extremely risky asset that can go to 0. But it is very different than placing a bit on Kalshi or a sportsbook.

I actually have bought CumRocket before but I also bought a lot of crypto and sold it at a profit. I did not use Kalshi later or sportbooks to gamble. I moved to invest in stocks later in life but bought boring etfs and index funds. Trading bitcoin actually taught me risk management and stocks seem much easier to handle in terms of strategy.

Sure I could've turned into a degenrate gambler but that's literally not crypto's fault

The phrase “financial nihilism” is explicitly mentioned and discussed in the article.

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Is it possible that these companies simply fork the existing protocols and use the technology without buying into the existing "crypto world"?

Yes it won't be quite so decentralised, but say a number of major banks all spin up a node for say a JPM asset trading blockchain, it becomes semi-decentralised, so they have some advantage of a using a more secure shared ledger, but they also retain more control and thus probably more acceptance within banking, as big players can keep a walled-garden of sorts.

> Backpack launched a SpaceX token at IPO that can be moved between on-chain and your brokerage

What is the actual societal value of this? Do you seriously believe that such a token helps price discovery?

Now I know there's a spoiler, the title of the article is a spoiler.

I only started watching it after I got spoiled, and didn’t mind it. Before I knew about the premise I thought the show looked boring. Didn’t pick it up based on the excerpt on Netflix.

The show doesn’t really rely on not knowing the twist. And even saying there’s a spoiler for season 1 will probably clue most people onto what the twist is anyway

I am ride or die Good Place; my family has the Trolley Problem party game. Don’t spoil it if you haven’t seen it.

But honestly I feel the Darkest Timeline is more apt, ala Community.

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What was the "tell" for you that makes you think this was AI-generated?

I assume he is referring to the uptick in stablecoin adoption. USD Stable coins are US dollar-backed cryptocurrency tokens that are intended to always hold a value of $1 USD.

Stablecoins are not backed by a central bank. Instead their source of value comes from a private company that holds actual US dollars or USD-equivalent reserves (like treasury bills, etc).

When you go outside of the nice countries, local money becomes worthless. Nobody wants it, they'd much rather have dollars instead.

Stablecoins for the first time offer a reasonable way for the global poor to store value in dollars, or in the form of any relatively stable currency.

Obviously this comes with all kinds of issues, but it's still better than the original situation where "savings" simply didn't exist except in the form of physical dollars or gold bought at a significant premium.

In recent years, since a lot of central banks have been putting gold and other assets instead of US dollars on their balance sheet, the dollar need new outlets and this is what those stablecoins through Circle and Tether are: easy access to dollars for anybody with a computer and internet connection, skipping banks and other financial institutions.

Trump is a pro crypto president in the sense that he is making it official and a lot of actors in finance are fighting it because it is killing their own lucrative scam.

The whole Trump memecoin and World Liberty Financial is shady but really a side story.

The bottom line is if you hold USD a lot of "legacy" actors are making money on your back. With stablecoins Tether, Circle & co join the party.

I am pretty sure he's talking about the TrumpCoin.

Buying crypto actually 'doubles' money by increasing risk:

You buy crypto and give out fiat. Now you have apparently 1 crypto worth 1 fiat and someone else now has 1 fiat.

The logical conclusion is it should be taxed as gambling, not investing. Some countries like India have already gotten this one right.

nerds gonna nerd i guess..

Technological nihilism, in a way. The displacement of the philosophical foundations of science and western civilization in the last hundred plus years is still becoming manifest. We've been coasting on the fumes for a long time!

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You might be surprised what legitimate insurance companies have issued policies against in the past - it has always been the case that insurance and gambling are more closely adjacent than you might think.

For example: https://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/ca/news/breaking-news/d...

“One British insurance company came to the rescue of three Scottish sisters … concerned about the cost of raising the Son of God should one of them be selected to give birth to the Messiah.”

Of course the big difference is insuring yourself against the personal risk of loss in the event of a specific outcome is not seen as quite the same as merely speculating on its occurrence. Insurance is just betting against what you want to happen happening.

I don't think so as smart contracts have huge issues unsolved.

It also doesn't solve a problem we haven already solved; If i buy something, companies are quite aware how this default contract works and what are up and downside of doing business with someone.

In smart contracts you remove the trust these people build and now come up with another mechanism. The latest i'm aware of is blocking capital from both sides until transaction is done. This binds a lot more capital on both sides which might be a huge problem for a small company vs. a big one, it could alos kill one party if the other party never accepts any resolution.

A current LLM with a credit card an already just buy something and everything in the background works as it has for a long time.

Fun for the first person that prompt injects their way to a billion dollars, I suppose?

> People have started to view a high-trust society like a rainforest: a natural resource that has lots of life-sustaining positive externalities, but you can just burn it down to make a quick buck instead.

I've never read this analogy before but it really works for me. Thanks!

> The weird thing about it to me is that it lumbers on.

Perhaps it is actually useful to some people.

And they repeat the same wrong garbage.

At least the pressure on the financial market, GPU shortage through AI, AI we have a realistic chance that crashes more and more.

I bet the first failure of a large stablecoin will be fun (for external onlookers at least).

Only virtual fiat is useful everything is garbage.

The stable coins in question are absolut idiotic. You can't just have billions and trillions of dollars/euros/fiat in some bank and not do anything with it while everyone else is using your stable coins.

It motivates these companes to invest the fiat they have to hold, which adds risk which wasn't there before.

Just make it a real digital fiat from central banks.

But than what did you win? Instead of having your banking ssystem in place with certifications, bank licenses etc. you have nothing to replace it with just bare digital fiat.

Smart contracts don't work.

Now what? a new whole parallel ecosystem? For what?

cryptocurrency is too long for the people using it for marketing

100% @dang can we edit these sort of titles for clarity?

Cryptography came first and has millions of practical applications, and will only become more frequent fodder for discussion as quantum computing advances. If any discipline deserves claim to "crypto" it's -graphy.

(I'd also accept cryptozoology as the one true 'crypto')

Sure, but what is the scale vs what has been done with Pan/Sui etc. by Alph, Amaz, others?

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