I worked at a crypto exchange and after I came to the conclusion that 99% of crypto was scams and rugpulls, I sold all my crypto and vowed to have nothing to do with it. It's more of a religion than a financial instrument and absolutely nothing has shown to me that crypto is anything more than a speculative gamble, basically tulips with the religious promise of a better world. The number of employees that lost money on rugpulls while I was there, but "still believed in crypto" was staggering.
My advice is always: Just hodl some bitcoin, but not in amounts that make you cry when you loose it.
It's been better for me so far than normal savings accounts.
My advice is always: invest in the assets I hold, and never sell.
It really makes the value of my holdings rise.
My advice: There's always at least one crypto scammer telling you to hold through the dip.
This is the worst financial advice anyone could take.
For context, this is the equivalent of someone telling you to invest all your savings in the company you work for and use all your salary to buy more stock.
I think you’re missing the joke where the poster is advising others to always buy whatever he’s holding.
That makes sense, just treat it as a retirement account. And hope that it doesn't get cracked in our lifetime through quantum computing or alien technology.
well i would hope so, a normal savings account has 0 risk. im not sure this is a great argument to hold some bitcoin lol
Because of inflation, a normal savings account is a depreciating asset. It used to be different, but in the land of near zero prime interest, and phony inflation numbers, that's the way it sits.
Also, the risk isn't zero, just way closer to zero than that of Bitcoin or other crypto, in my opinion.
A normal savings account does not have zero risk.
Hard to argue with that reasoning, on several layers.
You can make money from religion. You just have to make sure not to believe in it. No attachment.
What did you do with the money?
Thanks for sharing that unique perspective.
How do you feel about similar trends at the moment?
Both supporters and critics approach it too religiously. Yes 99% is scams and rugpulls. The rest of the higher profile coins are, at the very least, tools to make money. Why emotionally sell all your crypto vs holding some higher quality as insurance with potential upside? Or even, ride the periodic bulls and take profits, rinse and repeat? If it's full of scammers, why not take some of their money? Does this require "believing" in it? One can not believe in it at all, and thus actually insulate themselves from getting caught up in the hype.
>The rest of the higher profile coins are, at the very least, tools to make money.
Make money from what?
100%.
It's similar to AI... the only people trying to tell you "it's the future" are those with financial stakes.
There have been people going back to Turing thinking AI is the future and I don't think he was trying to pump his AI stocks.
You're forgetting the true believers.
I've never understood crypto, however I'm long term Bitcoin fan and user, and don't consider it "crypto". I think Bitcoin is pretty much opposite what the typical crypto project is.
It has proven neither to be a store of value nor medium of exchange though it is being used extensively for criminal activities.
Monero is used for criminal activities, not Bitcoin. How do I know? I monitor crime, mostly but not exclusively drug crime, on Tor's hidden services: https://rnsaffn.com/zg4/ Monero is the cryptocurrency of choice.
What is that hidden service scanner showing with regards to monero?
Not all crime is drugs.
Most of it is tax and sanctions evasion.
This is the same, nonsensical argument against monero that is used against end-to-end encrypted messaging. "app of choice for criminals" "makes enforcement harder" etc.
It completely ignores the benefits of Monero. Crime exists. Its not going anywhere. It is not societies job to make the crime fighter's job a walk in the park. Crimninals use cars to commit crimes, we don't outlaw cars. They use masks, the store sells masks.
The benefits of a global, decentralized and truly private and free medium of value exchange would be massive to the average person, but deterimental to those in power so they must use FUD to squash it.
How has it not been a store of value?
It's a store of value in the sense that it has a non-zero price at any given moment, but when people say that one of the functions of money is to be a store of value, they mean that its value must be reasonably stable so that its future usefulness is predictable.
A store of value is an asset with as close to 0% volatility in price as possible.
Bitcoin is a speculative asset: it has very high price volatility. It is not a store of value in the proper term.
By that standard, over the past year, Bitcoin would be a better store of value than gold...
Over the past year,
Bitcoin lost 10.8%
Gold gained 60.0%
It has an extremely volatile profile. You might as well stick your money in the SP 500 and call it is a currency.
Except the S&P 500 will give you a return. The stock market is not gambling, much as some people want it to be.
It does go down by double-digit percentages from time to time though, which is really inconvenient if you want to, say, buy a house today or tomorrow.
There's a reason people still use USD, EUR etc. and not fractional ETFs to pay and get paid.
I worked in crypto for five years, and this resonates. Sure, you can make money hustling some hype coin, but chances are you are more likely to lose money/time in the process. Outside of very specific supply chain blockchains, 99% of the actual value I see in order of value: 1) Stablecoins [faster than ACH!], 2) Bitcoin, and in certain places, 3) Ethereum has its uses.
Even Bitcoin though is not a panacea though, as without REAL transactional use-cases, it is also prone to sudden major drops. Until people in your home state can buy a car, house, and groceries using bitcoin directly (WITHOUT a Visa bridge), the real value will be highly subjective to the whims of the market.
How is it opposite. In my mind they all fall under the same libertarian fantasy umbrella.
The post mentioned the idea of casually sending a billion dollars. Was that ever possible with Bitcoin? AFAIK it's less ergonomic to send money using Bitcoin than it is using traditional banking.
It pretty easy. I personally think it’s much easier than in traditional banking.
The hard part is that for day to day things you still need an on ramp and off ramp, but that is changing as merchants accept crypto directly.
Ethereum seems useful as well. But that's about it
the problem with ETH at its peak is that the gas fees made cost of doing anything real too costly
if there was a real use case it would have manifested itself at this point
i think the abstraction needs to be much higher to end user for this stuff to have value. having to manage your own wallet doesn't make sense.
Tell me a single useful real world use case that Ethereum is being used in today, a decade after its creation
If I can solve that problem with another simpler, older technology it doesn’t count as useful. I don’t care if you can pay for things using ethereum when I can just use my credit card instead.
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/01/31/end.html#section...
Vitalik touched upon this briefly in an other-wise long and wide-reaching essay. I think its a good treatment of the topic that the author is talking about. He categorizes the ecosystem broadly into 4 cohorts- [token holders] (which includes investors, speculators, etc.), [pragmatic users] (actual end-users who spend crypto to buy stuff), [intellectuals] (who give the vision and ideology), [builders] (of blockchains, apps, etc.) - These 4 groups come together but with different motivations and there is a gap in understanding between them. Indeed, there is even resistance against trying to reach an understanding - one which plays out in the comments section of every crypto-related post on hn. The author of this twitter-post clearly falls under [intellectual, builder] and has been disillusioned by the speculators from [token-holders]. Yet the [token-holders] are a vital component (as are the other groups) as they fund most of the development and adoption. Ultimately these 4 groups have more in common than not. The challenge going forward is to balance the occasionally conflicting needs of all the 4 groups, which includes checking the excesses of each group, while try to achieve a consensus. (Vitalik provides a nice diagram that maps out what that would look like). Crypto is an experiment in economics and economics is a science as well as a social-science. Anyone looking for a good solution must seek to understand and address the psychology of all the actors involved.
In a casino you have - The gamblers spending a lot on the casino - The people coming in for the fun and spending little money - The owners/C-levels - The operational team
Someone from the operational team just learned that business relies only on the first group to be successful.
You forgot the money launderers, in both ecosystems. Casinos are the original tumbler.
'I'm shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.' https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0034583/quotes/?item=qt0429972
"I'm shocked! Shocked…"
(The double "shocked" is what makes the quote next-level.)
Doesn't quite translate in text. Figured those who could hear it in their head wouldn't need the extra prompting.
That falls under pragmatists
You also have this quadchotomy in a department store, or in a number of other valuable businesses.
> Someone from the operational team just learned that business relies only on the first group to be successful.
Is there any possibility the presence of the people who are there just for fun still encourages/increases the size of the first group?
Imo, yes. There are where gamblers come from. They are also providing plausible deniality to gamblers.
I worked in blockchain ("builder") for 5 years. I started 'eh, there are speculators, whatever, I build good tech' but finished 'holy crap speculators completely dominate and distort everything, nobody cares about good tech'
> nobody cares about good tech
Indeed. For example: Chia is arguably decent tech (better than Bitcoin), built by Bram Cohen (of BitTorrent fame), innovative PoSpace+Time. But nobody cares, it's at #450 in market cap, way down below Doge (#10), $TRUMP (#72), Fartcoin (#144), Melania (#375).
Nano is also another interesting one or litecoin etc., basically just having low gas fees I guess and being more efficient but I don't like shilling these products because I personally am a stauch believer in stablecoins and there are stablecoins like USDC's on chains like polygons which can satisfy the function "good enough" for me where they have trust etc. which I don't wish to replicate
There are still some 0 gas fees innovations happening in stablecoin marketplaces which is going to be interesting to see how that pans out.
The market cap obsession is part of the problem. Can I use it to buy things, easily? That's the only metric that should count if you're looking for practical use, not speculation.
A successful cryptocurrent probably has to start by first having a market that is dissatisfied with the available traditional currencies. If that market were to introduce on (with good tech), then it could immediately see the cryptocurrency used for its intended purpose. At that point, if it avoided the attention of speculators (not forever, just long enough for it to get its feet underneath itself) or could discourage those speculators somehow, what happens then?
Is there some other failure mode waiting, or does it take off?
Agreed re Chia, but here’s a counterpoint: MXE is 16,000 times faster than FHE, completely changes the concept of computing (that in order to calculate something you need to see the data) and it as a result Arcium the hottest thing in crypto right now.
Yep. As much as I can see utility in some crypto, and there are some personalities in respect (e.g. Vitalik) by and large the sector in such a dumpster fire I'm not going anywhere near it. I've got some bitcoin in a Coinbase account, that's as close as I'm getting.
Ah I see, so the [token holder] hires a [builder] to build something, and uses that to then hire [intellectual] to scam the ['pragmatic user']?
To take this a little more seriously, this is computer programming, very famously you don't need massive gobs of VC capital to build something. The only reason for the [builder] needs [token holder] is to hire [intellectual] to scam [user].
Oh and of course, [token holder] [builder] and [intellectual] are the same guy with 3 different anime profile pics.
The funny thing is that people are betting on a profile with anime pictures against the ECB representing 500 million people.
And yet when they want to actually buy a Lambo they need hard currency...
Has Vitalik fallen of grace? Some time ago I stopped following the crypto culture and now I keep being shown tweets ridiculing him.
That's a very nice categorization, but it seems orthogonal to the categories of: [scammers and hackers that want an untraceable and unrefundable payment method], [scammers that use cryptos themselves to scam and rugpull], ...
The only buyers are criminals, sanction evaders, and probably the dumbest people in the world given that the entire crypto ecosystem is focused on one thing and one thing only. Creating the most deflationary monetary system in history.
The entire crypto ecosystem is hardly all about deflation these days. If anything, I'd argue the opposite. Stablecoins, yield, perpetual futures etc. are hardly what Satoshi had in mind.
>criminals, sanction evaders
The definition of both may vary depending on where you are. Being not controlled by governments is the original purpose of cryptocurrencies.
Be honest, don't whitewash. You mean perpetrating fraud and crimes and laundering illegal money is the original purpose of cryptocurrencies.
So it was dumb of me to buy my bitcoins back when they were less than $100 a coin just in the slim chance that it completely blew up? I don't see what was dumb about a decision to put less than $1000 into 10 coins just in case. Worked out really well for me in the end and a less than $1000 gamble doesn't seem like that crazy of a gamble, at least to me.
You can't evaluate a decision in a stochastic process based on a single outcome, you need to look at the expectation over all outcomes.
Whether you made a profit, especially just once, is indeed not indicative of the quality of your decisionmaking either way.
You don't think a $1000 gamble on this new paradigm of blockchain crypto was a sound decision? When the sum I was putting in was otherwise an insignificant sum to me.
I bought in fully knowing it could go to 0, or maybe it could be worth a ton in 10+ years. To me it seemed like the chance it would blow up was well worth the tiny risk of losing a pretty meaningless amount of money to me.
I am not even otherwise a gambler. I have never gambled at a casino or on sports or anything like that. And my stock investing is all index funds. This was the only singular "crazy gamble" I had ever made and I knew full well it was crazy. But the potential in my mind around the tech and the potential hype around it seemed to greatly outweigh the tiny risk.
You had a positive outcome, but yes, despite that, I don't know if that was based on a sound decision. It's possible to vastly misjudge the expected value of a trade and still come out ahead.
> This was the only singular "crazy gamble" I had ever made and I knew full well it was crazy.
The only thing that matters is whether it's positive EV (and whether your methodology of coming up with the EV itself is sound). If you didn't have any explicit or implicit notion of the EV at the time you made it... It was probably not a sound investment decision, despite being profitable.
I mean I thought that there was a potential in blockchain tech back when I bought it. I also thought that there was also potential in the hype around blockchain to explode the value simply from hype and how humans behave alone.
At least WAY more of a chance than what I would get spending $1000 on a lottery ticket or at a casino.
Then maybe it was sound! To know for sure, you'd have to repeat the experiment a few dozen times, though ;)
I shoved £500 down in Sept 2017 knowing full well it was a gamble, and still have a roughtly £500 balance now -- having skimmed enough off the top over the years to buy a couple of iPhones and whatever else. I 100% consider this profit to be literal dumb luck.
Unironic congratulations on being self-aware enough to take your profits without it affecting your reasoning. Anecdotally, not many seem to come out of crypto net positive with that mindset.
Suggest you put $1000 each into all the other 28m of cryptos tracked by coinmarketcap, "in the slim chance that it completely blew up".
I don't see how you jump form this to that.
I made a singular choice once to put less than 1% of my yearly income into 1 thing that seemed to have some potential.
Back then it was the only crypto. I put in knowing full well it could go to 0, but the potential of where it could possibly go seemed well worth the tiny risk to an essentially insignificant sum of money to me.
There are other cryptos but they aren't the original or anywhere near the biggest, so they are not the same in my eyes. So those are actual legitimate reasons why I would not choose to perform that same risk again with a different crypto.
That wasn't dumb but thinking this a meaningful rebuttal is
You basically just confirmed that, from beginning, it's just gambling.
Being lucky on your bet doesn't make it a wise investment. I wouldn't call you dumb. I don't know how gamblers feel about their moves.
And the stock market isn't gambling? I view it as such.
Was this more or less risky than buying $1000 in scratch offs, or lottery tickets, or spending $1000 in Vegas?
In my opinion, crypto when I bought it had a lot more "potential" than any of those more "traditional" forms of gambling which is why I was willing to give it a try with a sum of less than 1% of my yearly income...
I am not saying it was a smart choice, just that I don't think it was a particularly stupid choice.
"So it was dumb of me to buy my lottery tickets just in the slim chance that I won? Worked out really well for me in the end and a less than $1000 gamble doesn't seem like that crazy of a gamble, at least to me."
(See also: https://xkcd.com/1827/)
I don't see how that relates to me. I made a singular choice. I am going to put in $1000 one time and leave it alone because there seems to be some potential here.
I made the choice basically saying OK this $1000 I am putting in will either be worthless in 10+ years or it will be worth a lot.
I am not continuing to buy, I am not dumping loads of money into it. I spent less than 1% of my yearly salary one time knowing full well it could go to 0. The potential seemed well worth the tiny risk.
You are the lottery winner, extolling the virtues of the lottery. There are many other people who also made singular choices, that — by pure chance — did not pan out.
It's good that you were in a financial position such that you could easily spend $1000 on a dumb investment, but that doesn't make it less of a dumb investment.
The point is that, your "investment" was pure gambling. See how I can replace bitcoin with lottery ticket.
> I am going to buy $1000 in lottery tickets one time and leave it alone because there seems to be some potential here. > I made the choice basically saying OK this $1000 I am putting in will either be worthless in 10 hours or it will be worth a lot.
But it's more than just a binary. Do you not think that the chance that bitcoin blew up big was more or less than my chance at winning a million on a $1000 lottery gamble?
I bought bitcoin because I perceived more potential around blockchain tech becoming either useful or at least drawing hype to explode the value. I wouldn't buy a lottery ticket because the odds of winning are astronomically low. I perceived there to be a far greater chance in bitcoin blowing up than winning the lottery, or even winning big at a casino.
Do you think I really over-estimated bitcoin's odds early on? At least with blockchain there were some potential real-world possibilities to it and that was a big factor in my choice to gamble on it. Is that kind of thought not at least somewhat more sound than buying a simple lottery ticket? To me it was.
Why didn't you buy $1000 of NVDA instead? It would have paid off better. Clearly, NVDA shares are the future of currency.
No it wouldn't have.
I bought 10 bitcoin for about $1000 in late 2013. It's currently worth about 900K and was a peak of about 1.2M.
$1000 in NVDA shares in late 2013 was about 35 cents per share, so about 2850 shares. That's currently worth 521K with a peak of 590K.
And why? Because in 2013 I thought there was a greater potential for bitcoin blowing up substantially due to the new concept of blockchain and what it could potentially do, or at least the hype around what people perceived that it could potentially do. Compared to what I thought the potential for NVDA to do.
I mean it was a lucky guess but still just a guess.
And also the most unerasable, and hence traceable, system. You can't delete records from a blockchain.
There are a lot of places in the world where crypto payments are now prevalent, not because users are the "dumbest people in the world" but because they have no better alternative for electronic finance. Either conventional banking is nonexistent/abysmal for this purpose or their national currencies are in such bad condition that it's better for them to hold and use cryptocurrencies.
Name one, and provide evidence to support that assertion.
Nigeria, Argentina, Venezuela, all prime examples because they faced especially severe problems with hyperinflation and traditional banking. You can also find widespread use in developing economies like Brazil, Indonesia, Philippines, but of course to a lesser degree since the problems with traditional finance are not as severe there. I will gladly provide more in-depth information, if someone provides some evidence to support that crypto users are the dumbest people on Earth. If not, feel free to use your own time instead of mine for your education.
Crypto is not prevalent in the Philippines or Indonesia. Except maybe in the scam centres in the Philippines run by Chinese gangsters that are operating pig butchering and other scams, and threatening to undermine the Philippine government. See The Economist, which estimates that these crypto scammers rake in some $500bn a year.
https://www.economist.com/audio/podcasts/scam-inc
https://www.economistgroup.com/press-centre/the-economist/fr...
You've mentioned some places in the world that have economic problems. You've provided zero evidence to support the idea that "crypto payments are now prevalent" in any of those places.
As a counterexample, El Salvador adopted bitcoin as an official currency, provided state-subsidized infrastructure for citizens to adopt it, and still achieved only minimal usage:
> The October 2022 “Encuesta Dinámica Empresarial” from FUSADES registered that 97¾ percent of business have not made even one sale in Bitcoin. NBER and Chamber of Commerce and Industry surveys show similar results.
https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/002/2025/068/arti...
I’m shocked it’s even that high
It's good to know everyone here is weary of crypto scams, but I don't see anyone accurately describing the significance of these technologies.
Bitcoin failed as a currency, and as that became realized, institutional investors pivoted to the "digital gold" scam, to keep people long, while they divest or hedge. The two reasons why it failed as a currency are transaction latency, and lack of fungibility. Transaction privacy is necessary for fungibility. Both of those are just technical problems; I predict that a distributed ledger currency with private transactions like Monero, but a faster consensus algorithm like Avalanche or Hedera will become popular in the next decade. It's likely to be an Ethereum L2.
That is just the currency aspect of distributed ledgers. It's just one use case that we don't yet have the technology to properly address. The exciting thing that distributed ledgers enable is cryptographic institutions. These technologies allow us to solve coordination problems more easily than ever before. Democracies, businesses, communities, projects can all be coordinated better and more honestly using distributed ledgers. It's not an overstatement to say that distributed ledgers are as big of an advancement for human coordination as democracy was.
If you've been soured on these technologies because most of the currencies built with them are scams, I would encourage you to learn about them as if they were just incredibly robust databases that even governments would struggle to take down. Surely you can think of something cool to build with that, which doesn't involve money.
> I would encourage you to learn about them as if they were just incredibly robust databases that even governments would struggle to take down. Surely you can think of something cool to build with that, which doesn't involve money.
Why is it so popular for someone in tech to assign everyone else the task of thinking up something useful to do with technology x they think is cool?
> It's not an overstatement to say that distributed ledgers are as big of an advancement for human coordination as democracy was.
Ok, if that's really your thinking then you need to lay out: here's an impossible-to-ignore thing we can do with this, and this is how, and this is why this wouldn't be possible without this thing.
> Ok, if that's really your thinking then you need to lay out: here's an impossible-to-ignore thing we can do with this, and this is how, and this is why this wouldn't be possible without this thing.
There was a period of ~1000 years where you could also make this argument against some high-minded guy advocating for democracy.
> Ok, if that's really your thinking then you need to lay out: here's an impossible-to-ignore thing we can do with this, and this is how, and this is why this wouldn't be possible without this thing.
These technologies can be used by people to coordinate amongst themselves whether the outgroup likes it or not.
If you google "network state" you will find things that you might like, and things that you might not like. It's not up to you whether other people create these things. You can only control your own participation.
Cryptography is really the study of incredibly rigged games, games that one side almost always wins, even when both players play perfectly. If human society is a game where humans try to coordinate with other humans to be better off, sometimes at the expense of other humans, then distributed ledgers have totally changed the meta.
> Surely you can think of something cool to build with that, which doesn't involve money.
People have been saying this for nearly a decade and many people with a great deal of motivation have failed to find any that worked and couldn’t be done better with traditional databases. It’s past time to ask if there’s actually any gold in them hills.
IME, these discussions always reduce down to one set of irreconcilable differences:
Does a government have the legitimate right to impose taxes on its people, and to sanction criminals (and criminal activity) via control of the Financial system?
Anti-crypto people say yes (and in fact the government has a responsibility to fight tax evasion).
Pro-crypto people seem (I’m not one of them) to say no, that people have the right to access to technology to evade these government functions.
I think this is a huge misconception. I certainly don't view this issue as grounded in 'rights' or what governments should or should not do.
It's entirely an issue of what people can and cannot do with this technology. It's a game with sides, and the concern should be that the technology has made playing for one side much easier than playing for the other.
The technology has unlocked total freedom of association, and I don't see a way to reign that in, other than restricting access to computation and the network for the entire population. As long as the average voter wants personal computing to continue, I don't see a way that a government could get the necessary control to shutdown one of these systems.
> If you've been soured on these technologies because most of the currencies built with them are scams, I would encourage you to learn about them as if they were just incredibly robust databases that even governments would struggle to take down. Surely you can think of something cool to build with that, which doesn't involve money.
The problems with the technologies is that the "robust database" guarantee is often highly dependent on the currency mechanisms. They unfortunately go hand-in-hand.
Remove the currency from a blockchain and you have a merkle tree. (To be even further unfair, considering currencies in aggregate, blockchains are always a merkle tree. How many forks of Bitcoin are we up to now?)
Merkle trees are incredibly useful, and yes a sort of robust database. I use git every day, but I have to respect that git branches and git forks are real phenomena and coordination of branches/forks always a real ongoing concern when working with git. Not a lot of institutions want a "robust database" which is easily branched/forked. You still need a coordination engine to keep the tree a "chain" somehow. The currencies for better and a lot worse (given how many seem isomorphic to scams) are the coordination engine that still seems most (distributed/transactional/"robust") useful to making a "blockchain" out of a merkle tree.
> The problems with the technologies is that the "robust database" guarantee is often highly dependent on the currency mechanisms. They unfortunately go hand-in-hand.
I agree that economic incentives are important for robustness, but I don't agree with this use of the word "currency". The tokens have value in that they can be used to write to the ledger. That is the consumer aspect of the token, you can give it up in exchange for the ability to edit the ledger. The producer aspect of the token is that if you help participate in running the network, you can earn tokens, to edit the ledger yourself later. The tokens have to store value (ledger write access), and there needs to be a market for them, because the producers can't use them all themselves.
Just because something can store value, in this case the specific ability to write to the ledger, doesn't mean that thing is suitable as a currency. Copper ingots let you make cat6 cables, the are objectively valuable, but we don't use them as a currency. And as the world found out over the last decade, the distance from store of value to functioning currency is significant.
The store of value is sufficient to run the networks though, you don't need the tokens to work as a currency, and I think that has been empirically proven. The Ethereum mainnet is unlikely to disappear for a very long time, but Ethereum is also unlikely to ever be widely used as a currency.
The takeaway is that you should have as much of these tokens as you are likely to need for writing to the ledger. If you hold them in Coinbase and never use them to operate the ledger then you are participating in the speculative overvaluing of the tokens.
What do you think about zcash? They seem to have solved the private transactions problem, have a better anonymity set than monero (and are accepted at exchanges) and are actively working on faster consensus.
Disclaimer, I currently work at a zcash corp.
IMO the hard problem here is PoS consensus with the private transactions. It seems like the stakers have to come up from the depths of privacy to participate in consensus. Maybe there is a way to do private staking, but that makes the network very difficult to understand and build confidence in. So I don't see upgrading to faster consensus to be a small incremental improvement, it's fundamental.
A separate issue is that both Monero and ZCash are not post-quantum secure, while many of the new zkSTARK VMs are. The ledger lives forever, and state actors will eventually decrypt the transactions if the cryptography can be broken. At that point it seems like it's better just to build the currency product in one of the zk VMs.
Distributed ledgers were not a Bitcoin invention. Proof of Work was - largely a waste of electricity. There's no reason why SWIFT or any other institution can't have far more efficient real-time payments. It's already the case in most countries (UK & EU).
Distributed technologies have largely been useful to actors that wish to remain anonymous (Napster, Tor). Money transmission probably shouldn't be (if we want to avoid scams as a society).
Anonymous cash is good, but BTC is not really digital cash either - it doesn't work in a warzone without internet for example. Any real alternative to cash would have to work offline. And any real alternative to bank transfers would have to be regulated.
What's the incentive for keeping these "robust" databases online, if not for making a lot of money by running scams?
No one is going to run a database for you unless you pay them. If you want to write data to an existing public ledger, then you are going to have to get some of the token that allows you to write to that ledger. Paying for a token to use the ledger is not speculative, it's pragmatic. Holding the token and not using it to write to the ledger is speculative, and encouraging people to do that in order to make money yourself is a scam.
If you pay AWS to host Postgres for you, are you being scammed? You might be if someone convinces you to invest in Postgres credits that you never use. But if you actually use Postgres, and it's cheap, and you are glad to pay for it, then it's not really a scam.
I think more of the promise of these technologies is in private ledgers, where the traffic is confined and the system could even be run altruistically. For example, a university club or a town could coordinate elections using this technology. They don't have to pay to use a public ledger if enough people in the group can run nodes themselves. Everyone who cares about the result of the election is incentivized to participate in the network just to know the result and ensure its authenticity. They aren't processing transactions for random users, they are coordinating using the latest technology with people who they want to coordinate with.
Or the university could pay 3$ per year to host a DB that all clubs can use.
I’m sure you can imagine a make believe world where no one has money and everyone cares and is tech savvy and yet no one can be trusted at the same time, and in this world somehow blockchains are useful.
But that’s not the world we live in.
> no one has money and everyone cares and is tech savvy and yet no one can be trusted at the same time
lol, you perfectly described a group of college students.
Imagine you have a home on Airbnb , your guest sends you a payment, but its not directly to you, the payment goes through the payment rails stipulated and controlled by airbnb. This amounts to what is often 25-35% of your listening fee (payment charges, visa network, listing fee, etc, etc.) This is the middle men crypto is supposed to replace.
Only a trustworthy network can replace the current system, it must be something public, immutable and participatory , otherwise it will just centralize back to the above scenario, regardless of any intent. Essentially crypto is network code, it creates the primitives on transmission. And thus anyone (really anyone) can run a node and get a reward for supporting this security model. That's not a scam or even just pragmatic, its literally how money operates, as a incentive/disincentive mechanism.
People forget the early stock market was filled to the brim with scams, the original intent was good, but it attracted bad actors piggy backing in its lack of regulations, and it took years to clean-up, one can make an easy argument that's its still filled with fraud.
In your example crypto would only replace the visa network. Most of the fee you are playing is to Airbnb for getting you the client in the first place.
Bitcoin, and really all crypto 'currencies' were never meant to be currencies at all. Maybe a couple naive people who created them originally believed that, but it was never the goal.
They are speculative assets for gambling with. They have been since day 1.
> Bitcoin, and really all crypto 'currencies' were never meant to be currencies at all.
To be fair, there is a significant amount of disagreement about what a "currency" is supposed to be, and there is a large subset of people who believe that the desirable traits in a currency are exactly those things that make it function well as a speculative asset (notably, on average over a long time, value with respect to goods is at least flat and preferrably increasing) while simultaneously not thinking the things that another large group of people sees as desirable for a currency (e.g., lack of extreme short-term volatility) are important.
I can't speak to the original designer of Bitcoin, but I wouldn't be surprised if it and most cryptocurrencies were designed to be currencies, just by people who have a very specific (and, IMV, wrong) idea of what a currency ought to be.
The original promise of crypto was lost a LONG time ago.
Instead of being a true rival to FIAT, it became a thing with a toxic-as-hell commumity, fraud, and basically its nothing more than a high risk stock. The risk is NOT only "will this go up or down" but you have a high risk of being robbed, as have happened to millions of people.
Maybe there will be a better alternative in the future, but right now bitcoin is not it.
To add to that, crypto is also a gift from heaven for criminals who need to receive ransoms.
Anonymous crypto, yes.
But if you're suggesting blockchain is anonymous and payments are untraceable, that's not the case for bitcoin at least. It's a gift to law enforcement, if they cared enough to trace btc transactions.
In practice all tokens including BTC are massively used for law evasion. Criminal don't need any fancy Monero for that, they only need to break the chain once, or maybe a few times an that is enough. That usually happens at the entry points, a criminal backe exchanges of any size will happily take your cash or digital money and exchange then for any tokens you like and vice versa. A politician then declares that his several BTC worth a few millions were "fairly mined" and nothing to see there. Or a corrupt government pays with tokens for some sanctioned wares. The whole Axis of Losers trade is propped up by mafia's USDT, which are used to trade between Axis countries and willing collaborators like India, to buy oil/rockets/chips/soldiers/anything, with central exchange in Dubai and other petrocratias.
India banned crypto. It never even traded using crypto. By the way a country of billion plus should have freedom to do trade in whatever way they like
I tried to pay my parking ticket in heroin, and they threw me in jail!
Viva la revolución!
And other countries have freedom to scoff at that or even sanction trade with it (gasp, the horror!). Freedom works both ways, you know.
A fitting quote for the moment:
"Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other." (c) George Orwell
Also regarding India and tokens, sure they are officially banned. But they are still a key link a in trade chain, that' why I mentioned Dubai and its neighbors. They act as a laundromat and a tumbler, obscuring financial flows. And one part of the Russia-India trade or Russia-Iran trade or even Russia-China trade involves tethers (USDT), without which exchanging rubles to rupee or to yuan directly would be highly problematic and risky. Tokens mitigate some of the risk by hiding financial flows through multiple jurisdictions.
This looks like a case of in theory yes, in practice no.
Tracing btc transactions to real persons can be quite some work and is a new kind of cat and mouse game.
Easier than with either cash or gold.
"Freedom enables crime" is an entirely true argument, and a gift from heaven for The Powers That Be who need to justify the taking-away of Freedom.
Freedom is never absolute. What gives one person freedom may limit another person's freedoms. Therefore you will have to weigh the pros and the cons of a technology that promises freedom.
I'd extend that a bit, in the same vein as TFA: you should always be aware of who you're taking freedom away from and who you're giving it to, in practical actual terms, when designing or deploying revolutionary technology.
If you deploy a non-government fiat monetary system... most of your users are going to be people who want to avoid government currency controls.
Consequently, without a counterbalance, they're going to skew the industry towards their needs.
In the same way that allowing the largest advertising company in the world to own the most popular browser in the world has some conflicts of interest.
Money sets strategic direction over the long term.
Which funnily is the dumbest thing ever. Because in order to use the currency you need to exchange it which means that you need input and outputs, you slightly obfuscate that but in the crypto chain everything is saved, so everything is traceable forever. Slip up once when extracting or get your wallet involved in unsavoury interactions and you're done. It's not a matter of if but a matter of when...
There is a difference between "Freedom to do something" and "Freedom to not have something happen to you".
If we keep curtailing the former to serve the latter, we will end up perfectly safe from interruptions, doing nothing at all(aside from what the government dictates as 'serving the common good')
There's no difference. You can't formulate that distinction coherently.
What's the difference between having the freedom to walk the street and having the freedom to not be hindered from walking the street?
You have articulated the same freedom twice here.
I live in a city where I can be fairly certain that I will not be the victim of a robbery. I don't need to carry a weapon or otherwise appear defensible. This type of crime simply does not exist here (or only to a very limited extent). That is “freedom from.” If I had the right to carry a firearm to defend myself in the event of a robbery, that would be “freedom to.” These two forms of freedom can be distinguished in a very clear-cut way. One allows you to do certain things. The other ensures that negative events do not occur. In North America, the cultural focus seems to be primarily on “freedom to.” But I would consider it a massive restriction of my freedom if I could not walk through my neighborhood at night without worry, even if I had the right to carry a firearm for protection.
Your semantic sleight of hand cannot reflect the difference between someone who feels safe because they believe they can and are allowed to defend themselves against danger (freedom to defend oneself) and someone who feels safe because they believe there is no danger (freedom from danger). However, there is a clearly discernible qualitative difference between these two freedoms. Otherwise, there would be no difference in terms of freedom between walking through Caracas, Tijuana, Port-au-Prince, or Pietermaritzburg with a firearm in your pocket and walking completely unarmed through Abu Dhabi, The Hague, or Trondheim.
There's tremendous difference. Imagine I put a 5' high fence every 3 feet on a sidewalk. You still have the freedom to walk down the street, but no longer have the ability to do so. This is why the Bill of Rights is framed in terms of limitations on governments as opposed to guarantees of rights.
For instance, the Bill of Rights doesn't grant you the right to free speech. You already naturally have that. It instead makes it unconstitutional for the government to try to hinder that right. By contrast the USSR and China both had/have guarantees of freedom of speech in their constitution, but they mean nothing because obviously you have freedom of speech by virtue of being able to speak.
You having the freedom of speech says nothing about the ability of the government (or private companies in contemporary times) engaging in actions making it difficult to exercise that speech without fear of repercussion. Or as the old tyrannical quote goes, "There is freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech."
> There's tremendous difference.
No there isn't. They are the different sides of the same coin. Any freedom from something is a constraint against someone else doing that thing.
Freedom to walk the street means no police will stop me when I try to walk the street. Freedom to not be hindered from walking the street means police will stop other people from stopping me.
Yes, you can, if you consider that liberty and freedom are functions of society and not nature. In this sense, dying from old age is not being unfree.
To stay with your example, one is bascically the absence of limitations (negative freedom), ie. the freedom to walk the street. The other is the presence of possibilities (positive freedom), ie. there needs to be a street to walk it.
street is public. Nothing is "done to you"
Freedom to walk anywhere means someone can walk onto your property ("done to you") You can curtail that freedom, because you are essentially giving up ("inability to do something with stuff someone else owns") some freedom to get some other freedom ("ability to own stuff that will not be used by strangers").
It's a tradeoff. A good one. Tradeoff of say "nobody's anything is private now because that allows govt a slightly easier time to catch criminals" is not a good tradeoff.
>> There is a difference between "Freedom to do something" and "Freedom to not have something happen to you". […]
> There's no difference. You can't formulate that distinction coherently.
The historian Timothy Snyder just wrote a book on the difference between Freedom from and Freedom to:
> Freedom is the great American commitment, but as Snyder argues, we have lost sight of what it means—and this is leading us into crisis. Too many of us look at freedom as the absence of state power: We think we’re free if we can do and say as we please, and protect ourselves from government overreach. But true freedom isn’t so much freedom from as freedom to—the freedom to thrive, to take risks for futures we choose by working together. Freedom is the value that makes all other values possible.
* https://timothysnyder.org/on-freedom
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Snyder
(The book was published in 2024, and there are a number of talks he gave on the subject online made during his book tour.)
My freedom to put cameras in your home is your non-freedom to have privacy.
Sounds like not such a great idea now?
You would have the freedom to try to put cameras in my home, I would have the freedom to try and stop you or take them down again. Shock horror, personal agency instead of surrogate power via government!
Unless amelius is stronger than you, or has better weapons, or commands a gang that is bigger than your gang, then you can't stop them.
Its almost like you need some sort of power structure with the monopoly on violence to enforce agreed upon freedoms, they could be called the "government" which enforces "laws".
The problem is that circumventing the government gets into criminal territory pretty quick, even if enough people view the activity as legitimate.
I remember Thailand letting everyone free with weed related crimes.
Or sometimes being a whistleblower is seen as criminal. Or if it isn’t seen as such but the government wants to view it that way, they will make it happen.
It's nice and all, but the same people who are running the biggest ransomware operations now had no trouble receiving the billions of dollars they were stealing directly from US bank accounts before they pivoted to ransomware.
Ransomware would still work just fine using regular bank transfers. Especially given that the payor has no incentive to stop that money from arriving at it's destination.
But sure, using crypto the criminals get to keep the 20-30% they'd pay for payment processing otherwise. I'm not sure that really makes a difference though.
only for privacy coins tho
Not true by any means. Fiat is the tried and true way to commit crime. Having transcations on a ledger forever, works against your criminal take. You are just repeating.
Taking possession of the ransom without getting arrested/physically followed by the police is what foils most kidnapping plots [1], and cryptocurrencies definitely address that part.
Criminals don't really need strong anonymity as long as the payment system has strong censorship resistance and at least one counterparty won't mind accepting "tainted" funds.
Arguably, privacy is much more important to non-criminal individual users as they themselves can be targeted by criminals as a result of their income/holdings being globally visible, and unlike organized crime, they often have less means to protect themselves from $5 wrench attacks.
[1] Source: I watched many crime thrillers growing up
> Having transcations on a ledger forever
Do you think cash transactions don't have even more detailed ledgers? The "tried and true fiat" has been used to catch criminals for centuries because banks keep very detailed records of withdraws and deposits.
> You are just repeating
You are just repeating. Obviously both are being used for crime
> Not true by any means. Fiat is the tried and true way to commit crime.
Depends on the crimes, and up to certain values/volumes.
For 'consensual' transactional things for goods/services it could be useful (e.g., drug deals). But for ransom-like stuff, where one end of the 'transaction' is not thrilled with the 'deal', having to physically pick up the cash puts the perp at risk.
If that was the goal, we'd be doing CBDCs instead of crypto scams.
Sure, but fiat is indispensable to running a modern economy. And the abuses that occur, of course, are curbed by vigorous regulation and enforcement. Sure, HSBC laundered money for the Mexican cartels. When it came out, it was a big scandal, they were fined, and the money laundering was stopped.
Crypto is entirely dispensable. It is pseudonymous, by design resists regulation, and has no enforcement. Some chains are deliberately opaque (Monero, Zcash), and there are tumblers to obscure flows even further. Its approach to money laundering is "sure, bring it on".
Fiat is indispensable, and better for legitimate purposes than crime. Crypto is dispensable, and better for crime than legitimate purposes. We should dispense with it.
"Fiat currency can be used to commit crime, too, so my solving-sudokus-for-heroin computer money is totally fine."
Yeah... say what you will about FIAT currencies, but at least they can be used as currencies. I always chuckle at people who insist their transactions on exchanges are secret. With the "Know Your Customer" rules, FINCEN knows what you're doing (or at least has the option of looking into what you're doing.)
This. The moment dex’s started allowing speculation is when it all when bottoms up.
When it was just a value exchange to buy tokens, it was fine, except that there’s a limited number of tokens and they needed supply to actually operate as an exchange so they became a trading platform and forex-like fraud house.
Another risk is just loosing your keys.
I bet it happens a lot more than people like to talk about.
You're right that the risk profile isn't just volatility. In a system where "you are your own bank," losing a seed phrase, signing the wrong transaction, or getting phished is equivalent to someone draining your checking account with no recourse
> The risk is NOT only "will this go up or down" but you have a high risk of being robbed, as have happened to millions of people.
Using a cryptocurrency (originally) meant basically opting out of the governmental violence-as-a-service for cryptocurrency/-token purposes and taking care of this aspect by yourself.
Depending on your resourcefulness and lifestyle, this may mean
- hiring personal security
- being very careful about privacy aspects, e.g. making it very hard to link your personal identity to your cryptographic keys; distribute your crypto-tokens among many keys so that if one key gets "linked", the attacker will find only few tokens there; use anonymization services; ...
- think about what mitigations you have in place against "rubber hose attacks"
- live a modest life so that people (and also taxation authorities?) don't get suspicious that you are secretly rich, i.e. don't boast about your richness
- ...
It originally meant nothing. Bitcoin was a proof of concept, with some examples of things it could solve, but no actual ideological arc.
Some people saw it as an opportunity to push for an ideological agenda because you can convince a lot of people that cryptocurrency is a silver bullet (it's not).
> but no actual ideological arc.
Wasn’t the first thing signed an article about the collapse of the banking system?
This is the first thing:
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
It has nothing about the collapse of the banking system.
> The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks
> Using a cryptocurrency (originally) meant basically opting out of the governmental violence-as-a-service for cryptocurrency/-token purposes and taking care of this aspect by yourself.
Cryptocurrency was a hidden blade. People were drawn in on the promise of avoiding the things they don't like about capitalism, but then cut by a more unregulated version of the same.
If you're going to dismantle all of the institutions of liberal democracy and capitalism so you can send a billion dollars to somebody, why not just go ahead and get rid of money while you're at it?
You you do the last, you deserve to get found out and punished accordingly. Pay your taxes people, like everybody else.
It was inevitable and trivial to predict, which people did, and the cryptbros laughed at them coz that's how old people think.
We put so much law and limitations about anything money purely because at times when we did not, stuff went wrong.
The whole idea of currency without any laws and limitations around it means any and every problem that those law were supposed (some do it better, some worse, some make actual problem worse, not trying to pretend they are perfect here) to help with will happen, easily, with the "new money".
The fact that on top of all the old problems the crypto invented a whole set of new problems is just a little turd cherry on top of a manure cake.
Okay, that was harsh, manure have some actual positive use
You can't convince me bitcoin wasn't simply a psyop to get criminals to commit crimes on a global, immutable ledger.
> its nothing more than a high risk stock
Nothing more? Proof-Of-Work wasn't innovative?
With fiat you have high risk of losing 50% of USD's purchasing value within 2 years, which already happened, and which is not far from being robbed, as have happened to millions of people too.
Sure, but if i have investments they cant be stolen, and if they are im pretty much compensated (given im not straight up giving my account away, hell even then there is usually a 24h window with a limit on withdrawls).
Bottom line is no one takes responsibility in the world of bitcoin.
You can buy an ETF that wraps spot crypto and get all those guarantees you name in exchange for a small fee.
Proof of work was innovative when it was created in 1997 as an anti-spam email solution.
lol. No, PoW existed before. Putting it all together in this specific form was an innovation, if only a minor incremental one on the large body of work of state machine replication, enabling for the first time sybil resistance and thus permissionless distributed consensus. But all that gave us were crime tokens; haven't seen a use case but crypto yet.
Invest in stocks and bonds to maintain purchasing power.
If it was only a minor incremental innovation, in this specific form, wouldn't it have appeared years earlier?
> haven't seen a use case but crypto yet.
BTC is up 500%+ since 2 years ago. This looks like a use case to me. It maintained purchasing power better than stocks and bonds.
This comment read to me like AI slop.
The existence of fraud, toxicity and misinformation around bitcoin doesn't necessarily mean that bitcoin itself is broken. It's a very poorly understood technology, centering around money that once spent cannot be reversed. It's natural that MANY people would come along and attempt to exploit that gap. Over time though the bag of tricks will start to wear a bit thin, and people will learn what to look for.
Many people in the bitcoin community have been and are still calling out wallets that rely on 3rd party trust, decentralized exchanges that are build on a house of cards, alternative coins that are created purely for the purpose of pump and dump etc.
Meanwhile the core technology progresses and deals with functioning at larger scales, with lower entry and exit friction, improved safety guarantees.
It was started as an alternative to fiat casino capitalism. It became an absurdist parody of fiat casino capitalism.
Offtopic but zerotier is really good software that I used but I am in India and its pings were high which is when I started to look around at free vps's in the form of jupyter notebooks like intel tiber and others using things like pinggy and trying to find a non rooted version of ssh (dropbear) etc.
Technically it was one of my "first" achievements that I can do a lot of things if I devote the time to tinkering.
I think a lot of zerotier customers atleast free users just want to host minecraft ngl, I think after trying out lots of custom solutions, I found a custom solution which I stuck with it for a long time: https://trulyfoss.mataroa.blog/blog/self-hosting-vanilla-min...
I didn't know why I shared this but just wanted to share I guess that human spirit can try to find ways around and tinkering and how its an indominatable spirit I guess (ps hackernews "hacking" community glorified it a lot to me as well and gave me confidence that I am sure I can find ways to do this so thanks to hackernews as well)
It uses (https://e4mc.link/), I have no skin in the game but its open source and maybe just wanted to give another open source software and its team if possible some leads on improvement
maybe you guys can look into hosting e4mc software on your infrastructure or similar. Minecraft hosting is one of the largest markets, maybe zerotier can look into it
I know my blog was really messy but if zerotier really does implement my idea, the only thing I wish if is if the team ever create a blog post about it, maybe I can be given the opportunity to write it if possible but even if you do not, I would respect it and I just wanted to give some leads because I "wished" to create a product in this market but I don't have the funds and/or I wouldn't have the proper ability to monetize it in my opinion.
Also, what are your thoughts on creating a zerotier alternative to pinggy, recently shown on hn (pinggy.io), Heck I have created a custom huggingface space + websockify/ssh solution in house (vibe coded) too and I would love to discuss more about it as I am truly passionate about these things and if it might align with zerotier (sorry if I am yapping and the overlap is none)
have a nice day and sorry for catching you off-guard I guess.
Also must admit, you have a really catchy name on hackernews and that was why I decided to click and found you made zerotier (and its infrastructure, I decided that the biggest hurdle for me was the infrastructure aspect of things and I am also curious how zerotier started its infrastructure and journey, I feel overwhelmed by these infrastructure side of things basically and like to focus on trying to create crafty solutions around them) :p
Some printed materials, perhaps most are garbage. That doesn’t mean the printing press is bad.
I've never understood the initial arguments about Bitcoin, no matter how many times they've been explained to me.
The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database. How anyone, especially many intelligent people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top of such a unwieldy piece of technology is beyond me. Maybe it goes to show how few people understand economics and anthropology and how dunning-krueger can happen to anyone.
Now the uninformed gambling on futuristic sounding hokum? THAT is easy to understand.
That being said, I'm sorry the author had to go through this experience, the road of life is often filled with unexpected twists and turns.
> The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database.
That's the entire point when the goal is to achieve a public, immutable, decentralized ledger that prevents double-payments without needing to trust a third-party to adjudicate properly. It being inconvenient makes it exceptionally difficult to edit history.
Whether that's a useful goal is less clear when nearly all of modern society relies on trusting parties at some point along the way (will the thing you bought be delivered to you? Will the service you purchased actually be rendered? etc).
> Maybe it goes to show how few people understand economics and anthropology
A financial process being unwieldy hasn't really been an issue historically. Why are most publicly issued stocks in the US owned by Cede and Company for example? No one that has stocks really thinks about the underlying system (the fact that they have contractual rights to stocks rather than actually owning stocks), as long as it ultimately works.
Where things have broken down in my opinion is how centralized the systems have become with massive exchanges being the only realistic way to interact with them. In the same way that a bicycle wasn't designed to be a moving van, these systems weren't designed to be centralized. With that being the reality though, the entire blockchain backbone is mostly useless, and at that point it really is an inconvenient database.
It's an ingenious solution to achieve a "trustless" currency that prevents double-spending without a central authority. Unfortunately, this solves the wrong problem. Spending money usually involves getting a good or service in return, which inherently requires "trust" (as does any human interaction). Your fancy blockchain is not going to help you if you order something with Bitcoin and no package arrives.
> Unfortunately, this solves the wrong problem. Spending money usually involves getting a good or service in return, which inherently requires "trust" (as does any human interaction). Your fancy blockchain is not going to help you if you order something with Bitcoin and no package arrives.
That problem already has solutions. The problems cryptocurrency is supposed to solve are, I want to buy subversive literature from someone I already trust not to rip me off, or for an amount I'm not worried about losing, without anyone requiring me to give them a government ID. Or I want to sell it to people without requiring them to give anyone an ID. I want to donate money to Wikileaks. I want to commission art or software from someone in South America who doesn't have access to US banks. I have the same name as someone on a list and I want a way to move money without the government ruining my life. I live in an oppressive country and I want to finance the rebellion, or buy contraception or some other thing which is banned by the baddies when it ought not to be.
It's for doing the things where the existing system fails you, not the things where it works. But it can do those things too. Cash works the same way. You're not worried about a restaurant stealing your money because by the time you pay them you've already eaten. You're not worried about Newegg sending you a brick with "lol" written on it instead of a GPU because they're a well-known company and if they did that it would cost them more in damage to their reputation than they'd gain from the theft and people would sue them independent of payment method.
You don't always need your trust in other people to come from the payment system when it can come from a dozen other things instead.
> > Your fancy blockchain is not going to help you if you order something with Bitcoin and no package arrives.
> That problem already has solutions
The solution to that problem is "the court orders the bank to send the funds back to my account", including all the way up to clawing back any funds the scammer spent. This is possible when the government controls the currency. It is not possible with crypto.
The only remaining purpose of crypto is funding crime. Some crime you might approve of (buying subversive literature), but that's dwarfed 100000:1 by ransomware, scams, and much more nefarious activity (drugs, sex trafficking, etc.)
Of course it's possible with crypto, it just means you can only deal with people with a known physical presence if you want any prayer of getting it back.
A judge can order a lien or seizure of their assets. I presume people that deal in crypto still want a car, a place to stay, some nice chairs or maybe to stay out of a cage when a judge determines they are willfully avoiding a court order to pay the money back.
Of course if they have no tangible assets or the entire operation is out of jurisdiction then that's an issue, but for a random joe are you really that worse off than trying to get the Chinese government to refund you for that knockoff you bought on aliexpress?
> You're not worried about a restaurant stealing your money because by the time you pay them you've already eaten.
But the restaurant is worried about you stealing their food and dashing off without paying.
Any transaction requires some level of trust to function. Crypto is a pipe dream for people who want to participate in society without confronting their pathological aversion to trusting and depending on others.
> It's for doing the things where the existing system fails you, not the things where it works. But it can do those things too.
Only as long as its use for the former doesn't outweigh its use for the latter. Trying to resist a government by using a digital currency is putting the cart before the horse. The dollar is an abstraction and an accounting convenience over the genuine temporal powers of the consensus that issues it.
> Only as long as its use for the former doesn't outweigh its use for the latter.
That's just a self-fulfilling prophecy. Obviously the early adopters are going to be the people for whom the existing system fails, but if you use that as an excuse to ban it or otherwise make it an insurmountable inconvenience for ordinary use through regulatory suppression then you're just preventing people from using it to buy lunch, not preventing them from using it to buy drugs. Which is useless and spiteful, especially when you're not going to address any of the problems that caused people to want it to begin with.
> I want to buy subversive literature from someone I already trust not to rip me off
Subversive literature printed on blotter paper.
Outside of buying sex and drugs the only uses for cryptocoins are, and always has been, ransoms, scams and gambling.
Okay, tell me how I buy something over the internet without tying the purchase to my government ID.
Your argument seems like "only criminals want privacy" which is a no.
Use a pre-paid Visa gift card purchased with cash.
Just for fun, I’ve paid for my Mullvad subscription with the incredible technology of putting cash in an envelope and sending it.
Go buy eBay gift cards with cash?
No, the argument is crypto is primarily used for crimes. Which is true.
Also, if you want privacy, don't use crypto.
> No, the argument is crypto is primarily used for crimes. Which is true.
The argument is right here:
> Outside of buying sex and drugs the only uses for cryptocoins are, and always has been, ransoms, scams and gambling.
It doesn't contain the word "primarily" which indeed makes it false, and the rebuttal to your different claim is this one:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46190260
> Also, if you want privacy, don't use crypto.
Can you tell me another way of buying something over the internet without tying the purchase to a government ID?
>> Also, if you want privacy, don't use crypto.
> Can you tell me another way of buying something over the internet without tying the purchase to a government ID?
Isn't the real question more, does crypto actually allow you buy things without tying the purchase to a government ID?
I'm no expert but I regularly see articles about de-anonymisation. This leads me to be sceptical about claims to privacy, certainly given enough time and motivation by a government actor.
> Can you tell me another way of buying something over the internet without tying the purchase to a government ID?
By using a prepaid (debit|gift) card bought for cash in a convenience store? Much better anonymity that way. And much less volatility.
Sorry, which web shops demand governmental ID? I have never had to provide them mine in any of the countries I’ve lived in.
If your concern is the webshop finding out your address, well I’m unsure how you solve this when you buy with crypto, but again ship to your home. If you have an alternative place to get it delivered for privacy, might as well do that with fiat transactions the same way.
The store usually* doesn't demand it, but your ID is tied to your cards via your bank's KYC obligations anyway
* It's becoming more common for sites to ask for ID, I've gotten prompted for it buying a cellphone online, to access an old Facebook account and even Hetzner (Before ever using it) because I got flagged as high risk
Ok, let’s go step by step through your processes, since I am tired of crypto nerds LARPing as Jason Bourne.
How did you first obtain your crypto? What level of anonymity was available for that tx?
Where do you store your crypto short and long term? How do you make it available for spending on online platforms? What percentage of your income and expenditures is in crypto? How do you balance between fiat and crypto anonymously?
What are you buying with the crypto? Why does it need to be purchased with crypto?
Where are you having it shipped? Are you faking all contact details when making the purchase?
Are you completely obscuring yourself physically while collecting said package? Are you obscuring your movements along the way as well to prevent leading back to your home?
Often, proponents love to portray citizens in economically ruinous governments in SAmerica as ideal usecases. Why do they need to use your specific crypto coin? Why can’t they use a locally invented (read: forked) one? It feels much more useful to regulate supply/demand where all said economic activity will take place, instead of replacing your entire net worth from a dying currency to a speculative one mostly propped up by foreigners like you who have zero skin in their local game.
I could go on and on, but it is exhausting to reiterate common sense - no one ever thinks this through fully from the comfort of their air conditioned first world white collar desk job office. How are you ensuring perfect info and op sec in your crypto journey?
I never said anything about my usage of crypto, I just said that requiring an ID with digital purchases is becoming more and more common
But, you are mischaracterizing me, I AM a South American migrant that did scape and has benefited from crypto for what little economic interaction I do have with my ruinous home country
On the same idea, I don't need/care for perfect opsec because my threat model doesn't need it, what little I've directly bought with crypto has always been digital, so that's whay I've cared to figure out
Still details on income/transactions and such, all feel a bit unnecessary for public display, but a small percentage, and my first crypto came from mining and selling back when it wasn't taken that seriously specially not in Venezuela of all places
> which web shops demand governmental ID?
Basically all web shops in Brazil require you to give a government ID to buy anything (usually your CPF number).
Brazil has an insane number of 'illegal' immigrants as well as people living in Favela who essentially don't even recognize the state, so I'm curious how that works. I assume it's something like the US where 10 illegals work under one social security number or a tax ID they've registered under the auspice of foreign controlled business.
> an insane number of 'illegal' immigrants
Immigrants can request a CPF (the 'national ID'). I don't think being in the country 'legally' is a requirement, that isn't enforced the way it is in the US.
> people living in Favela who essentially don't even recognize the state
Most people get assigned an ID at birth. And people who live in a favela often have to work outside it, and they interact with most companies/state services that aren't utilities as usual.
Utilities OTOH often get MITM'd by militia/narcos these days though.
> I assume it's something like the US where 10 illegals work under one social security number or a tax ID
No need for anything fancy like that. The poorest people are willing to work based on verbal agreements, as the alternative is either starving, or hoping the public social security network has your back. And in case your employer requires one, that's a non-issue because, except for rare circumstances, everyone has one.
Digital banking, install payments and general smartphone usage is widely popular, including favelas.
> Outside of buying sex and drugs the only uses for cryptocoins are ...
Apparently Black Rock and such buy billions of dollars worth of sex and drugs. I wonder where they keep it.
Yes, and "buying subversive literature" is a crime too. That was the original point.
>Outside of buying sex and drugs the only uses for cryptocoins are, and always has been, ransoms, scams and gambling
That is a very shallow take. There are real non-criminal uses for crypto that people in stable, wealthy countries often overlook. Millions rely on it simply to move money between family members across borders when traditional banking is slow, blocked, or outright inaccessible due to politics. In several countries, people use crypto to buy food, medicine, or basic goods because their local currency is collapsing or their banking system is dysfunctional, or their entire nation has been cut off from the global financial system as a decision of few politics persons.
Its fine to criticise the scams and speculation — there is plenty of that — but pretending thats the only use case ignores the people who depend on it for everyday survival.
> the people who depend on it for everyday survival
Oh, my, all those poor people that died prior to 2009.
And the Glock switch is useful for home defense.
The blockchain and every transaction being public effectively disproves your entire supposed usecase.
But wallets aren't associated with a real person by default, unless it's created through some service that does KYC. If you can get anonymous tokens in an anonymous wallet, who cares if the transactions are public?
That is unfortunately a fairly weak form of anonymity. With a fully public network you can trace even the most meticulously tumbled and laundered tokens. And while they may not exclusively trace back to you, they'll trace into a mixer and out of a mixer with a large majority of the inputs and outputs being tainted.
Most exchanges, etc won't really touch accounts or UTxO that are messing with mixers.
Because of that it's generally just better to use "properly" private and anonymous blockchains instead. If they are fully opaque then tracing becomes effectively impossible.
It takes one OPSEC slip up for someone to link a wallet address to you. So yes, your transactions being public doesn't matter as long as you are cognizant of that 24/7 365 days a year.
You can resolve this issue by repeatedly tumbling your money, using the same tumbling scheme as everyone else. This will reduce the value of your wallet slightly, to pay the mining fees, but it's… hm. That sounds equivalent to inflation or tax, except that the lost money doesn't go towards anything useful: it just goes towards buying ASICs and burning electricity.
Depends on the blockchain. There are plenty of ways to have private transactions.
Bitcoin came about to solve the trustless component and provides weak anonymity.
Then Monero, ZCash, etc built on that to add privacy and anonymity.
If you use bitcoin nowadays and expect anonymity or privacy you are clearly mistaken but there are plenty of platforms built for privacy and anonymity on extensions of that same underlying technology.
Like basically every vendor that accepts cryptocurrency and values privacy/anonymity is going to offer monero as an option.
> I want to buy subversive literature from someone I already trust not to rip me off, or for an amount I'm not worried about losing, without anyone requiring me to give them a government ID. Or I want to sell it to people without requiring them to give anyone an ID. I want to donate money to Wikileaks. I want to commission art or software from someone in South America who doesn't have access to US banks.
So literally 0.1% of the financial needs of the average person. What a revolution
Fairly niche things for which the market size nowhere near bears the investment in the technology?
The investment in terms of speculation is primarily of interest to the speculators.
That (freedom of payments) may have been the idea. But there are two problems with it:
1. Payments which you can't make today inside a legal system are two types. And if you enable system you automatically enable both types. For libertarians that is a clear 100% positive. For regular centrist citizens, not so much. At minimum it's a topic for debate.
2. BTC and a few other tokens actually make this problem worse. Since blockchain is public, you can always trace "bad" or real bad payment to the source wallet. That i one issue, and another is that since BTCs are non-fungible, the tokens used in such payments are forever tainted. Even in the current anarchic and almost unregulated environment some exchanges are blacklisting some of the tokens, to limit own exposure.
I’m all for bitcoin but your examples are essentially I want to do all these generally illegal things that I cannot within the current legal framework.
Reading your comment made me think of an ad i saw several years ago.
It was an ad that started off like a typical quality coffee ad, nice pictures of beans, people harvesting, some roasting etc. But than it switched to the topic if making sure that "fair trade" was really applied - switching to IBM Blockchain and claiming that through the use of Blockchain there is safety that everything went fair trade.....
And i just thought.... sure... your blockchain approves that those workers harvesting got paid fair... or does it? All it actually does is proof that someone inserted the information that they got paid fair. If it really happend? Noone knows. Therefor Blockchain is a representation of what you feed into it nothing more and nothing less. At the moment it touches real life - as in the fair trade/payment for coffee bean harvesting - especially in countries where alot of payment is still for dayjob/cash - there's no way the Blockchain can assure that everything went the way it is stored as.
Yes. The oracle problem. Because of it, the only blockchain use case is basically crypto (and other purely on-chain stuff, such as NFTs (well, they typically link to off-chain sources by URL, haha) and crypto kittens).
I have not seen this scenario, but I assume that a blockchain could more reliably and believably be made public, recording all the way down to the farmer, then could other technologies.
Blockchain enables transparency from the farmer to the consumer. It does not ensure that the farmer was not coerced.
To make it simple to understand:
For example, international conglomerate using exclusively slave labor inputs "these bananas are small farmers fair trade bananas" into blockchain.
That's it. That is the "transparency".
Right. That's a forgery - a lie. No blockchain could prevent that type of lie. What a blockchain could enable is honest transparency.
An attempt to pass off a lie as truth would be much more damaging to a company's reputation than would be just not addressing an issue. By addressing the issue and introducing a channel for transparency, the company is demonstrating that they are willing to put their reputation on the line.
I would agree that as a regulatory measure, this would not solve any problem. But as a self-imposed measure, it builds consumer trust.
> No blockchain could prevent that type of lie.
Indeed
> What a blockchain could enable is honest transparency.
Wat?
> An attempt to pass off a lie as truth would be much more damaging to a company's reputation than would be just not addressing an issue.
Do you perhaps live in reality? When was the last time "reputation" of a company was in any way shape or form damaged by any lies?
> I would agree that as a regulatory measure, this would not solve any problem. But as a self-imposed measure, it builds consumer trust.
Indeed, it solves no problems except imaginary ones from the land of fairy tales.
I believe the “trustless” part is not having to trust a central authority that makes the transaction possible, not about not having to trust the person you are transacting with.
With crypto you don’t need to trust the authority that holds your digital money, the authority that executes the transaction, or the authority that manages the issuance of currency and other factors that may affect its value (interest rates, fixed exchange rates…).
That being said, I agree that in practice this is a rather niche problem to solve, and among the people with this problem, there are far more bad faith ones that good faith ones.
And it is never completely trustless anyway, for most crypto you need to trust a single dodgy implementation, the issuance policy of the founders hoarding the vast majority of the tokens, and whatever backdoors they have put in place for disaster recovery or other purposes. And then there are all the surrounding systems that make crypto actually practical to use, like exchanges, that are absolutely not trustless.
It’s absurd how the top exchanges keep their customers crypto in big joint accounts that the exchange controls and transactions mostly just happen in their closed database outside the blockchain, canceling out most advantages of crypto anyway.
> Spending money usually involves getting a good or service in return, which inherently requires "trust"
Indeed. Good paper driving the point home:
Irrationality, Extortion, or Trusted Third-parties: Why it is Impossible to Buy and Sell Physical Goods Securely on the Blockchain
The issue isn't that it solves the wrong problem.
The issue is that crypto boosters (including a few already here) claim it solves a whole host of other problems without thinking things through, kind of like some communists. Then if you argue enough they'll point out that things can be fixed ... but bitcoin is now indistinguishable from any other currency, other than its payment system that will no longer be widely used.
Like, you can make it easy to use if there are banks. And those banks will be subject to regulations. Boom, now you have banks and regulations.
You can get a loan from those banks. Now there's fractional reserve banking, with something like a virtual gold standard.
If it ever gets big enough, the fed can write bitcoin denominated bonds, and it's now prerty much a fiat currency, not even virtual gold.
Yes you still have a shadow sector where you can use bitcoin to buy drugs or dodge the taxman. But all the other supposed benefits have gone.
> Yes you still have a shadow sector where you can use bitcoin to buy drugs or dodge the taxman. But all the other supposed benefits have gone.
You use monero to do those things or zano or freedomusd and similar things for these but I didnt understand the conclusion of this statement
Basically you are saying crypto is just an less regulated fiat nowadays?
A legal curry of tech jargon just meant to replace laws and regulations?
Pretty much. People say it's meant to replace laws and regulations, but if it's successful then it won't.
The US has a large bitcoin strategic reserve. Banks offer bitcoin accounts (in some countries). You can get a loan backed by your bitcoin.
We're not yet at the point where you can get a credit card and 60 year home loan denominated in bitcoin, with the fed writing bonds or even issuing fiat to stabilise rates, but if it was more popular then is there any technical reason we couldn't get there?
What purpose does a bitcoin strategic reserve serve?
Trump did it, so frankly it's probably just a brain fart.
However, the US having a strategic reserve of a currency makes it a lot like other currencies. The next logical step is that banks can use it (already in the works - also Trump). If you can get a bank account it bitcoin, the next logical step is towards a fractional reserve system (loans, banks effectively "printing money"). The strategic reserve can cover a run on banks - think interbank lending, bailouts. Then the fed can offer bonds and IOUs (fiat).
All the things q lot of bitcoin advocates say bitcoin should stop, but you can't stop the government writing an IOU and demanding everyone treat it as currency.
Your argument here appears to be "crypto is no better than fiat, because you can build the same systems on top of them."
What you put on top is not the core value proposition of cryptocurrencies? It's what's underneath that's different, that was always the point. Fiat currency is built on a foundation of gov't control, whether it's the physical currency or the money in your bank account. Cryptocurrencies, fundamentally, are under no such control. If you're stupid enough to go get a 5mil loan in bitcoin from a bank who is only holding 1.7mil, and the delivery of said bitcoin is a slip of paper saying "iou btc lol" that's not the currency failing you, it's you acting stupidly.
No; the argument is much closer to "if you don't make cryptocurrency basically the same as fiat, by building the same systems on top of it, it's useless to the vast majority of people."
That is just an observation, not an argument against building, improving, and using crypto.
Cryptocurrency doesn't need to do everything for everyone at all times to be a useful thing to have in the world. It only needs to be helpful to a subset of people, in a subset of situations, some of the time.
I'm happy paying by card for ~100% of my daily transactions, but I want cryptocurrency to exist should the need arise. The rise of authoritarian governments and policies across the world should've made that obvious by now. What's legal and perfectly moral today can become a crime tomorrow.
You don't solve the issue of authoritarian governments with crypto, though. I haven't seen China collapsing exactly since 2009.
Instead, you give criminals a tool for crime. And gamblers a new casino.
But cryptocurrency enables more abuse, more victimization, today. And the problems with authoritarian governments a) cannot actually be solved by introducing cryptocurrency; that only enables some people to work around them; and b) cannot even be worked around with cryptocurrency for the majority of people: only those who are already relatively wealthy have access to the systems that enable that.
The financial system being under government control is the only proposition consistent with reality.
We, the people, make the rules. Replacing our democratic processes with finance controlled by the one with the most computing power, control of the software, or having horded the most of the tokens, is in no way desirable or realistic.
Even if the proposition wasn't borderline idiotic in the first place, there is no clear explanation how such a system should reward early adopters and allow them to cash out at a profit many times exceeding inflation.
It's all a scam.
I'm gonna first of all disagree with the notion that our entire democracy rests on control of the financial system, secondly point out that you seem to make some wild leaps about how decentralized currencies work, and thirdly ask how the hell you're getting the idea that early adopters would need to be "cashed out at a profit many times exceeding inflation"(Participation in the new system is the point of adopting it, how is this unclear).
Finally:
We, the people, make the rules.
I said the financial system must be controlled by our democratic system, not that democracy rests on control of the financial system.
No idea where I'm supposedly making "wild leaps" here. You on the other hand...
And guess where "the hell" I am getting the idea that early adopters would need to be cashed out at a profit many times exceeding inflation: reality. As cashing out at a large profit is exactly what has been happening for over a decade. It is the sole reason for virtually all participants joining the scheme in the first place.
> We, the people, make the rules.
Since when? We merely vote for politicians who promise to enact laws and regulations that are beneficial for us but they almost universally fail to do that, succumbing to self-interests and corruption.
If a government implements authoritarian measures that curb our freedom in an unpopular manner, "we the people" can't do anything about it. In a few years we may or may not vote them out, and the people who replace them may (or may not) do what we, the people, want.
That's a bleak view on the state of democracy.
Whatever your feelings on the topic may be, we will not be giving up government control of the financial system in favor of a blockchain and profits for crypto-bros.
Bleak but realistic, unfortunately. There needs to be a viable alternative as long as our elected representatives have the power to abuse the financial system as a means of authoritarian control, like freezing the bank accounts of protestors.
A truly democratic leadership with stringent limitations on how they can meddle with financial transactions would be preferable, but that's just a dream at this point.
A viable alternative to the financial system is also just a dream.
If we take from the government the ability to freeze bank accounts of protestors, we can't just also remove the ability to freeze the accounts of criminals, enemies, or even terrorists.
It seems like a clear non-starter, yet many proponents of crypto seem to think it would be an obvious improvement.
>If we take from the government the ability to freeze bank accounts of protestors, we can't just also remove the ability to freeze the accounts of criminals
That's really the crux of the issue here: Having to choose one over the other, would you rather some criminals go free, or some innocents be imprisoned?
I suspect anyone's position to this depends heavily on which sides they've been on more on their lives: Victimized by criminals or unjustly punished.
That might be the crux philosophically.
But realistically we're not seriously going to entertain stripping all controls from the financial system because we don't trust the government to do a reasonable job. Perhaps you'll agree that this is a very unlikely thing to happen.
Now my issue here is that many proponents of crypto, among other fallacies, use this exact scenario as a justification for why eg. Bitcoin will go to $1M, and why they should deserve to cash out at a 10x return in the future.
It's not going to happen, and even if it was, there's still no reason for early adopters to profit in what has so far been a zero sum wealth redistribution scheme with negligible value generated.
We are actually completely in agreement that crypto-hustlers and such are entirely full of hooey and nobody deserves any payout whatsoever. I'm only arguing from a point of "government bad" idealism.
>realistically we're not seriously going to entertain stripping all controls from the financial system because we don't trust the government to do a reasonable job
I kind of am. What I'm seeing happen is the opposite: The government stripping more and more agency from the individual because it does not trust its citizens do do a reasonable job(of anything). Every sector freed from the Leviathan, every tiny bit of life that can proceed without being subject to gov't interference is a huge win for me. Again, this is essentially a position born from my seeing what happens when "safety over liberty" goes too far.
>negligible value generated
Depends on what you value. I happen to like drugs and gambling. On the other hand, giving someone who falls for a hustle the ability to get their money back is something that I personally do not value at all.
You might have formulated things a bit unclearly, but I fundamentally agree that money, like everything else, should be under democratic control of the people. Not controlled by some crypto bros that are happy to interfere with the protocol if it suits them (The DAO hack, two 20+ block rollbacks of Bitcoin), but not if massive crime happens on it.
I guess so, although crypto proponents will anyway tell you that you don't understand how crypto works as soon as you say anything negative about their scheme.
I believe what I said is a fairly accurate summary of Proof of work / Proof of stake mechanisms and Core developer's influence on the protocol.
Ultra-capitalist libertarians are communists... riiiiiight...
btw I was banned from r/bitcoin Discord for saying that exchanges are banks.
Why should the method of payment solve that problem? A reputation system for sellers and service providers makes more sense to be entirely separate.
except currently the main usecases for cryptocoins are to buy illicit goods and services online. I remember when OpenBazaar was a thing. It even somehow managed to get an iOS app despite it being ridiculously easy to find listings for lbs of cocaine
Ya, I'm not a big fan of that use case, and I agree it's a problem. But I hold Bitcoin as a hedge against inflation. It tends to do better than gold, and is way easier to transact and store.
Neither will cash. Thats what a third party escrow is for. You get that as part of what you pay for a credit card. Not trying to come down on either side of this i personally hold near zero crypto, your statement was just wrong.
Indeed, most societies ended up inventing a mandatory trusted third party escrow called a "legal system" as part of a "state". They usually issue hard-to-copy tokens, solving the double spending problem.
And put people in jail they catch making and using fake ones.
They also confiscate those hard-to-copy tokens if you acquire a sufficiently large quantity and attempt to leave the country with them.
I see a lot of hand wringing about this; but for 99.99% of people the banking layer and bureaucracy of modern monetary systems is a feature that protects them from fraudulent transactions, people stealing their credit card number, and businesses charging them and not delivering goods. These are generally good things.
Yes it is possible for the state to inflict violence on you, and if the state wants to, it probably will do so. Putting your money into internet tokens instead of state backed money will probably just get you tortured more until you give up the keys, or die. Crypto isn't some "one weird trick" to prevent the state from taking your property and possessions.
> for 99.99% of people the banking layer and bureaucracy of modern monetary systems is a feature that protects them from fraudulent transactions, people stealing their credit card number, and businesses charging them and not delivering goods. These are generally good things.
Let's go through these. To begin with, "fraudulent transactions" is redundant because that's either someone stealing your credit card number or someone you paid not doing what they said. So let's consider those two:
> people stealing their credit card number
This is the problem caused by the existing system, which is designed with such poor security that breaching a merchant allows the attackers to make charges to their innocent customers' cards at a different merchant. They get zero credit for providing a mitigation to the problem they created themselves.
> businesses charging them and not delivering goods
This gets sold as a benefit, but it's also a cost, because then it becomes a mechanism to commit fraud. People go to a business that does deliver the goods and issue a fraudulent chargeback. The merchants then have to pass the cost of that onto everyone else, which means that it's also a fraud against every other customer.
Meanwhile we have other solutions to that problem that don't do that. Established businesses don't want to ruin their reputation. If someone rips you off you can sue them. Sometimes you're just paying someone for something they're already delivered.
And most importantly, there instances when you would trust someone to deliver the goods independent of the payment system, and other instances when you wouldn't. Which is why you want both payment systems to be available instead of just the second one, so you don't have to pay for the chargeback fraud when you don't need to buy your trust from the payment system.
Putting absolute trust and surrendering too much agency to the state has been proven a mistake many times throughout history. Citizens need fallbacks when the state fails them. Concrete example where crypto achieves this: many trans people in places with an inadequate medical system or hostile government turn to buying gray-market DIY hormones online, facilitated by crypto.
Sure, but approximately zero of the actual crypto space/hype was built around facilitating this kind of thing. In fact for that use case, it would’ve been better if Bitcoin never got nearly as big as it has (since that lead to much more government scrutiny, all over the world). Ideally it would’ve gotten large enough that there were enough reputable-ish exchanges that you could move fiat in and out, and then stopped there. Like some sort of digital Hawala.
I also use crypto to bypass government prohibition on unprescribed self-medication. Is it still noble if I'm buying cocaine?
The war on drugs is a scam. Cocaine prohibition is a pretext to oppress indigenous peoples of the Andes. https://filtermag.org/world-health-organization-coca-prohibi...
The war on drugs is a scam, but pretty sure if the primary goal was to oppress indigenous people in another country the US government could’ve found a cheaper way (both fiscally and politically).
Is it necessarily the case that it isn't? Suppose you can't afford health insurance and you have a condition for which a controlled substance would be prescribed, if you had access to the healthcare system, but you don't. If you then buy it over the internet, is the system being wronged by you or are you being wronged by the system?
Most states still haven't created digital versions of these hard-to-copy tokens meaning that there needs to be an alternate provided by a 3rd party which is where cryptocurrency comes in.
The Fed has had a wire service (Fedwire) for banks, allowing them to transfer their balances on the Fed’s balance sheet to another bank during settlement, since before the dollar moved off the gold standard. It was initially done with literal telegraphs - not sure at what point it became digital.
It obviously has no pseudo anonymity, is literally the least democratized banking system in existence, and is subject to the government’s whims in a whole host of ways. But it is a digital ledger of massive sums of real dollars (the banks can ask for it in cash if need be), and you couldn’t really steal the money even if you managed to create an unauthorized transfer on some bank’s master account.
So why don't any businesses let me Fedwire them money? It turns out unlike the physical version of cash, this "digital version" has hefty transaction fees and a poor UI meaning no business will take it, unlike how almost all physical businesses will take cash.
That’s not a technical problem - this kind of system can scale out just fine and has in other jurisdictions. SEPA is far from perfect, but is better than Bitcoin for everything but evading governments (justified or otherwise). We’ll see what Fednow looks like in a few years - the banks are definitely dragging their feet and it’s hard to tell what the UX will look like in the end.
> the banks can ask for it in cash if need be
Ehhh, can they? I suspect any bank that tried would pretty soon find that it actually couldn't.
I think we’re talking about bank reserves, which is a fraction (in the order of 1%) of the total amount of money held in the customers’ transaction accounts. Reserves are convertible into cash. Not that any bank would suddenly want to do that, unless there’s a bank run, in which case it’s the customers who want the entirety of their accounts (100x the reserves) converted into cash, which is impossible not because the fed refuses to convert the money, but because the bank doesn’t have enough reserves.
They couldn’t get their whole balance in cash I’m sure. But the Fed is the one that handles retiring old paper currency and giving banks fresh currency to give to ATMs and tellers, and I doubt the inflows and outflows are perfectly even for each bank.
The Fed manages printed currency - they’d be irritated, but they literally do provide the physical dollars people need now, and if they felt it was appropriate, they’d produce them as needed.
Just like those airplanes of bills shipped to Iraq, etc. in the past.
Most states have in fact invented bank transfers for that purpose.
The decentralized nature of banks makes it hard to offer a good payment experience to consumers and businesses.
Only in America. The rest of the world figured it out.
To be fair, this is because the US figured this stuff out way earlier through credit cards, and now there's a bunch of stakeholders and legacy changes which get in the way of making the services better.
Indeed, and there are some good reasons, too: US regulators want to prop up smaller regional banks and avoid large national monopolies (for what is essentially a natural monopoly).
The externalities of the crappy US banking system are so vast though. Musk, crypto, ...
SEPA is among the most stable & robust payment areas globally with a lot of interesting features which a lot of other regions are jealous about :-) And there are additional layers built on top, so at least we have N=1, while I have to admit that convenience could & should be improved
Inside the same country, really? We have the aptly-named Faster Payments in the UK and it's instant. The company I work for is virtually built upon it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payment_System_%28Unite...
The states (or rather the national banks of said states) are usually the ones running the central clearing system. That's the place where all the different banks report their net change in relation to all the other banks, and settle that change on their account with the central bank.
Believe it or not, banks don't ferry around cash to each other. It's all just numbers in a computer.
I love watching the HN comment hivemind speedrun the history of blockchain innovation every time this comes up. You just reinvented smart contracts on Ethereum, keep going :-)
No amount of smart contracts can solve the situation where one party says "I shipped you the widgets you ordered; pay me" and the other says "I received a box with a brick in it" -- you need some trusted third party to decide based on reasonable heuristics who is trying to commit fraud, based on e.g. is this the first or the tenth time this has happened.
That's exactly the point of smart contracts.
The contract can hold the money in escrow such that it can only be sent either to the seller or returned to buyer.
The seller and buyer can then both walk the contract through a state machine on agreement (i.e. confirm shipping, confirm delivery, potentially also confirmation for a return process) and when the buyer and seller come to a disagreement (ex: seller attests they've shipped the product and it should be delivered but the buyer asserts they havent/the tracking on shipping is invalid) or one of the participants is non-responsive for a certain amount of time then the contract moves into arbitration.
In arbitration one or more third parties then step in to serve as arbiters/oracles that decide in the favor of one party or the other and commit those decisions to the contract and the contract then derives consensus from those decisions and proceeds to the corresponding state/action of the contract (i.e. refund vs close).
Now your arbiters/oracles/third parties have reputations and you can reason about how trustworthy they are before you enter into the contract.
This means all parties can evaluate their risk tolerance and trust levels before entering the contract/on agreement.
-------
TLDR: Trust is inherent to any system reliant on the physical world. The point of smart contracts, etc is to formally encode those trust assumptions and the procedures of the contract in as trustless of a way as possible and to allow distribution of that trust across parties with most of the coordination overhead being automated/abstracted away.
And importantly smart contracts provide an extremely low friction happy path. In the happy path where all parties are satisfied, it's extremely efficient and responsive. But in every other path, the conflicts, incentives, and resolution procedures are clearly defined for all parties involved.
Read Irrationality, Extortion, or Trusted Third-parties: Why it is Impossible to Buy and Sell Physical Goods Securely on the Blockchain. Or just read the title, it has the main point.
That’s just a bad contract. Now consider one that mints you an NFT
I can't actually tell if you're touting monkey jpegs or making a really funny joke.
They agree with your statement in another reply under this submission. So a joke on crypto hype culture, where you either put aside problems and move to next craze or next craze is shoved to everything.
Smart contracts can only enforce things which happen on the chain.
No smart contract can prove you were not actually delivered your goods without trusting someone else.
Yes, it's called an oracle on the blockchain.
So blockchain requires trust in third parties. What is the point of it then?
I outlined it over in another comment[1] so I'm not gonna copy it all over but the point isn't to eliminate all trust. The point of trustless architectures (of which blockchain and smart contracts are one) is that you are eliminating implicit trust.
You are taking all the implicit trust, lowering it into explicit trust assumptions, and formalising who is allowed to make what decisions when, what happens when they do, and how the other parties are permitted to respond.
You are moving all of those implicit assumptions about how a contract, interaction, or relationship work and formalising them into something explicit and upfront so that all participants can evaluate their risk tolerance and trust levels prior to agreeing to a given contract or interaction.
And of course you are also sprinkling in a heavy dose of automation to smooth out the complexities of these explicit, mechanised contracts such that the happy paths are buttery smooth and the unhappy paths are at the least bearable and correspond to the contract you signed on to at the beginning of your interaction.
TLDR: It's low trust automation + formalising implicit assumptions into explicit ones.
I love watching cryptobros speedrun the history of finance :-)
smart contracts need some link to reality that has to be.... trusted.
> Not trying to come down on either side of this i personally hold near zero crypto, your statement was just wrong.
Umm, you are agreeing with the person you are responding to.
I always thought it was actually an ingenious solution to elections. There's absolutely no reason that a driver's license can't derive a hash that can only be proven and not reversed (for identity); and provides a one-time contribution to a blockchain that contains your vote - which you then receive your block's information when you finish voting.
ANYONE can calculate the sums, anyone can verify and proof hashes, identity is kept secret, trust is installed with hash checks for each and every voter - etc etc etc.
It's certainly more airtight than the solution we have today - where trust and efficiency can both be compromised fairly easy.
Others have shown why most of your other points are wrong or don't need blockchain, but this is also important:
> ANYONE can calculate the sums, anyone can verify and proof hashes
This is completely false. In fact, at the scale of a country, almost no one can actually do this. 95+% of the population doesn't have the knowledge required to do something like this and understand why it works. And while in principle they could learn to do it, they don't have the time and energy and other resources to spend on this.
And this is a deal breaker, as having the population believe and easily able to convince themselves that their elections are free is an extremely important part of democracy, especially when things are not that rosy.
In the current election system also almost no one can do anything to verify the results. The percentage is way higher than 95%. There are many arguments against electronic voting but the current system is terrible and insecure.
>>And this is a deal breaker, as having the population believe and easily able to convince themselves that their elections are free is an extremely important part of democracy, especially when things are not that rosy.
And it's currently not the case at all.
I think blockchain is a terrible idea for about anything. Electronic voting is hard. Voting is hard. It doesn't change the fact that the current system is a complete security joke .
It is extremely easy to convince yourself that the current system works. Numerous people volunteer to work in election monitoring every year, and any person who is not sure can take a day or two off work to do so at their next election.
Plus, the system overall is dead simple, first grade math skills are enough to understand it: we just count the votes in every precinct, and sum up the votes later up. No hashes, no smart group theory schemes, nothing complex.
Yup. I did this in 2020 and came away pleased at how well the system was designed.
The "current election system", in the US, is not one single system. It is much closer to 50 separate systems with their own differences that range from quirks to wildly different fundamentals.
You can't make blanket statements about "the current election system" in the US because of this; you're going to have to talk about things in more specifics, or people in states with well-designed systems are just going to keep popping up explaining why their system genuinely is good.
>"Others have shown why most of your other points are wrong or don't need blockchain"
Answered them. Introducing 0 knowledge proofs was a good point but blockchain can still be a medium to utilize these possibilities. I don't believe a conventional database or transparency log can meaningfully substitute the decentralized nature of blockchain for such an operation, though; and I said as much in my replies.
>"This is completely false. In fact, at the scale of a country, almost no one can actually do this. 95+% of the population doesn't have the knowledge required to do something like this and understand why it works."
Why can't I apply this logic to current election systems? You can memorize and regurgitate a usa.gov or National Archives article to articulate it - but 95% of the populace doesn't actually know about those ballot counts, ballot transportation, result tallying, transmission and communication of said results, implications of Independent State Legislature Theory and how challenging it - at least on originalist grounds - can cause 50 different processes for each of the 50 different states, etc etc etc.
There is no more wasted time, energy, or blind trust than in the current system, and at least introducing zero knowledge proofs, blockchain (or another system) and cryptography to the electoral system can be rooted in the pragmatic AND be abstracted to a layman from any given savvy person, of which there's many. Even in the long term. As it its, it's not like independent researchers or cryptography nerds haven't called out institutional-wide folly; it's what happened with Dual_EC_DRBG, and was promptly laughed out the door for any serious cryptographer and highly publicized.
As for the rest, it's well known that the data is collected and retained on voter information as it is. We're seeing states like Colorado, just this past week, deny giving the current federal administration voter data from the previous election. You can reasonably predict roughly half of America's voting anyway; when their timeline of party affiliation AND the knowledge of whether they voted or not is already public information.
> Why can't I apply this logic to current election systems? You can memorize and regurgitate a usa.gov or National Archives article to articulate it - but 95% of the populace doesn't actually know about those ballot counts, ballot transportation, result tallying, transmission and communication of said results, implications of Independent State Legislature Theory and how challenging it - at least on originalist grounds - can cause 50 different processes for each of the 50 different states, etc etc etc.
The paper voting system is extremely simple, it takes maybe an hour or two at most to explain in any detail you want to anyone who wants to understand it. People can, and many do, register to participate and see it working first hand. The US presidential election system is slightly more complex because of its legal nature, but I am discussing paper based voting in general; and all of the legal complexity would persist even if each state moved to a blockchain or digital based voting system.
In contrast, understanding zero-knowledge proofs requires college-level mathematics knowledge, probably requiring some months or even years to teach to someone who works in a non-mathematical domain, and at least a day or two to really get it even for someone with enough math knowledge who hasn't seen it before. And this is only the theory - the practical parts are in fact MUCH MUCH more complex - to the point that it is almost certain that there isn't a single person in the whole world who could actually confirm for himself that an electronic voting system actually implements the algorithms promised. Establishing that a CPU is executing the code you think it is is extraordinarily difficult, and doing so for the many such systems that would compose an electronic voting system is way past any human.
> cryptography to the electoral system can be rooted in the pragmatic AND be abstracted to a layman
what you're arguing for is a system that you understand and can verify, but not other people.
You're also missing the bigger issue which is that voting systems vary by state, which means to do what you need to do would require federal/constitutional change.
Plus how do you verify and guarantee the terminals are not tampered with (especially as they are all going to be digital, and securing hardware in remote locations is fucking hard. )
Much as its not fun, paper votes with local counting stations are harder to corrupt universally (unless you have government collusion)
> what you're arguing for is a system that you understand and can verify, but not other people.
I don't think people really need it. We're used to using and trusting systems we don't understand. So, I think if the system is open, people will readily accept it. They'll be content with knowing that all the experts say the system is reliable, and they themselves, theoretically, can, if they want, understand its structure and confirm its reliability.
And the real reason for its non-use is somewhat different: The elites believe that the introduction of such a system would almost immediately lead to demands for real direct democracy, and the stupid masses, using this democracy, would make decisions that would destroy society and civilization.
If you want that just use zero knowledge proofs and cryptographic accumulators. No block chain needed.
Typically one of the properties people want from elections is the inability to prove to soneone how you voted, e.g. to stop someone from going, prove you voted for my candidate or i beat you up (or dont give you the bribe). Your scheme wouldn't support that.
>"If you want that just use zero knowledge proofs and cryptographic accumulators. No block chain needed."
Sure, I suppose. You'd need zero knowledge proofs for the reversals anyway.
>"one of the properties people want from elections is the inability to prove to soneone how you voted"
Your political party affiliations AND the fact on whether you voted is already public knowledge in our current electoral system; so 2/3 aren't supported now anyway. That said, my scheme DOES support all of those; it wouldn't tell you the identity of the person that voted for "Person A", so bribery or extortion is NOT in the cards.
If you somehow get access to someone's license, their hash won't tell you how they voted - just that they have already voted. And like I said to another commenter, if they beat you to a vote by using your ID (or whatever form of government ID is decided for the hash, they're all numbers anyway - we can just as well do social security), then in the current system that's bad - but id.me and real are already doing early-stage multi-factor authentication use cases for otherwise deterministic identification methods. Which is long overdue anyway, and I'm not sure too many people who would morally oppose such election reform if a byproduct of it being passed and enforced is an additional reform on deterministic identification.
If you give someone your block ID that says how you voted, then yeah ok - but you can do that today by taking a picture of your ballot. People brag all the time with photos of their ballot on election time - that's your choice.
> Your political party affiliations AND the fact on whether you voted is already public knowledge in our current electoral system
Neither of these are how you actual voted so they don't really matter.
That said, as a non-american, the party affiliation thing is super weird.
---
> If you give someone your block ID that says how you voted, then yeah ok - but you can do that today by taking a picture of your ballot.
And in many countries this would be a crime and have legal consequences.
Who validates the driver's license?
How do you stop inauthentic licenses?
Perhaps some sort of central authority?
This is the main problem with most of the blockchain/crypto issues is that its all fine until a dispute, and then we all fall back to the state to sort it out (ie the legal system)
You're describing a transparency log, which doesn't require a blockchain.
A transparency log, as I understand them, requires a centralized actor; which makes it easier to fudge numbers and introduce false participants.
No, because each participant can check its contribution in the log.
Everybody gets a copy of a verifiable hash etc when voting, allowing voters to mathematically check their vote.
The kind of knowledge allowing to design such clever algorithms is the real meaning of the word "crypto" (cryptography).
I see what you're saying now, I was imagining the type of transparency log that's usually run by a single institution and audited by a few others.
Even if every voter gets a hash and can check that their vote is in the log, you still have a bunch of places where a central actor can misbehave: Deciding who gets to write to the log in the first place, rate-limiting or dropping submissions, or running split-view logs in the event that there's not a ton of replication - hoping that wouldn't be the case in an election.
With a (properly designed) blockchain, you at least push those assumptions into a consensus layer with many writers/validators and game-theory penalties for rewriting its history. It's still not magic; but for something like elections, I'd rather minimize the points where a single operator can tilt the playing field, which is why I was thinking "blockchain" instead of "centralized transparency log"
What if one doesn't have a car and a driver's license?
> identity is kept secret,
Except to anyone who sees your driver license.
I said this in a response to someone else:
>"If you somehow get access to someone's license plate, their hash won't tell you how they voted - just that they have already voted."
If they beat you to your drivers license information (or whatever form of government ID is decided for the hash, they're all numbers anyway - we can just as well do social security), then in the current system that's bad, but id.me and real are already doing early-stage multi-factor authentication use cases for otherwise deterministic identification mediums. Which is long overdue anyway, and I'm not sure too many people who would morally oppose such election reform if a byproduct of it being passed and enforced is an additional reform on deterministic identification.
There are schemes for this, but it requires much more than just a hash. You need not only asymmetric cryptography, but some sort of Zero Knowledge Proof if you don’t want to be able to identify the person who voted.
you can also juststore hashes in a normal database.
Blockchain is a very inconvenient database, for sure, but there is a good reason Bitcoin uses it. It had to solve to double spend problem and create a trustless p2p digital cash, while being censorship resistant and having no central authority.
Some people around a decade ago started using blockchain for everything where a SQLite db would have been better, because blockchain was the buzzword around that time, and they were charlatans who wanted funding and hype, or signal how cutting edge they are (kind of how the last two years everybody became an AI company).
It doesn’t mean that Bitcoin using blockchain is stupid.
> and they were charlatans who wanted funding and hype, or signal how cutting edge they are
Interesting that those same hucksters and shysters who spread the gospel of the blockchain immediately jumped on th AI bandwaggon when this was the shiny new thing.
Or, maybe, 40 years working in IT turned me slightly cynical.
> spread the gospel of the blockchain immediately jumped on th AI bandwaggon
There were also a few months of super conductors, don't forget :-)
LLM has more tangible benefits for companies and consumers.
If you mentioned NFTs though you’d be spot on
> According to new projections published by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in December, by 2028 more than half of the electricity going to data centers will be used for AI. At that point, AI alone could consume as much electricity annually as 22% of all US households.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energ...
We're currently all subsidizing the AI industry. When we solve the energy problem then we can talk about potential benefits of LLMs
Skipped the metaverse, slotted between the two
It may be money, but it is definitely not cash. Cash is completely anonymous, BTC is not.
Cash is not completely anonymous, but hard enough and not enough parties track it. Bills are serialized and you could take photos of coins and likely identify them based on scratch patterns.
Still, whole thing is saved by not enough people actually tracking it to that level.
And on other side, BTC tracks every single transaction ever. Which is also detriment, that is we keep everything stored forever in lot of places... Which kind seems massive waste.
There was a great article in a German magazine some month ago, they are listing very detailled how cash tracking works and who is involved and which process step: https://netzpolitik.org/2025/reise-eines-zwannis-diese-gerae...
Its really interesting, feel free to use your favorite LLM to translate it :)
Point taken about anonymity. However, its design (that of cash) is theoretically anonymous, it is reality which gets in the way. BTC, on the other hand, is "just" a huge ledger of transactions with giver and receiver perfectly "identified" (in a unique way, albeit just pseudonymous) and preserved forever.
Also, as you point out, BTC is a massive waste of resources and storage space.
> giver and receiver perfectly "identified" (in a unique way, albeit just pseudonymous)
Not perfectly. A lot of heuristics are needed to link a unique owner to multiple transactions. With bitcoin, it's recommended to use a new address for every transaction so, for example, in a basic transaction, it's not so easy to identify which output is the recipient and which is the change.
And there's Monero that tries to hide these links a lot more.
Which is why higher layers like the Lightning Network, Rootstock, Liquid offer to not store everything on chain and offer speed/features Bitcoin natively can't while resting on the higher security model of their base layer.
It's stupid because blockchains don't scale. In most other respects they're quite clever.
In theory a L2 network coukd solve the scaling problem, but every time I've looked at L2 solutions theve had terrible UX.
L2 networks achieve scale by... Not being blockchain. And by not offering the double-spend protection guarantees of blockchains.
So this statement is "you can scale blockchain tech by using another tech in its place that doesn't offer the same guarantees".
With the Lightning network, L2 is basically a database between only 2 parties that are required to be online during the transaction. It's not possible to double spend in that situation.
There's the possibility of double spending by committing to the bitcoin blockchain an old version of your "database", but then you would face the penalty of having your entire balance confiscated by the other party.
More details here: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/67141/how-is-a-d...
> but then you would face the penalty of having your entire balance confiscated by the other party.
Only if the other party notices in time that you did this. You are reliant on active monitoring of the blockchain to know that your transactions actually happened. And the more you want to scale (i.e. the more transactions you do on a single Lightning channel without settling it on the BTC blockchain), the bigger the risk becomes.
Yes, but as long as you monitor, double spending is not possible. And it's possible to use tools to do that somewhat passively.
There are conditions on every payment system. With bitcoin you also have something to do to prevent double spending: wait for some number of confirmations (and making sure you're on the right chain).
And "double-spend protection guarantees of blockchains" is very dependent on the cost of doing a 51% attack, so it's not strong by itself. It's very strong in bitcoin only because the quantity of hashrate/money required to do one is astronomical. It's not so strong on small blockchains.
And I fail to see how the risk increases with more transactions on a single lightning channel.
My point is that Lightning has additional failure modes that BTC does not, and Lightning in itself does not offer the guarantees that Bitcoin does. It of course also suffers from all of BTC's failure points - if someone successfully does a 51% attack on BTC, they can implicitly also steal any Lightning funds as well. If you close a Lightning channel and then don't wait for enough confirmations, or you broadcast your cheating transaction and don't wait for enough confirmations, you can clearly lose your money.
The risk doesn't increase with the number of transactions on a channel, that was a wrong statement from my side. What I was thinking of is that the risk increases the more your transact through Lightning instead of regular BTC. Basically, the more of your BTC is caught up in Lightning channels, the higher the value of attacking you with a double spend attempt.
If monitoring really is a problem isn't simple automation the solution?
This is automated, no one is proposing to manually look at BTC blocks to see if you are getting cheated. The problem is that you need to explicitly run code constantly to check if this happens - which means that if your monitoring agent goes offline for any reason (which an attacker could perhaps force), your BTC that you received in a Lightning channel may be stolen.
Okay, so it's an attack vector but one that can be mitigated against by implementing redundancy.
I would argue that Lightning's biggest security issue is having to store your private keys on an Internet connected device. I don't know if further improvements can be made in this area, for example allowing for some kind of 2FA, like multi-sig on the base layer.
I thought it was interesting that BSV seemed to scale just fine, and you could also store entire files on it, including JSON, HTML or even music or videos.
This seemed like an amazing innovation to me, made even more amazing by the fact that it was, by all accounts, the original protocol.
You could do some pretty amazing stuff with it, for example store a SPA on chain and then store individual posts on chain, and have the SPA read the app.
Unfortunately, the ecosystem was completely greed focused, and nobody is interested in technological advancement in the slightest.
>BSV seemed to scale just fine, and you could also store entire files on it, including JSON, HTML or even music or videos
This doesn't pass the sniff test. Everyone must store the full blockchain in order to verify it. So to run a full node you would have to store everyone's JSON, HTML, music, videos. Full mirroring for every node in a distributed system is about as close as you can get to the definition of doesn't scale.
Indeed. Bitcoin's blockchain grows with a laughable 3kB/s, yet is an unwieldy 700 GB.
A blockchain that allowed you store one song per second would be hundreds of TB before long. There are other architectures for that sort of thing for a reason.
how many transactions a second could/can it manage though?
The anonymity aspect of it always confused me. If anything, bitcoin and almost all other cryptos are the ultimate surveillance state currency. Every single bitcoin, no matter how many fractions it is broken into, is traceable through every single transaction it has ever participated in, all the way back to when the coin was first mined.
Early on bitcoin was thought to be pseudoanonymous. Like sure, it's all public, but what's public is "bc1qxy2kgdygjrsqtzq2n0yrf2493p83kkfjhx0wlh", not "John Smith, age 43, living in Florida".
Then two things happened: people figured out that it's actually very easy to connect the dots, particularly if somebody ever does something like: "donate here: (hash)".
And, Bitcoin is hard to get into. As soon as difficulty went up, making yourself some went out of the window. Now you have to buy it. And its characteristics mean that anyone selling any online wants to be really, really sure of your identity. Thus near everyone ends up creating accounts at Coinbase or wherever with very accurate identity verification, and now we've got real names connected to those random looking numbers.
That visibility could be considered a feature for some use cases. We could use more transparency in many areas, particularly government.
It isn't anonymous. Anybody who says bitcoin is anonymous either doesn't understand bitcoin or doesn't understand anonymity. It's pseudonymous.
When you start transacting on Bitcoin Lightning network (which is essentially sending pre-signed bitcoin transactions in a smart way, without submitting them on the main chain), then you no longer see each transaction. Lightning introduces decent privacy, not perfect, but decent.
It's also not guaranteeing double spend protection (especially not passively), and is not actually using Bitcoin, except occasionally and optionally.
It does guarantee double spend protection, that's exactly what the lightning nodes do. If someone tries to double spend, they lose their bitcoin. I have a different definition for "using bitcoin" than you do.
Similarly I believe that HTTP Live Streaming is using Internet...
That's only true if they observe the channel being fraudulently closed in the right time window. You have to actively monitor the BTC chain to see if your Lightning network partner might steal from you. If you don't (e.g. There is some network or power issue and they take this opportunity to steal), tough luck.
Basically Lightning is like a tab that you open in a bar. You perform various transactions on the tab, and only settle later. No one would say that you're using Visa when you tell the bartender to put some drink on your tab, even though at the end of the day or week or whatever, the transaction will go through Visa.
Technically there is no such thing as a bitcoin. Just unspent transaction outputs. Those get spent as an input of a transaction and then are gone forever. There is no concept of the output of a transaction being the same "bitcoin" as what comes from the input of the transaction. This means if you had 2 inputs and 2 outputs of the same amount there is no way to trace which input became which output. At best you can find which outputs potentially came from an input.
That is called tracing. It’s also not hard - every node does it to verify blocks.
When blocks are verified it just needs to validate that sum of the outputs isn't more than the sum of the inputs. It doesn't care about tracking what went where.
But you (theoretically) cannot know who mined the coin, or who is actually the holder of the coin, thus the anonymity. Though currently this is getting restricted as governments require more ID verification from businesses dealing with crypto, which links up your coin to a real person.
The correct term here is pseudonimity - you know the immutable, stable wallet id of who mined the coin, which is a pseudonym for a real person. Anonymous systems are ones in which it's impossible to associate an identity with the work item.
For example, if I send cash through the post office, and I don't sign the envelope, that is a form of anonymous payment - it's impossible to tell who sent the payment (assuming there is no footage of the post box where I deposited the envelope, and I left no DNA on it, etc). If you receive a second payment, it's impossible to tell whether it came from the same person or someone else.
How is the serial number on cash any more anonymous than bitcoin addresses?
Because it's attached to the bill itself, not the owner or the wallet.
If I give you a dollar bill with the serial number 100100, it's impossible for you to prove that bill came from me (unless you have forensic evidence of me giving it to you, of course - but that's equivalent to having photo evidence of me typing in my private key to a BTC wallet) . If you find a dollar bill on the street, it's now yours, you can't know anything about its previous owner.
In contrast, a BTC address is a unique identifier for someone who owns the BTC. The blockchain stores all addresses that it ever interacted with, so even if you create thousands of wallets, they can all be-anonymized quite easily if one is, as you can track how money was sent between them.
You don't have to transfer bitcoin. You can give someone private keys to the wallet and they can do anything they want with it. It would be exact equivalent of giving someone the bill
You do have to transact bitcoin to get bitcoin into the wallet. Plus, you can't prove to someone you haven't kept a copy of the private key, so you can't really transfer ownership of a private key, not trustlessly.
You are confusing anonymity and privacy. Bitcoin can be anonymous, but not private.
Crypto makes perfect sense if you just understand it's for doing illegal stuff.
No moral judgement, but the only viable use case for the blockchain is doing things with money that the authorities don't want you to do.
Other than that, no, there is no use for a distributed database because doing financial transactions with people you can't even trust to abide by the law is generally a bad idea.
I am a dual citizen. I wanted to buy a condo near my parents where I spend my summers with my family. I have never in my entire life felt like a criminal more than trying to buy something, with the money I made with my wife, going through regular financial system. after weeks of feeling like a criminal over coffee with my cousin who owns the company that was selling me the condo I was like “can I just fucking give you two bitcoins on a thumbdrive…”
I would never own a crypto but working with the current financial system can make you feel like a criminal more than crypto at times… :)
Foreign property ownership is not like buying an Armani bag when you visit Italy. The financial regulations are complementary to the legal ones. Besides, even if you just sent 2 bitcoins, what about all the remaining documentation? It's not gonna fill out itself
And this is [part of] why Dubai has the highest per capita influx of high net worth individuals.
You can call them a dystopic theocracy, which is a bit true, but you can literally just fly over and buy a condo in a neighborhood with basically zero violent crime, with 2 bitcoins with essentially no questions asked.
Dubai is the Bitcoin of cities, so I guess the example fits.
Fine, let's just give up civilization and praise the disneyland for oligarch and rich brats, build and maintained by slave like labor.
What made you feel like a criminal? Buying a home is fairly straightforward and has almost no state verification of any piece of it, at least in the US.
Was it something the state enforced, or something being done by the agents of the transaction (ie the mortgage company)?
> Buying a home is fairly straightforward and has almost no state verification of any piece of it, at least in the US.
you mean the purchase deed isn't registered anyplace?
or you mean that the mortgage company didn't do a credit/background check on the buyer before granting the mortgage? Which includes some level of providing a state-backed identity card?
Or do you mean it's easy to buy a house for cash without hassle in the US? Just a suitcase of $100 bills? I'm assuming you've tried this recently?? (and the house cost more than 150K?
Only one of those things is a state enforced requirement (the deed) and everything else are system requirements that do not get solved with bitcoin. What mortgage company is going to loan you a million dollars ("in btc" whatever) without figuring out if you're a good risk? That's not the currency of choice making you get cross examined, it's the nature of the thing you are trying to do.
Maybe the suitcase of anonymous cash bit is easier but only because you're doing that to dodge taxes... In which case feeling like a criminal might be a bit on point.
Just owning this much money feels criminal. Suddenly a lot of institutions start asking questions about where they came from.
That is because you’re working in the same financial system.
Now try buying some property in South America. Or Eastern Europe. Or Asia.
Be prepared for a similar experience OP documents.
It's incredibly common in Argentina to buy a property with a suitcase of cash. In fact I think it's about the only way it's done. Argentina has a tax on bank transfers, plus by various measures the tax on profit of business can be above 100% so no one actually uses the traditional finance system for more than a minority fraction of their use.
If your funds are clean there is zero reason for the (unfounded) anxiety. Just follow through the motion.
A local agent on a flat fee will probably make things easier.
I bought a vehicle early this year. In the UK we have supposedly instant BACs transfers.
However because opaque anti-fraud stuff, that I am not informed about, I was stuck in the middle of a field trying to convince someone in a call centre that the car I could see with my own eyes (and I had done all the appropriate checks) does indeed exist. This whole process took almost an hour because their anti-fraud team has a two hour response time.
There are obstacles in the banking system that make doing legal transactions difficult.
> If your funds are clean there is zero reason for the (unfounded) anxiety.
Nonsense. Your funds can be frozen with no recourse even if you're innocent. No-one will tell you what you supposedly did wrong. Everyone who hears about your predicament will make up reasons to believe that you'd done something wrong because they want to believe that the system doesn't make mistakes.
Most token holders use exchanges, where freezing accounts and just keeping the tokens is a daily occurrence.
That's not something solved by cryptocurrency in its current form.
You do realize that they get frozen only because of the fiat system regulations/laws?
These exchanges freeze accounts in fear of what governments might do to them if they weren't cautious/suspicious enough. They have no economical interest in freezing account otherwise, that's one less customer trading and paying them fees.
> after weeks of feeling like a criminal over coffee with my cousin who owns the company that was selling me the condo I was like “can I just fucking give you two bitcoins on a thumbdrive…”
and he said no, because you also can't do this. Bitcoin has not solved any problem there.
Actually, in many places it would work fine. Some it would be immediate jail time.
In the places it would work fine, so would a traditional transfer, though. Again, Bitcoin hasn't solved any issue here.
You're clearly someone who doesn't agree with the quantitive theory of money.
This utility is what helps stabilise its value, but the side effect of that is that it is a good store of wealth. These two facts make BTC go up. People say Bitcoin isn’t used for anything when in reality it’s being used every day to store and move wealth between big financial players (many of them being organised crime). Why wouldn’t they continue using this useful technology and therefore why won’t its value hold/increase? Is it moral to piggy back off this? That’s for you to decide. It’s worth considering that many major banks have been involved with organised crime since forever…
You could also say that the bad guys are "piggy-backing" off the good people who hold it.
What should you do? Censor their transactions? Who gets to say who gets censored?
Like democracy, bitcoin is for everyone, including your enemies.
> Crypto makes perfect sense if you just understand it's for doing illegal stuff.
What happens when a country's banking system fails?
In what circumstance could the banking system collapse but leave the electric grid and all other infrastructure which supports the internet intact?
The internet is more resilient than that. I wouldn't want to live in a country where the banking system has collapsed, and one of the reasons is because I expect that this correlates with unreliability of the power grid; but you can run a lot of useful pieces of software on a computer powered by solar panels and batteries in the wilderness with a satellite uplink, including a bitcoin node.
Ah yes. And everyone in a country that suffers a banking collapse lives in a wilderness with solar power and a sattelite uplink.
Yes. And if a country with say 200m people suffered a banking collapse, everyone could do a Bitcoin transaction every 40 days (assuming everyone else stopped using it), and would use only about 1% of the world's electricity. Great stuff.
One where the president prints trillions of dollars to bail out his AI cronies.
++1
Venezuela?
Do Venezuelans _actually_ have much documented usage of crypto, or are they simply using foreign fiat like the USD and Euro?
To understand the initial arguments, look no further than the Genesis block, which includes this text:
The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks
In many rich countries, all signs point to nasty inflation for the foreseeable future. Bitcoin is inflation-proof because there is no central bank that can print more Bitcoin. Having a secure system with that property means accepting some tradeoffs in terms of usability and efficiency, compared to a centralized database.
> there is no central bank that can print more Bitcoin
It turns out this doesn't matter: you can't hear the inflation argument over the volatility. The amount of goods you can buy per Bitcoin changes dramatically on a month by month basis. It's just that everyone loved it while it was going up, but that's not actually guaranteed!
Also, you can't print more Bitcoin, but that doesn't matter: you can fork it (people have, BCH), or you can just endlessly spawn new token chains, or you can have things which both sides regard as abominations but are somehow immensely popular: stablecoins. These give you the legal stability of crypto tied to the price stability of the dollar. It turns out that what people actually wanted was several hundred billion dollars of virtual poker chips.
but there's no compounding interest. no dividend based on future cashflows.
holding stocks of a diverse index seems better on the long run, no?
Check out how $100 put in bank deposits or S&P500 have done versus gold over the last 50 years. You will find that these do not generate real returns when measured against sound currency either.
I'm not sure how you reached this conclusion. I did as you suggested. $100 invested 50 years ago into gold would be worth $3000 today. $100 invested into the S&P500 50 years ago would be worth $6870.
https://www.macrotrends.net/2324/sp-500-historical-chart-dat... https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-...
$100 put into S&P 500 in 1975 would be about $7500 today, or about $1250 in 1975 dollars.
$100 put into gold in 1975 would be about $2600 today, or about $440 in 1975 dollars.
S&P 500 would have had 3x the returns of gold.
check your numbers with a purchase date of 1971.
Usually, yes. But the government can still tank the economy in all sorts of ways. It happens more frequently in some countries than others, but it can happen anywhere.
Indeed. The crypto crowd seems to assume that the options for your savings are cash or bank deposits, or crypto. That's nonsense. A balanced portfolio of stocks (with some bonds maybe to reduce vol and improve your Sharpe Ratio) handily beats inflation. Heck, even bonds alone have mostly had positive real yields.
This also supports and funds the productive economy, unlike crypto.
Until you hold a passport of one of the US enemy states, which are plenty of and have permanent risk of getting your account frozen and money stolen.
Crypto doesn't have this issue.
Not using your cash also helps the economy. More exchange of money means more velocity means decrease of value of the money.
By not using your cash (by for example holding crypto) you’re making the money that circulates higher value
If you only care about inflation, real-estate in desirable locations is also inflation-proof. You can't print more land in San Francisco, London or Hong Kong.
Yeah but you can also have a disaster strike in that place (say, a nuclear accident) that will obliterate your real-estate value. Or general society changes that will make a city much less desirable (see the "rust belt"). Of course, nothing is without risk - so in that sense, it's not surprising that real-estate has risks. But that's what I wanted to underline, nothing is "inflation-proof". There's no guaranteed way to preserve wealth (much less increase it). None.
While there is no bulletproof way to preserve wealth real-estate is one of the most sound one compared to others. A nuclear accident can be insured and general social decline happens over many years or even decades that gives plenty of time to react.
Clearly crypto is more accessible to more people than is San Francisco, London, or Hong Kong real estate.
Way less liquidity and way more administrative overhead, but sure
Simply put:
Bitcoin was to be an alternative to FIAT, but it ended up being nothing more then a meme-stock that consumes more energy than Poland or Argentina.
Its sad really. But the greed in people turned it into shit.
A different metric of comparison isn't Bitcoin's energy consumption compared to other countries but compared to the existing banking system it's trying to replace, which burns more energy than Bitcoin and allegedly burns more energy funding wars with fiat. Mining gold instead of Bitcoin burns more energy than Bitcoin too.
Compared to that for energy consumption, Bitcoin is superior really.
> compared to the existing banking system it's trying to replace
I don't think it's appropriate to compare it to the existing banking system (whose featureset goes far beyond payments and managing account balances).
It's appropriate to compare it to existing payment and account systems. And on that front, compared to e.g. Mastercard, there's no way Bitcoin is more efficient. TXs/watt, $/watt, however you want to measure it.
> there's no way Bitcoin is more efficient
No way? You studied this personally and can prove it?
Transaction Fees On Bitcoin Lightning Network Are 1,000 Times Cheaper Than Visa And MasterCard
A bitcoin transaction costs around $100 (in invisible money supply increase, paid by everyone that holds Bitcoin, but received by the miners).
There's no way a fiat transfer costs that much.
I have no numbers but i would assume the global "FIAT market" is orders of magnitude larger than bitcoin, so ofc it consumes more. I would want to se a chart of how much 1USD/EUR "consumes" compared to 1BTC.
The comparison is moot because Bticoin barely functions as a currency. Banking system provides a lot of other functionality beyond just money.
I never understood why bitcoin is winning popularity/pricing over ie. ethereum - which doesn't burn energy anymore and you can actually do programming on it, not just moving money from a to b.
Because it's based on narratives. Bitcoin has the strong narrative and the "network effect". Because bitoin keeps surviving, the narrative reinforces itself. At this point surely most people know, even if they're unwilling to admit or fooling themselves, the utility value is basically dead.
The utility value is now a pure gamble that a person tomorrow will pay me more than I paid for it today, thinking that a person in the future will pay them more than they paid. And that can be a powerful enough narrative to keep it going.
But if bitcoin disappeared today, 99.99999% of the world wouldn't even notice, that is how little of a problem it solves.
Anyway, the point is, imagine the scenario if ethereum overtook bitcoin in value. What will this actually do to the ecosystem? In my view, it would be catastrophic to the value of all coins, because it suddenly destroys the narrative of a "store of value" (the last lingering narrative). Any other coin could just overtake ethereum, and out of all the thousands of coins, which one? At that point, I think the whole thing comes down.
One interpretation of this comment, if viewed from an adversarial angle, is that comments like this, although perhaps not this comment specifically, are designed to dissuade people from buying crypto days before a bull-run starts.
Accurate data illuminate a lot of things.
I would benefit enormously from people buying crypto to keep the price going up. I've owned bitcoin for 9 years. I bought it when I realised that the narrative was strong enough to overcome any technical arguments and I wanted to profit from that. One day I'm assuming it help me retire.
(I just wish I'd bought more)
Bitcoin has a longer proof-of-work history, which is the only thing that secures any blockchain.
One theory backed with proprietary data is that it's because bitcoin was created by the US government and money printed by the Fed goes in bitcoin so the government will one day pay its projected $113T of debt by dumping on everyone.
Yeah and even more crazy: all other applications of blockchains are even more stupid. Haven't seen another application that wouldn't have been better, faster, cheaper implemented in a "classical" way.
Agree. Blockchain is good for nothing but crypto (by virtue of the oracle problem, among others), and crypto is good for nothing but crime.
It's funny, people speak as if decentralisation was a good thing, but very few bother to explain why. Typically, if you dig into it, they cite advantages that you can already get from good old permissioned distributed tech. The only thing that decentralisation gets you (at enormous cost) is that it's harder to regulate.
This was already evident 9 years ago: https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/ten-years-in-nobody-has-c...
Gambling.
You can do gambling easier without blockchains. (Not that you should do any gambling at all, on neither side, if you ask me.)
Not really, because the government freezes your bank account and takes your money.
> Haven't seen another application ...
You need to get out more.
Git
Git is nice distributed tech. It's permissioned, though. Good old permissioned distributed tech. Which predates Bitcoin (obviously, as git is older than Bitcoin).
Am I misinterpreting you or are you saying Bitcoin would make a better, faster, cheaper Git?
If you are, I am already laughing.
They're saying git would not have been better or faster or cheaper if implemented in a classical centralized way.
Isn't git most of the time used centralized? And that offers better user experience than doing it some decentralized way? It seems to me like most prefer centralized use of git. Be it private server or some large server.
That's the thing about blockchain/"distributed". They are such vauge terms they can apply or not apply to anything depending on what point you need to make in your argument.
If we compare the traffic of Github vs Bitcoin, Github is likely doing 1,000+ writes per second and Bitcoin is doing what, 5-7 maybe higher with specialized stuff?
Github is nowhere near the world's "central and only" service for Git, so what am I missing to not laugh about?
The downside of a global distributed database (no matter what) is the speed of light, if you need ordering in any transaction you are in trouble, and no classic service requires that for all transactions in its scope, we figured out partitions, row locks, and shards a long time ago.
Yeah, and I always say git with commit signing is a cryptographic block chain in the loosest sense. But in this context I was of course referring to the proof of work/stake BS. In git the proof of work is the work you put into writing the source code. There is actual value in it, not just fictional speculative value.
> The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database.
Care to elaborate? I have been using Bitcoin now 10+ to store my wealth and make payments, and it has been very convenient - not much time needed to use it, and I think I've gotten plenty of value for my time-investment.
What kind of database would you recommend to make it more convenient? Maybe you can write a guide how to implement decentralized value transfer and storage system on top of PostgreSQL, so that the amount of tokens is limited to 21 Million, with similar security guarantees?
my naive self was just looking at a lot of what apps were doing:
- waiting for users to do very simple things (gather a few fields, expand a template, store)
- sleep during the night (as their users were sleeping too)
- emit very small amount of data
- struggle with security
- reimplement 70s business but on top of digital network
in some corners of society this kind of tools (doctor appointments) seemed to be a net benefit, you can now book your GP even if it's 10pm, the system was ready to fire.
and when I see some news on zk parallel vm for smart contracts i feel some valid technical quality..
but maybe it's really just a fools errand i don't know
Most of my transactions go through credit card, that means every time I exchange money for services/goods a private corporation takes a 3% cut. That makes sense to you but the dream of BTC doesn't?
Of course it turned into a gambling scam filled cesspool like most human endeavours, but the initial dream was sound.
You say this right when your central banks went on a massive money printing spree, shot up inflation beyond their own baseline for years, and have created a frankenstenian K-shaped economy where everyone who is not in the top 10-20% is getting actively poorer
It doesn't take a lot to figure out that hard currencies with some supply cap tend to hold value better. BTC might not be it - it might be gold or silver - but you really can't ignore the inflation issues inherent in fiat currencies anymore.
Deflationary "currencies" like crypto are significantly worse (why spend when you can HODL). Regular crypto "currencies" will have the exact same effects.
> why spend when you can HODL
You touch upon an important point: the entire foundation of our current economic system is built on high velocity of money. You are incentivized to spend rather than hold because without it, there's no mindless conspicuous consumption. A deflationary currency will grind this system to a halt
But the question you need to ask is: has all this mindless consumption really done us any real good? For the handful of genuinely useful things to come out of excessive consumption, there are a gazillion pieces of wasteful crap that clogs homes first, then landfills
A deflationary currency is bad for the current economic system. But that doesn't mean it's bad by itself.
Lol. All you have to do is think about five seconds without going into rants about over consumption.
Let's take Bitcoin. It has a predefined limited supply. That is, it already has an artificial deficit built-in. On top of that, obtaining bitcoin becomes exponentially more expensive over time (until it becomes impossible once all the bitcoin has been "mined"). Now you have to spend many magnitudes more resources to obtain even a tiny fraction of a bitcoin.
So even in the absence of any external world to compare to (e.g. without denominating Bitcoin in USD) why would anyone spend a limited resource they obtained? Especially considering that even today getting even a single bitcoin through traditional mining is nearly impossible except for the filthy rich miners running industrial-scale data centers.
So you are saying there would be a limited resource becoming exponentialy more expensive over time? I guess there might occur a demand for such a resource? And mayhaps in that case the holders might decide to exchange it for some other assets they desire?
(ofc thats not the 100% correct description of bitcoin which depreciated against most other assets ytd but the idea still stands)
> So you are saying there would be a limited resource becoming exponentialy more expensive over time?
I'm not saying it. It is literally what Bitcoin is, and other deflationary "currencies".
> And mayhaps in that case the holders might decide to exchange it for some other assets they desire?
Keyword is "some".
In 2010 when bitcoin was novelty and had no value at all, someone paid 10 000 (yes, that's ten thousand) bitcoins for two pizzas. Now imagine bitcoin becomes a currency, as some cryptobros still prophesize. You have a constant pool of money for all "assets", and no way to get more money.
At least for me, the big selling point was being able to send money fast and relatively cheap. Back then you either had PayPal, or wire transfer. PP could easily freeze and hold your money over whatever issues, while bank transfer was slow.
And, mind you, I only purchased/sold legal stuff.
This is only a selling point in places like USA. Even before moving to the USA 13 years ago I was able to send money via wire transfer domestically for free, and it settled within 1 business day (to me that's fast enough). IIUC nowadays intra-EU wire transfers also are free (but I kinda view them as "domestic"), however I'm not sure how quickly they settle. The way how banking worked in the US was definitely one of the biggest culture shocks I've experienced when moving (and not in a positive way).
Less than 10 seconds for SEPA Instant. Still some stragglers, but I have understood coverage starts to be pretty good.
....coverage is obliged by ECB since of 01.10.2025 :-) (for 100% implementation, some banks had earlier already the option to receive them but it was not widely used as nearly no one was able to send before the regulatory forces stepped up to enforce support for it)
Yep, that's what I thought nano had done:
instant, fee's a fraction of a cent, I thought this was it, international payments that don't rely on visa/mastercard!
and then it just went no where :\
Turns out nobody is actually interested in transacting with crypto otherwise Nano would have been a winner. I also love Banano, a Nano fork where you mine by folding proteins. Work that has actual value.
Because in practice services like TransferWise solved this problem using fiat currencies with fees low enough not to make it worth bothering with crypto.
Man they don't solve it for me. They charge much more for using a credit card vs a checking account, especially when going across currencies, and I consider it pretty dumb to share my checking account information around when I can control things much more easily with a credit card. And literally any fee they charge is more than what nano charges. It's just that nobody takes nano :(
I duno, I still can't make a payment on the net without Visa or Mastercard, still a problem to be solved to me
Looks like other people still trying to solve as well:
> Earlier this year, Coinbase changed online payments forever with a new protocol called x402. But could this technology really usher in a new age of 'machine to machine' payments? Let's run it...
> I still can't make a payment on the net without Visa or Mastercard
Let me introduce you to the wonders of Discover.
For larger amounts it makes sense to use the bitcoin rails for international transfers. I'm doing bank to bank international transfers and using bitcoin saves around 3% compared to Wise and you get the money immediately (or within 1hr, depending on what you use).
Few years ago I needed to transfer a big sum from a Scandinavian country into Euro. The official bank exchange rate plus fees was worse than Wise’s. But I asked the bank and the bank gave me an exchange rate that was like 0.1% better than one from wise.
Depending on the direction, but there are ways to actually make a little extra on top of the middle exchange rate (e.g. on the USD to EUR path), since there are many people that want to buy no-KYC bitcoin in Europe and they are willing to pay a couple % extra.
Every time I try to use TramsferWise, I end up jumping through KYC hoops for hours - days. Sending crypto is much simpler and faster.
Nano is pretty amazing, but, yeah, the interest is in profit not the technology, so it's fading into the background. Pity.
Almost every cryptocurrency starts out with low fees and then fees increase when it gets popular and runs into processing limits.
Okay full disclosure, I believe in stablecoins only but what are your thoughts on nano. It has zero fees and I worked using its zero fees to store data/timestamps in it by nanotimestamps
Personally I prefer usdc on polygon
> what are your thought on nano. It has zero fees
I repeat:
> Almost every cryptocurrency starts out with low fees and then fees increase when it gets popular and runs into processing limits.
The funny thing is that a lot of early Bitcoin advocates did recognize the blockchain's inefficiency
well actually, you could build a network on top of that (expensive) database... hmm... it's kind of starting to sound like SWIFT.
but you have: no rollbacks, no refunds, no governance to stop bad actors you do gain: immunity from government decisions, theft by state and independence
as unpopular as it might sound like, bitcoin is great for criminals, yes you could say "who decides what is a criminal", well let's make this simple: people who murder and steal.
edit: by "murder and steal" I generally mean something that is "lawfully and/or morally disallowed"
> bitcoin is great for criminals
Never understood this soundbite, and I used to be a criminal. Bitcoin is horrible because literally everything is tracked, with minor benefits compared to just dealing with cash or still the best, using the banks you know who look to the side when you need to clean your cash.
The tricky part remains to wash the money, and bitcoin doesn't make that easier, it makes that part harder. But "Bitcoin is great for criminals" is a nice little signal that the person echoing that soundbite probably don't actually know what they're talking about.
it becomes significantly easy to store money and launder it whenever, it's what all indian scammers do: get it out of the banking system into crypto
> and launder it whenever
Again, there is no "LaunderBTCAndTurnIntoUSD" function in the Bitcoin protocol...
> get it out of the banking system into crypto
And please describe how you do so without involved A) banks who look the other way and B) registered companies who handle the on/off-ramping from/to BTC.
When people argue that it makes it so much easier to launder money, please spend at least a minute to actually figure out how that will work in practice, and you'll understand that Bitcoin makes the laundering HARDER than what it is with cash, not easier...
Ok you seem to be pretty outdated I won't blame you for that so I'll catch you up to speed and when I refer to bitcoin I generally refer to any tier 1 crypto currency:
There is actually a BitcoinToUSDPipeline. The real problem is that the exchange crypto transactions are NON REFUNDABLE as you know, that means once it leaves the banking system (via making victim register a coinbase or kraken account, or register it for them using their credential information and compromised webcam for liveliness checks) you have an unlimited amount of time to do whatever. There are also various real life ways of bitcoin atm, using card to buy <1k giftcards (no kyc).
Okay you have your money in bitcoin, now what? Well, welcome to dex - decentralized exchanges. Using smart contracts you can wrap your btc into eth-btc, using etc-btc you can now trade it to any other crypto currency no strings attached and the most popular currently is tron.
Tron has tons of merchants which will simply swap from a to b from two different liquidity pools and those transactions are done off-chain and exist only on their database, since there are usually dozens of transactions mixed it becomes increasingly difficult to continue your investigation without having to use the slow legal route which is especially difficult if the merchant is offshore often ending up in a dead-end, at that point only INTERPOL really has the power and resources to trace it. Liquidity pools are used for perfectly legal reasons and it is not like tornado cash.
Now you have two choices: just spend the money directly (in Georgia (the country) everyone accepts crypto), buy giftcards or if you don't really care and aren't doing anything interpol would be interested in just deposit to binance and withdraw to your bank account, depending on your local government they might not even care.
> so I'll catch you up to speed
Great, finally someone in this submission who know what they're talking about, exciting!
> in Georgia (the country) everyone accepts crypto
Oh no, another larper. You cannot walk around Georgia expecting to pay everywhere in BTC/USDT like you would with cash or a standard card, and I'm not sure what you're basing the information on because it's surely not based on personal experience.
Guess we'll continue waiting for people with actual knowledge to drop by.
Georgia is from personal experience, everywhere I went was crypto accepted even the small coffee shops accepted crypto (none accepted btc tho) and just to clear it up: you don't rely on crypto for everything, small amounts via some kind of systematic b2b laundering to cover the bases and crypto for larger purchases (you can buy a car!). There are also people who will exchange thousands of crypto for cash in one go, the criminal infrastructure for crypto is massive.
1) I mean, also great for anyone who sells stuff on places like Craigslist, where the recommendation is to take cash? Taking the standpoint "the consumer is always always correct and refunds should be trivial" sort of works for larger companies that can amortize scams, but you enable a different form of crime (fraud) by adding that feature to small-scale transactions. Hell: many of the modern payment rails you now have to use to buy stuff from vendors at fairs don't have user-accessible refund mechanisms, including Zelle.
2) To the extent to which you really want those features, they are no different than any other in their ability to be built on top of a decentralized database, but now can be done in a way where the rules can be open and anyone can experiment: as an example, you could put your funds into a smart contract that only can transfer money to other people through an escrow mechanism which holds onto the funds for a net-30 period and pays a small fee to the protocol; you then could have the people who own the protocol governance token (and would receive the fees) vote on members to sit on a refund arbitration council (which needs to be somewhat fair or people will stop using the network, crashing the fees they are paid, aligning the incentives in a similar manner to a centralized business doing the same).
> let's make this simple: people who murder and steal.
So many Western governments and their elected officials? The US? Israel?
What about the people in international waters Trump keeps bombing and calling drug criminals? I'm so confused about how you're able to make the delineation of those who "murder and steal" to mean criminals, given that such a distinction puts the government square in the spotlight, and many of the people whom they spend relatively insane amount of resources to target target: drug users/pushers, political activists, immigrants, etc.
Distributed ledgers are good for... targeted activists, people who don't want the government to have the power to arbitrarily weaken their buying power, people seeking safe drugs and medicines, just about anyone needing to be anonymous, and regular people who don't need to justify their economic transactions or risk their wealth being diluted. This "criminals" angle is just farcical, ignorant, and also very tired... you're not the first to suggest it.
you could call them criminals, many do, activists are also criminals from the view of politicans I generally just used "who murder and steal" as a basic notion of "it's good for people who are in trouble with the law"
Legal and morally right are two different things though.
criminals are not always bad people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrFs2_uhz-o
and to break it down lawfully or/and morally bad:
lawfully bad, morally bad = bad and crypto is one of the major tools in your arsenal
lawfully bad, morally good = neutral, but you are a prosecuted criminal, crypto is helpful for you but there are alternatives
lawfully good, morally bad = bad, but not a prosecuted criminal, crypto is not that useful for you
lawfully good, morally good = you are not a criminal, crypto is not that useful for youLaws at least have the advantage of being written down. Morals are different for everyone and not constant in time even in a single individual.
Laws aren't always written down. A good example is what happens if you criticize Israel - the government, if it notices you, will come down on you like a sack of bricks, even though there's no law that says "don't criticize Israel". https://youtu.be/zJt3omLLAuA
Likewise, there's no law saying "don't accept payment in Monero" but you may be jailed for money laundering if the government notices you.
Ideology can be blinding. It was never about the technology.
It might have been for first few months. And then it kinda got into becoming rich or kings of future world...
Or a more charitable explanation; the ecosystem was initially filled with people caring about the ideology and technology, but as money got involved, people who cared more about accumulating money started taking over more and more of the ecosystem.
The initial people still exist, although they are few compared to the money people who've infected the ecosystem.
> Now the uninformed gambling on futuristic sounding hokum? THAT is easy to understand.
Yes... During a hype rush, sell memes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusion...
>I've never understood the initial arguments about Bitcoin, no matter how many times they've been explained to me.
>Proceeds to provide their opinion.
At this point you are wayyyy behind schedule, even if you hold an anti-crypto position like me, you recognize the benefits of Bitcoin, otherwise you would claim that even the most popular/first/best coin is completely useless.
I'd invite you to seek to understand the initial arguments on Bitcoin instead of trying to convince us of your views on Bitcoin. Like, the topic is very deep and you are stuck in the first step.
Apparently, some fraction of the population is willing to believe whatever makes them rich.
Amen. Bitcoin barely manages to continue to function, while currently handling 0.0000001% of the worlds money transfers. The idea that we could base any substantial part of our financial system on a globally serialized transaction ledger is a laughable joke.
As a technical experiment, I love bitcoin, and I have thoroughly enjoyed wasting some of my own time on it. But it's not mainstream, and it never will be.
> I've never understood the initial arguments about Bitcoin, no matter how many times they've been explained to me.
Because it's a cult, like the "AGI is coming in 2027" cult thinks we're on the brink of skynet level world destruction, it'll come and go and 99% of the people who fell for it will tell you they never really truly actually believed
To understand why crypto became popular requires understanding that there was a massive anti-America (and by extension, anti-USD) sentiment in the 00s and 10s, mostly on the heels of America's various wars in the Middle East. For some brief period of time, America was the evil imperialist global enemy number one, even in the eyes of many American people. There was practically a patriotism crisis in America around when Trump first came to power.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine completely hard-flipped this overnight. America once again became the good guys of the world, and with it died any serious movements to disrupt the USD and greater financial status quo. More critically it also started the narrative that China might do to Taiwan what Russia is doing to Ukraine. It basically brought the world back into the late-20th-century good guys in the West versus bad guys in the East bipolarity.
I think a lot more important for understanding crypto is learning the first bitcoin was minted in January 2009, months off of the heel of the Lehman Brothers filing for bankruptcy, and more notably the "start" of the 2008 financial crisis
Anti-Americanism was well underway by that point. I think the impetus from both distrust in the American government and in Wall St really gave crypto the runway.
> The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database.
It's the cost of it being out of control of any single party. Efficiency and convenience are worth nothing if you have a system someone can just wipe out or manipulate.
Have you experienced hyperinflation in your lifetime? Have the generational assets of your family been seized by totalitarian government? I think you'd understand better if you lived through events where your wealth very painfully was just an "entry" in the efficient system someone else controls (badly).
> I've never understood the initial arguments about Bitcoin, no matter how many times they've been explained to me.
This may not help much, but it's really a (self-)governance thing. That's why they start their article like so:
> I donated to Gary Johnson as a starry-eyed libertarian. On top of being a staunch Randian, I was into computer programming, so crypto was a natural fit for me. The cypherpunk ethos attracted me. (...) Being able to walk across the border with a billion dollars in your head is and always will be a powerful idea to me.
It is also why you keep hearing about crypto transactions being primarily used for illegal stuff. Just like with the uber-free-speech p2p platforms, it primaily benefits those who'd be otherwise hampered. Who, contrary to the usual talking points, are usually not actually so innocent or respectable.
But then we do keep sliding back, so maybe it's only a matter of time the proportions shift, and the claims of these technologies' justness stop being so false and hollow. And maybe these events and processes are further not actually uncorrelated. Trust is at an all time low and dwindling, after all.
I've recently used Bitcoin to pay for several legitimate items because the fiat financial system just decided not to let me pay with my debit card, for no apparent reason.
I agree with the article and I hold 0 crypto right now. But I still think it's amazing that I can hold something limited, something I can exchange for real money, in my head, just based on math. Sure it is extremely inefficient database, and pretty much all the real value needs to be linked with real world banking, but it does have some really unique features that makes me sad that it (predictably) turned to just scams and speculation.
Edit: and the other feature I like is that I could just attach my code to the raw banking backend. People say that anyways everybody just uses exchanges, and that's true, but if you'd ever want to connect to banking backend, you'd get buried in paperwork. With crypto, you'd just run or connect to a node.
> just scams and speculation
The "currency" part is actually the only one that is not a scam, as long as you understand what it is and the trade-offs it makes.
If you do actually have a legitimate reason to use it (because conventional payment rails are not available, or you're doing crime, or need pseudonymity), it is a perfectly fine tool.
> The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database
The point is to be a database that isn’t controlled by a central authority, rather by the majority of its users.
I think block chains are inherently fine. The issue with bitcoin is that it isn't inflationary. Yes, yes, the supply increases over time, but that's also true for gold, and I've yet to hear anyone call gold inflationary. If a declining unit value is not guaranteed over time then it cannot be used as a currency and just becomes a savings vehicle / speculative asset. This is why all central banks aim for inflation. Try telling the true believers this and they'll reply with something about "sound money", seemingly nostalgic for the gold standard or something. It's rather disheartening.
> sound money
Perhaps they're the new incarnation of audiophiles.
I think the sort of libertarian mythos of crypto is very appealing to a lot of people. Escape the big bad man and so on.
The crypto ecosystem though is totally disconnected tho...
It is an amusing and potentially even good concept, but with one caveat - you only consider close enough exchanges with similar peers. To translate that into English - a fully libertarian self-sufficient settlement where people are exchanging home-made stuff between one another. Because everyone was the same and no one could abuse the system, it may even worked. We even seen it in the early criminal communities, when BTCs briefly were a medium of exchange for drugs. And then tokenbros made a leap of faith and magically scaled that to the whole world. Which obviously didn't work in practice. Their famous Lightening L2 is an abomination of hacks and centralization and it still doesn't scale.
The problem of BTC was at the same time overabundance of imagination in one area and a big gap in imagination how the world actually works. They only saw simple isolated scenarios and never a globalized economy.
>How anyone, especially many intelligent people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top of such a unwieldy piece of technology is beyond me.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
Because... Nothing else achieves that? Besides a centralised database, which is extremely vulnerable to censorship - as seen when Visa blocked Steam from selling porn games.
read the original Satoshi paper
all the 3rd party summaries/interpretations of this paper are problematic. Read the original.
The whitepaper has some problems. Satoshi isn't automatically right and virtually no one uses Bitcoin/crypto the way Satoshi envisioned. Arguably if you judge Bitcoin based on the whitepaper it is a complete failure.
I’m not sure the paper or the character Satoshi himself matter anymore. Once you have a preeminent coin with fiat power behind it, the details of a paper and the wherewithal to reinvent that coin more purely are irrelevant. Once a particular political family signaled that control starting in Sept 2024, keeping close to that family reassured you of a bailout or pardon.
I can send a billion dollars to someone in Uganda with no intermediary or oversight. This was not only impossible before but most likely would never have been a possibility. Being able to hold massive amounts of value in the ether and control it from anywhere, you don’t find that impressive? Sure, this is mostly used for nefarious activities, but let’s not pretend it’s solving no problems. It’s incredibly difficult to transfer money into a third world country without incurring massive fees, unless you use crypto.
Okay, let's image that I've sent you 100 BTC. Now, can you tell me how exactly you would convert the "money" I've sent you into bread and milk?
Because, most of the time people say that just in the context of the blockchain. In that sense I can also say that you can control vast majority of money by just having knife and glove skins in Steam (for the game Counter Strike). You also can trade/send/receive. But the moment you decide that you want to convert to "food" all sorts of problems arise that are worse than what banks offer.
I'm telling you as a person who received salary in crypto while living under sanctioned country
Yes, you convert them into bread and milk the same way you convert little pieces of paper into bread and milk: You find someone who's willing to give you bread and milk in return for them.
Good luck finding someone who will accept btc for literal bread and milk
There are massive P2P economies already built in most third world nations that work on crypto. They prefer stablecoins but will happily accept BTC as well. It's a serious enough problem that they've started using code words to refer to crypto currencies ("goat" for USDT, "chicken" for ETH, etc.)
If a corrupt third world government is scared of a piece of tech, it is, imo, good tech
bitrefill.com
I'm pretty sure I could find someone who'd accept 1 BTC for bread and milk. After that, we're just haggling over price.
People are already using crypto in this way so you can stop fighting the hypothetical.
There is no conversion of money into goods, only exchange of money for goods.
I'll give you some bread and milk for 100 BTC if you want. I'll even fly to your country to personally deliver them to your house.
How exactly can you send a billion dollars to someone in Uganda using Bitcoin?
Purchase and sale of bitcoin is highly regulated and obviously tracked - and the blockchain itself provides little privacy - I’m guessing state-level actors have already attached identities to most of the wallet addresses out there.
So if I hand you access to $1 billion dollars - cash or in a bank account - how could I practically get $1 billion dollars to an individual in Uganda so that they could spend the dollars?
There are people that hold billions in Bitcoin and they could send it to someone in Uganda without friction, do you dispute this? You’re being pedantic, stick to the hypothetical. Change the example to $1,000 and yes it’s trivial to do and will be cheaper and quicker than using traditional systems.
A lot of countries don't have access to bank-accounts, by not having valid id's for example. But they do have cellphones so they can download crypto apps to accept payment for jobs etc. And then there is the money receiving from relatives in other countries, yes.
Truer words have never been spoken.
Someone called J.Powell decides the price of US dollar. Bitcoin fixes this by inserting an algorithmic monetary policy, never seen in human history before.
How does Jerome Powell decide the price of a dollar? How does an algorithm fix that? What is being fixed?
Jerome Powell sets the future price of the dollar by setting a goal that is achieved by the Fed creating dollars and buying bonds (or selling bonds).
> What is being fixed?
A small group of people decide how much currency is circulated and can be used as debt, which creates inflation or deflation. Also there is no democratic process that can be used to control this small group of people, other than a repeal of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.
> How does an algorithm fix that?
As an example, Bitcoin's algorithm has a fixed schedule in which new BTC is created. People can voluntarily use or not use BTC as a currency based on this currency creation schedule (vs. arbitrary creation that comes with fiat currency). This algorithm can only change by actors that take hashing majority on the Bitcoin network.
Maybe in their head it's still back before 1976 where we have the Bretton Woods system, there's no foreign exchange market and policymakers set the price of dollars against gold?
Dude, you might not belong to our civilization. Sorry.
If by “price of the US dollar” you mean “direction of financial sentiment”, then yes.
But that’s a big mistake.
What do you mean? Technically it works, no?
it is an incovenient database, for sure, but the fact that people can trust it enough that they put billions of dollars in it is remarkable.
I wouldn’t put my house in an S3 bucket…
You wouldn’t put your house “in a blockchain”, either. What is it you think you’re saying, here?
I meant an amount of money that’s equivalent to the value of my house…
TLDR: to understand bitcoin you have to see the problem it's solving - most people are blind to it even though it affects their lives terribly.
https://x.com/saylor/status/1878154748353818932
> "The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database. How anyone, especially many intelligent people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top of such a unwieldy piece of technology is beyond me."
The answer to your question is humans' inability to resist printing money out of thin air if it's possible to, and the disastrous effects it has on the world. Bitcoin is money that can't be printed out of thin air by anybody. The only way to obtain it is by providing work of equal economic value.
Look up the M2 money supply over the decades and realise that each time it doubles, the value of your wages, savings and pension are halved. Worse still, that value is stolen, sucked out into the hands of the people above you in the fiat pyramid scheme (see the Cantillon Effect).
It's one of the most important inventions in the history of mankind. This is because it shuts down the biggest scam in the history of mankind - central banking. Bitcoin's positive effect on the world is to restore power to the people and end their monetary-based enslavement - the changes will be profound.
Your comment assumes that the purpose of an economic system is to preserve a financial status quo. It isn't, and shouldn't be. Inflation incentivizes people to put their money to productive uses in the economy (capital formation) rather than hoarding resources.
The purposes of money are:
- store of value
- unit of account (a measuring stick for value)
- medium of exchange
Allowing the financial system to inflate the money supply destroys two of those fundamental qualities. The fact it can additionally charge interest on the money funnels the stolen value into its hands.
Interest on money loaned out is the only incentive required for putting money to "productive uses". Nothing about hard money affects that. In fact inflation only causes the people at the top of the pyramid to hoard all of the economic value instead. They are buying up and hoarding the entire world with the wealth they are taking from the people.
Bitcoin was envisioned by its creator to be used as a currency. To buy and sell stuff using it. If you ask today what is bitcoin you'll be told that it is a store of value. The purpose of money is not to be a store of value. It can be, but that is not its purpose which the case of bitcoin clearly illustrates.
> Interest on money loaned out is the only incentive required for putting money to "productive uses".
And what is the incentive to loan money in your system?
To become a medium of exchange, it needs to become a unit of account. That will happen as it's value stabilises, and that will only happen once it's proved itself as a store of value.
What if Henry Ford evisaged his Model T being used as a temporary alternative for when your horse is unwell? Or a fairground ride? Bitcoin is what it is.
> And what is the incentive to loan money in your system?
Interest - the age-old solution. Offer me interest that both compensates me for not having use of my money and for the risk of getting it back, and we have a deal.
Value can only stabilise if there's either someone in charge adjusting the rate of printing to maintain a stable value. It cannot be done algorithmically as there's no way to determine the value from inside the system.
Non-deflationary currencies encourage hoarding which leads to wild swings in value. Deflationary currencies do much better. Look at the price chart of BTC vs XMR.
It depends how you measure value. By stabilise I mean stops growing in value by 50%/yr with big short term swings of 80%.
As it matures and gets close to it's ultimate value, volatility will naturally reduce.
Once it is used as the unit of account, everything else will fluctuate in value relative to bitcoin, which has more stable fundamentals than anything else on earth (fixed/zero issuance, liquidity etc), but this will be decades in the future when it's dollar value will be 8 or 9 figures in today's money
> By stabilise I mean stops growing in value by 50%/yr with big short term swings of 80%.
Yeah, so that can't happen unless it's used for actual trade more than it's hoarded, which can't happen unless it's inflationary.
Bitcoin is also money printed out of thin air. Bitcoin is also a fiat currency. It may be impossible to change the rate of Bitcoin printing, but it's definitely possible to print more cryptocurrencies (see Ethereum, Monero, Solana, Tron, etc), it's definitely the case that bitcoin's non-deflationary nature is terrible for it as a medium of exchange as it encourages hoarding and destabilises the value, and it's definitely the case that it's impossible for any currency with a fixed issuing rate to maintain a stable value.
Is monopoly money a threat to the dollar? Does Hasbro need to report to the Fed how much it has issued each year?
People will only hoard hard money until they need to buy things after they've run out of the state's fiat tokens to try and sell.
Look up Gresham's and Thier's Laws
What?
Alas, any comments trying to talk about the problem are getting buried. They don't understand the solution because they stick their fingers in their ears when someone tries to show the problem. Of course a solution doesn't make sense if there is no problem.
We have to remember 2008 was 17 years ago. People who were born during the crisis are now adults. The tragedy is there might not necessarily be another huge crisis. We blew it 17 years ago. We didn't fix anything. People stopped talking about financial reform about a decade ago. So now we might just have to live with a system where a few elites are creaming the top of the money supply. A system where the brightest and most talented people go and work for something like Jane Street, spending their days playing games and trading bits of paper with each other, causing real effects for people doing actual work, but adding nothing of value themselves but taking loads.
This Douglas Adams quote explains a lot:
> I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
The thing is - the world young people are accustomed to is just a carefully managed matrix. There are glitches.
"Why do house prices endlessly rise?"
"Why am I working so hard in such a technologically advanced world yet can't even afford to raise a family?"
Once you see the reason, you can't unsee it.
We also have Gresham's and Thier's Laws on our side.
> I've never understood the initial arguments about Bitcoin, no matter how many times they've been explained to me.
Bitcoin has a great mythology associated with it. People over emphasize the technical aspects, i think its the "story" that made it succeed. Its about taking back "control" from the man. People love an underdog story, people love a rebellion story. Lots of people in the tech space are anti-establishment or libertarian. Bitcoin is the perfect fulfillment of the dream of that ideology.
When people try to sell bitcoin, they aren't selling merkle-trees, they are selling "freedom".
I think if it was actually just about digital currency, then chaumian ecash would have taken off. It technically has a central party but not in a way that matters. It makes so much more sense than bit coin. But it doesnt have the total freedom story.
> How anyone, especially many intelligent people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top of such a unwieldy piece of technology is beyond me.
I mean, it did work. It is a shitty currency no doubt, but you can buy and sell stuff with it. There are bitcoin atms in my neighbourhood. I think the bigger mystery is not how anyone thought it could be a currency, but how the hell something so silly actually sort of became one (albeit bad one)
You say bitcoin is "so silly". Please give me an example of anything better for nation states to hold as reserves and to transact with other nations with.
I'll even allow you an imaginary thing as long as it's constrained by the real world.
Fiat currency. (So-called petro dollar)
Gold.
There is a reason why no countries are using bitcoin as a reserve currency.
So the bitcoin market cap is currently at $1.8 trillion.
You can compare that to USD M0 which is $5 trillion or EUR M0 which is around €4 trillion.
Not bad for an "extremely inconvenient database".
Market cap is pretty hypothetical though - if somebody actually tried to liquidate $50bn of bitcoin into fiat money you'd probably send the BTC price to about zero...
South Sea Company at its height was worth almost 3x British GDP. Not bad for a company "with negligible business activities"!
We've been hearing the story for years already that the Bitcoin value will go to zero.
Slippage yo. Market cap means jack shit if the true order book is thin like a slice of carpaccio.
I guarantee you that blockchain tech can solve a real, extremely important problem, though it's only a problem for some people. If you're connected to the money printers, then it's useless to you. Just like if you worked for a company like Enron which was cooking the books, 'honest accounting' would not be a solution for you; 'honest accounting' would be a problem for a company like Enron and everyone who works for Enron.
Proof of Work is highly inefficient and inconvenient. I agree to this.
Cryptocurrency sector is mostly a scam; or at the very least, a kind of casino. I Agree to this; though my understanding is that it has been corrupted by mainstream financial interests; just like Africa is kept corrupt and poor by some of those same interests. Then the plebs basically blame African people for 'choosing this'.
I've worked for some very successful crypto founders who became corrupt. I saw the change happening. The desire to improve things turned into self-sabotage. It was unlike any other company I ever worked for; nothing made sense. Yet I know for a fact that government regulators gave their approval. I witnessed the EU commission give grants to scam projects with nothing behind it, then these same founders got funding again and again after failed projects. It was all announced publicly though it took some time to understand that the projects were scams from the beginning... But like they got money from a government entity and they didn't build anything AT ALL. Then they got more funding on their next project... Weird right?
Proof of Stake is actually highly efficient; it's basically a ledger with dynamic runtime replication ability.
Unless you fully understand the current mechanism of how money is created globally; including the Eurodollar system and how stablecoins, derivatives and other financial constructs could be used for legal counterfeiting, you should not speak about the utility of blockchain.
> you should not speak about the utility of blockchain.
But most of the engineering around blockchain was to improve throughput (ie off chain transactions)
Its not like you can really do fractional reserve banking on the blockchain, well not practically. this means that you can't treat it like "money" ie the ever increasing supply of non-central bank controlled cash (ie your eurodollar, yen etc.)
There is no utility in stablecoins. They are basically joint stock company, but without an income, or case law to help you when it goes pop. Of course they are popular because they have no regulation and can basically do what banks do, but without any of the oversight need for stability/fraud prevention. "we are going to act like an investment bank, and create money, oh no, not by securities, but by word of mouth, that word being pyramid."
>> I witnessed the EU commission give grants to scam projects with nothing behind it, then these same founders got funding again and again after failed projects. <<
could you share some links here to these EU-supported projects?
I never got the whole larger "crypto" economy. The number of meaningless alt coins. That come and go most of the time, build on zero any type but speculative value. Worse than any fiat.
And then stable coins. Fancy IOUs of fiat. Which might or might not have actual assets backing them. Which you might or might not be able to redeem. Say if Russian government had a billion in whatever stable coin. Could they redeem them and get real dollars transferred to some account they own?
What is there to get? Do you get sports betting or lotteries? People play games. They invent arbitrary rules with real consequences and try to "win".
Back in school we used to do things like "dare" people to do something or bet on a coin toss or something with the stakes being a snack or a desirable bit of stationery. I feel like everyone believes there is some clear boundary where things suddenly become "grown up" and "real". Do you remember when you became "grown up"? No? Nobody does. The secret is it never happens. The only difference is children have no "real" assets to play with.
What makes some derivative traded on Wall Street, like a "synthetic CDO", any more or less meaningful than alt coins?
I think the second line is touching on something. The implication is that there may be a kind of legal cross-nation counterfeiting happening. Stablecoins likely play a part. When I worked in crypto back in 2017, all the successful people would tell me that they thought there was something really wrong with Tether and they all believed it was propping up Bitcoin. They expected it to collapse any day... But here we are 8 years later.
Ideally, countries should only be allowed to issue their own currency. It's not hard to see why a country being able to print another country's currency would pose a problem... With all money being digital and stored on thousands of distinct bank ledgers which basically don't have consensus, it would be very difficult to track with manual audits and with the current incentives in place. It would be trivial to hide these transactions under legitimate names as various forms of international payments.
regardless, they found a way for two parties to exchange wealth without trusting each other. the failures were letting it diverge from being a currency into a speculation instrument. It failed in being a low-cost wallet that we can pay our restaurant tab with.
The blockchain is an excellent distributed storage system for anything that should be immutable, such as contract hashes like notarial deeds, vehicle sales, and digital identities, which are not controlled by any central authority (if the blockchain is truly distributed) and are verifiable and tamper-proof. NFTs are the toy experiment that demonstrates this path.
It is therefore also usable as a currency, with fungible tokens, where the transactions per second (TPS) are sufficiently high, not for Bitcoin, therefore, but for example, Solana is already adequate; its performance and economic model are sufficient to pay for your local café.
That, without widespread acceptance, they have limited use, initially for crime, then for speculation, is another matter, but it is not a technical issue. The technical issues are quite different: https://blog.dshr.org/2025/09/the-gaslit-asset-class.html
To understand Bitcoin you need to forget the technology and first understand the problem. You need to understand what caused the 2008 financial crisis and how it resulted in us collectively funnelling more value into the hands of useless bankers. You need to understand that there are people who are literally spending their days playing games with each other, trading bits of paper and making silly deals and bets. If you don't understand the word "literally" or don't believe it, read more, study harder. If you don't understand a zero sum game or how this nonsense fucks up the lives of regular people, read more.
Read The Big Short by Michael Lewis. You could even start with the film by Adam McKay who also gets it. Then read Other People's Money by John Kay.
Only once you understand the problem can you begin to understand why a trustless digital cash would be good for us. Bitcoin is simply the first viable solution to the problem. If you can come up with a better one you'll change the world.
OK, suppose the whole world used a trustless digital cash. Now you cannot do monetary policy. Now booms are booms and busts are busts and we are back to the early 1900s. Great.
Actually what would likely happen is that people would be incentivized to opt-in a digital currency with a monetary policy knob, and this would again become the de facto currency that everyone uses.
The problem with 2008 was corruption not monetary policy.
"Monetary policy" in reality simply means printing more money than is ever destroyed. It's human nature and always will be.
This means bitcoin's average price will go up forever when priced in fiat tokens. Or anything else for that matter - even gold's above-ground stock doubles every 35 years. How's that for an incentive?
The largest amounts of value will always settle in the best store of value for large amounts of value. Show me one with better fundamentals than bitcoin.
>>The largest amounts of value will always settle in the best store of value for large amounts of value. Show me one with better fundamentals than bitcoin.
Thats Gresham's Law
No solution is perfect. Come up with a better one. More regulation, however, is not what we need. We need to decide what we want the financial sector to actually do, and that probably doesn't involve a bunch of children playing games.
Just because no solution is perfect doesn't mean we should adopt a solution worse than the status quo.
The thread is "I don't understand Bitcoin".
Or you know, people understand bitcoin fine they just disagree.
That you don't understand something doesn't mean everyone else is wrong.
The Emperor was very pleased that everyone was admiring his new clothes, even if he couldn’t see them himself!
No, but it doesn’t mean they’re correct either.
It's funny that you think of crypto bros as "everyone", when in reality they are very much the few.
>How anyone, especially many "intelligent" people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top...
However a currency was grafted on, is used by millions and has a $1.7tn market cap. Seems real.
The currency is absolutely not used by anyone serious as currency. Market caps are, quite obviously, representative of nothing, given the current state of the S&P. Let’s be serious.
I used it to buy some airtime on my phone. Not a very good currency maybe.
Crypto is a great technology, sadly, as every other existing financial technology it attracts scammers. However the unregulated and accessible nature of crypto opened a window for the common people into mechanisms ruling their lives, so now everyone can learn about the world.
The US crypto lobby has already raised over 240 million for the 2026 election. It’s a cancer attacking our society’s institutions.
240M is small time for US lobbying. Just saying, they are gnats compared to pharma, banking, MIC, Unions, or energy.
Is it tho? I think one of the supreme court judges sold out the US for a couple of holidays and a winnebago
> I wasted years of my life in crypto
I've wasted days of my life explaining to people why virtually all of crypto currencies and exchanges are scams.
In recent months I changed views and shifted from the desilluioned "this is a casino" mindset that is described in this article to a "we need this now" one. An example in this article [1], the US can now unilateraly decide to prevent an individual anywhere in the world from having a functioning financial life and this because of the quasi (western) duopoly that is Visa and Mastercard. Nothing against the US in general, this is simply too much power to put in a single decisional entity, whatever/wherever it is. The "crypto" related systems now seem like a needed extra option to the current payment system (the same way cash is almost always an alternative to credit/debit card payment and vice versa)
[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/11/19/n...
Understanding crypto from this type of international context focused on these sorts of issues is where it indisputably makes much sense and is seeing indisputable adoption. Low and slow but end of the day to a very large and growing problem, bitcoin+ adoption or a mass civics readjustment in the US are the solutions. Which is more likely?
So it’s an inefficient tech with a mess of problems and uneven adoption but if you want to send $1-$1mm anywhere in the globe you can. That’s very powerful tech and the implications are about as important as anything else from cryptography hitting public adoption. And all of those have been consequential.. see 30 year fight about e2ee.
If, after all these years, Crypto has not become a stable store of value that can replace a fiat currency and let you buy your groceries with it, why do we suddenly 'need it' to do that now, and what would change that will enable that to happen?
It's still not possible because of the high speculative aspect (even though stable coins offer some form of alternative but since they are anchored on the dollar, not so much). Change will happen when more people are impacted by unilateral decisions. If all of a sudden the US decided you/your business/your political party/your government is not aligned with their views, they could make sure that Visa/Mastercard/Paypal/Stripe/... stop accepting payments for that given group. Then you realize there are very little alternatives ready to go in that case (for online payments there are, but for physical ones not so much). So far this hasn't seem like a possibility at all, but, in my view at least, this has changed this past year.
That's just the money cycle. Ray Dalio explains it in his new book, "How Countries Go Broke, Principles for Navigating the Big Debt Cycle, Where We Are Headed, and What We Should Do" (https://www.principles.com/)
The short explanation is that every major currency goes through a cycle; and what you're seeing is the late stage in a currency.
I got into crypto back in 2011/2012. I used PayPal and bank wire transfer extensively back then, as I bought and sold a lot of stuff internationally - so to me bitcoin seemed like the natural next step, and a godsend to people like me. At my height, I had 100 BTC.
Eventually big events in my life happened, and I sold my coins out of necessity. I found myself unemployed, separated, and broke - so I sold everything I owned. I cashed in around $40k or so from the coins, which helped me pay off my debts and get a down payment for my house. To be honest, I personally don't know anyone from way back then that became filthy rich off crypto, most sold off their stuff when every boom cycle started again, afraid that it would be the last one...the people I know that became rich, were those that went all-in on crypto around 2017/2018. They dumped everything they had, and managed to 10x-100x their investments.
Of course, had I held onto those, I'd be set for life now. But hindsight is 20/20
But with that said, I remember around 2017/2018 when the first "real" boom occurred - that's when everyone pretty much abandoned ideals, and went into it for the money. Lots of people made life-changing money back then, and the idealistic dream was pretty much dead. "Store of value" won the war, and soon after "moon lambo".
At least for me, the writing on the wall was clearly that crypto would evolve into just another financial instrument that big finance would pump and dump periodically. Though I could not foresee a crypto-friendly US gov. entering the picture.
The worst thing about crypto is these "had I done this" calculations, which are crucifying for some.
You didnt make a mistake. There is no reason to believe 40k of coins becomes 10M... and if you keep that much on a USB drive I think it would send most insane!
Here, I'll keep it for you instead. I'm already insane so it's safe.
Like most kids, I had my Randian phase. But I grew out of it before moving to Sili Valley.
I've always been a bit of a fan of Adam Curtis' documentary style, and "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" (named after the Brautigan poem) is worth watching. I'm not sure how much of his narrative of Rand is accurate, but it's well presented:
Rand broadly attracts 2 types of people:
- The rebellious teenager. The often 'outgrow' it.
- The self made man (who in a certain way also rebels against society). These are generally the entrepreneurial types. Their understand the essence of views put forth by AR. Their views do not change over time.
Most people fall into the first category.
Most kids don't have a Rand phase. It is a good indicator for low empathy selfish idiots tho.
Hearing someone proudly describe themselves as a libertarian always reminds me of the ol’ twitter quote that goes something like “libertarians are like house cats - fiercely self-assured of their own independence, yet completely reliant on a system they don’t appreciate or understand.”
All of this was obvious 8 or so years ago during the first real boom when cryptos pants fell down. All hype no usecase. Here we are now how far along in (20 odd years?) with how many smart people making a genuine concerted effort to build something useful (literally millions over the years?) - and still the only useful thing anyone has ever done with blockchain is buy drugs and have a good time.
As I say, crypto is only useful if the whole world is already on the chain. Until then you need to trust outside sources which undermines the entire deal in trustlessness and undermines it in performance.
There are multiple countries in the world where issues like hyperinflation have pushed day-to-day transactions to crypto for everyday people.
No, there actually aren’t. People just assume there are but the majority of desperate people turn to the barter system before crypto helps them.
> I wasted years of my life in crypto
Yeah you are a software engineer. That means like 80% of your work will probably get minimal traction for a few years before burning into nothing. 8 years on crypto, probably a ton of people interacted with things he created and now it will dwindle to nothing and be replaced by the next hot thing. Sounds like a win imo.
The only smart involvement in crypto was to spend a few minutes buying Bitcoin early on and holding on to it. Everything else — all the altcoins, stablecoins, NFTs, large ecosystem of startups, VC funds, DeFi, web3, payment networks, smart contracts, blockchains – has been an immense waste of time and resources.
I disagree. Sort of. I agree that the things you listed like altcoins and stablecoins and NFTs aren't that valuable.
Note: I hate using the word "blockchain" to describe these decentralized networks hosting distributed ledgers, but it seem to be the word most people recognize. With that in mind:
Bitcoin was a first generation blockchain technology. It's the gold backed standard that supports the rest of the ecosystem and it always will be. That network should never do anything but be money.
Ethereum and all of the networks that replicate what it does are second generation blockchain technologies. They generalize what blockchain does to the degree that we can write arbitrary programs. It is a global decentralized computer, albeit a rather limited one. People use them mostly for finance because people have no idea what else to do with them.
Third generation networks are on the way. My favorite example is Polkadot and what Gavin is doing with JAM. This brings us a bit closer to what "Web3" was supposed to be about. JAM is something new, something different, upon which you can run all kinds of blockchain networks. Very few people understand how Ethereum works or how to use it. JAM is even more difficult to get your head around. But it is a radical paradigm changing technology.
The noise of altcoins and NFTs is the result of hype and greed. It overshadows Web3. It makes it nearly impossible for anyone working on Web3 tech to get any kind of coherent messaging out to the masses. And it will be that way for a while. But not forever.
All this to say that it's not wasted effort and it's not a dead end. It's just that what is valuable in the scene is almost impossible to see due to the overwhelming hype and nonsense.
For a few years there it was really fertile ground for simple fraud, a great trade if you can get away with it. Most of them did.
> your bank account would just hold USDC or Bitcoin, and you could send a billion dollars to anyone in the world in a few seconds. That belief is powerful and I still ascribe to it.
These statements still surprise me to this day. If you're a good person engineer, why does sending money in seconds need blockchain? There's parts of the world where this is commonplace and free as well.
I don't believe cross border was there in 2010 or so but why not implement that feature in an existing system instead of building out a parallel universe
The cross border not about technical capacity but legal control. For example if you are a refugee you might not be able to pull your bank savings and liquid stock with you from your home country to another without it being seized or taxed, but your crypto is always yours as long as you are the only holder of the keys. This scenario is one of the rare real world utilities I see with crypto.
A lot of countries cracked down on merchants accepting bitcoin, and in a lot of places it's illegal to offer BTC->cash conversions without KYC.
I suspect authoritarian regimes would be the first to close this loophole. This is not theoretical - Russia did this in 2022 to stop people from offloading their rubles and/or fleeing the country with their money.
Yes, there are rare use cases where this is useful. The high inflation case is one as well.
So stop talking about a parallel system and start talking about what it is, a niche product.
Your crypto still needs to be declared, even if you hold the keys. Not doing that breaks all kinds of laws and makes you jail-able.
Sure, you can hope the state won't find out about your crypto, but then how do you enjoy it?
Specifically for a refugee, at least with crypto you have the possibility to declare your assets in your destination, since you actually still hold on to them. Which is unlikely if it is tied to banks or investment platforms of an authoritarian country trying to genocide you. I understand this sounds like a fringe example but there are over 100 million forcibly displaced people globally.
I think the key difference is the inability to be (easily) deplatformed / locked out which can happen in traditional banking
You are questioning the method when people just see the need.
If you're an engineer, no matter what you say about the method, you know a country at war will make you lose all your savings. Or if you're a foreign citizen in a country that will seize your assets, even "by accident".
It is not an engineering problem, it is a geopolitical and legacy banking problem. Yes sending an encrypted message somewhere in the world in under a second is solved.
> If you're a good person engineer, why does sending money in seconds need blockchain? There's parts of the world where this is commonplace and free as well.
The promise was to make this available for everyone, to send money everywhere.
For example for me in Sweden it's really, really hard to send money directly to people in Ukraine since the Swedish banks simply refuse to send money there.
Because you don't trust or don't believe in the legitimacy of governments.
Similar thing happened to me, albeit like 6 or so years ago.
I was very young and had been "in the space" for a couple years. The concept of "decentralization" in general appealed to me as someone frustrated with the abuses of centralized power. I liked the idea of a transparent ledger and wanted to apply it to non-profit initiatives. I even spoke about this at the European Central Bank as a 20 year old (got there via anonymous paper submission -- imagine the surprise).
But very quickly I grew frustrated with how much of the space was scams, people looking to get rich quick, etc. I had been more interested in the applications of blockchain that went beyond crypto but even stopped paying attention to cryptos altogether as a speculative investment. Funny enough, a few people who were "evangelized" by me made a fair bit of money.
I'm thankful though because I got into programming at 18 to write smart contracts, and that actually changed the course of my life quite drastically.
> a transparent ledger
The only useful application of crypto/blockchain tech I've ever seen simply takes advantage of the transparent ledger as a way of tracking receipts.
One of the perfect applications is in shipping and logistics where receipt validation, transparency, and certification, is an essential part of the business.
Is there somewhere that explains this concept? When I "receive" something, there still must be trust that I correctly mark it so. By that point, doesn't it require trust, and therefore you may as well just use a trusted third party data store?
The most interesting insight here isn’t “crypto bad,” but how years in a speculation-first ecosystem warp your intuition for what real value looks like.
When incentives reward casinos over products, even talented builders end up optimizing for the wrong game. That lesson applies far beyond crypto.
They optimized for the right game: making themselves as much money as possible.
There are builders and there are opportunists. The builder's goal is to build something useful. Often the most useful things that you can build are not going to earn you a single dollar, but a builder will still go ahead and build it.
The opportunist is just trying to make personal wealth, which could come from the pockets of end customers, or investors, or other speculators (the "greater fools").
A lot of people made a lot of money from crypto and blockchain, even if ultimately almost everything built in this ecosystem is inconsequential trash.
I was thinking of how this mirrors the actions of people currently pushing AI. Or the dotcom bubble. Or "big data". The examples just keeps going...
From OP's post;
> you could send a billion dollars to anyone in the world in a few seconds. That belief is powerful and I still ascribe to it.
I'm sorry, but that just seems idiotic. Ever heard about anti-money laundering or KYC?
It is not desirable to send a billion dollars internationally "to anyone" within seconds, and certainly not without checks and irreversible. The core idea was fundamentally unrealistic from the very start.
Cynically reduced, tfa reads as: "I don't like what the population is choosing to use their brand-new Freedom for", but claims to say: "The promised freedom did not materialize."
If crypto allows people to do something that was previously not possible(order drugs in the mail with the convenience of amazon, invest at consistently insanely chaotic conditions, run multimillion hustles with total impunity) versus doing something that was possible already, just re-skinned(make bank transfers), then it's really no surprise what will see better adoption. The biggest value-add is in the degenerate stuff.
> "I don't like what the population is choosing to use their brand-new Freedom for"
I think this is a totally valid conclusion, especially for someone growing out of Randianism. It's yet another Chesterton's Fence, or someone discovering that the safety rails were there for good reasons.
I'm not sure how we got from the massive international overreach of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg to "sports gambling is now endemic and everyone has trading-themed gambling apps in their pocket". It seems like gambling is too cancerous: you can't just have a little gambling in a corner somewhere, it will take over everything if allowed to exist.
If people making bad choices is a deal-breaker for someone, then I think they might not have been a very good libertarian/randian in the first place.
Also, my point against tfa was less "the author holds a bad opinion" and more "the piece claims to talk about one thing, but actually talks about a completely different thing, drawing bad conclusions as a result."
The low-agency masses will always choose the incorrect way to use something (especially money). Nothing about what happened re: speculation in crypto should be a surprise. The technology is neutral, but basic human traits like greed will always prevail over the popular mind. That our previous cohort of financial demons has now slid into frame should be even less of a surprise.
You didn't waste time, you just spent eight years removing your rose colored glasses.
How familiar this arc is to anyone who's ever worked inside an industry whose rhetoric and incentives drift far apart
If you work in cybersecurity, I’d table many views in this thread and just understand it’s the place to be to cut your teeth in fairly hard security problems and make money along the way. If 1980’s security culture seemed cool with a new BoF everyday and Bill Gates himself calling you a bad word for doing it, and toss in advanced threat actors, a sec career in crypto isn’t too far off of that. Of course company by company variations apply and the above could include explaining EDR to small teams with absurds amounts of funds tied to a private key in a .txt.
That said, much of the feedback in this thread applies to working in it imo, as the other side of keeping these companies and their treasuries not hacked and capitalized is it exposes you to a lot.
That said, I’ve done big tech too, and the nonsense in crypto just has a couple less rungs of management insulation than the rest of tech. The rest of tech lives with the consequences of asinine decisions over 4-5x quarters and in crypto you live with it month to month. Pick your poison on preferred version of nonsensical tech instability.
There’s a twitter comment that covers what I’ve come to think - natural state of crypto is just a more direct instantiation of what’s going on everywhere else, crypto just doesn’t hide it (sort of). Hard not to believe that with tech selling “trade in your IRA!” as if that’s not offering a beer to my 20 yr sober Uncle Bob, in terms of products that are cancerous for “the people.” So I see nothing in crypto that’s not reflected everywhere in tech and civics right now.
The crypto tech or integrations to pay attention to - btc, atomic swaps cross-chain, trading firms, whatever finserv is testing for payment and settlement infra. All of these have deep building, are functional and funded. Wouldn’t bet against it over a career.
GNU Taler is a working implementation of "digital cash" in the spirit of Ecash. Since it doesn't come with its own currency, it cannot be used for gambling. It is quite telling that it has seen essentially zero adoption in the "crypto" scene.
Cashu is a working chaumian ecash protocol built on Bitcoin. It is quite functional and has some subset of bitcoiners actually using with, with many wallets and mints building on the protocol.
My question is, which real-world problem is actually solved by crypto? All I know is transferring money over the border gets much easier than pre-bitcoin era.
Digital currencies don't enforce any policy other than avoiding double-spending. (Set aside smart contracts for now.)
Other online payment methods (Visa, PayPal, Stripe, your bank's ACH, etc.) do. These policies start by disallowing illegal transactions (crime). Then they disallow unfair transactions (buyer claims not to like the quality of the item, etc.). Then they disallow immoral transactions (gambling, pornography, etc.). Then they disallow anything... unseemly? (2022 Freedom Convoy protests, Stripe briefly banning certain legal, non-adult LGBTQ+ transactions in 2025, etc.).
Is it a problem that your currency-transfer system enforces policy? Many people don't care, but to some, yes, it is a problem. They don't want PayPal telling them what they can and can't do with their hard-earned money, because that's the job of their government, their religion, and their conscience. They want their online cash to behave like offline cash.
If you were designing a system architecture for value transfer, would your low-level primitives throw policy exceptions, or would you delegate that responsibility higher in the system?
The only real world problem is probably solved by low chain fees where I can hold usdc or gold coins and then pay or recieve payments without too much hassle
But that again, is such a low niche and something that includes exchanges fees too
Recently I wanted to get a domain name on black friday so I went to namecheap and paid them 10 $ in crypto, I had to pay 80 cents to an exchange to convert my usdc polygon to btc to then + some btc fees because namecheap just accepted that
I am a teenager so technically buying this domain pseudo-anonymously (yes I know I can do things with monero too so thus anonymously too) is the only real use case
I think stablecoins have potential to atleast remove this stripe/paypal/visa/mastercard etc.'s monopoly and allow cheap payments
Honestly I wish UPI from India or Pix from brazil were implemented at a global scale, they are so good.
My thoughts are nuanced but since I am a teen and yes I have a bank account but it cant be operated fully until I turn 18 by me, its all just complicated and crypto kinda solves some aspect of it
But this whole field is niche too and most people who build on these primitives basically build gambling as the author said
Here are my thoughts on crypto that one time I was on HackerNews on a similar thread and wanted to give a proper space to my thoguhts: https://justforhn.mataroa.blog/blog/most-crypto-is-doomed-to...
> "buying this domain pseudo-anonymously (yes I know I can do things with monero too so thus anonymously too) is the only real use case"
The domain registrar is required to have valid contact information for you. Sure, you could lie to them, but then you risk having your account terminated.
So I'm not sure this is a real use case for crypto.
I have given my real information to name cheap for what its worth, namely my valid phone number so yes in a way it isn't anonymous.
Still, I would argue that crypto with things like njal.la and orangehosting etc. kind of allow it to be a real-use
Personally,So this reduces the "use-case" to basically a bank account for teenagers with (no?) limits and less KYC overall
In practice is sorta allows reasonably quick bank transfers.
Something that outside of the US is solved by SWIFT, or the state equivalent of instant bank transfer. Most of the rest of the world has instant, or near instant bank transfers. The US doesn't, it has venmo or similar.
There is a lot of money "wasted" on intermediaries due to the closed nature of the global financial system e.g. 3-5% fees for updating a row in a database. Besides those it allows other novel products that traditionally required trusted entities: - p2p lending - reputation systems - p2p insurance Also we have things like Open Banking i.e. sending money instantly for free which banks started implementing in 2015, one year after Ethereum mainnet went live which suddenly allowed people to send fiat money instantly and (almost) free. Banks and fintech companies having competition is a good thing for consumers.
Donating to projects and websites who don't want their PayPal wallet to be locked and can't rely on a bank account.
That's the main legal use-case afaik. If you like travelling to a country that has no banking connection to your country, it might be more convenient to open a bank account or make friends in the target country and move money there via Bitcoin marketplaces. I've seen that plenty of times.
How does that work? You transfer the money in BTC, you exchange that into real money, you open a new bank account, you deposit that money, the bank's anti-money-laundering detection sees a large deposit to a newly open account and triggers an alert, the bank locks you out of the account and asks you for a proof of income/tax payment, you have no explanation of where that money came from legally, they freeze your account and report you to their local revenue services, you're SOL.
Oh yeah, this isn't about large sums, this is about "I need money to live there for a month".
However, with a lot of BTC trading sites, you get money from real people's accounts, so its not that crazy as long as the amounts are low.
Allows scammers to avoid money being returned by having no centralized platform.
The problem of not being able to conduct transactions (globally or not) due to state-level censorship. Also called "censorship resistance".
I only refer to bitcoin (and lightning as Layer2), not crypto. Real-world problems will become more relevant if you live in a 2nd or 3rd world country:
- private (as in privacy) store of value without necesity to build a vault (or trust a 3rd party for storing)
- Transfer of money by immigrants "back home". Good luck sending money to Cuba or Venezuela right now
- Micropayments / Webpayments via Lightning (TradFi failed on this) - you can literally send 10cent right now to someone at the other end of the world - or pay for a news article.
- Decentralized / Ad-free social media like Nostr. Pay with micropayments for everything (hosting, forwarding, micro-donation for content). If you look at how damaging the ad-based social media economy is fighting for engagement and attention, it is obvious society is better of without Instagram/Facebook/Youtube/Tiktok trying to get you to watch more, to get more ad revenue
- Insurance against dictatorships taking over free democracies. If monetary policy is not done my the government, they can't use it to control the people. In Bitcoin, the people are deciding and voting on monetary policy independent of the government (miners, node runners/validators, acceptance of transfers etc.)
- Insurance about fiat devaluation (governments printing money)
Purchasing drugs
Regulatory overreach, for one.
Does it really?
Glad to hear the change of heart here and the guts it took to write it up. I know that's not an easy thing to do, and it likely burned some bridges.
The point about it being gambling, and therefore, taking advantage of idiots, yeah that rings true. The mass proliferation of gambling and the true compulsive addiction and ruin of mostly young men, it's hard to look at oneself and state that they caused that pain for other and their loved ones.
The next step is, of course, to do the very hard part: use the money gained for good. The author mentions that they are a hypocrite for only speaking out after making their money. They need not be so. Finding legitimate ways to use the ill gotten gains for good is a bit of what they built their skills in, after all.
I hope to someday see the next post of theirs detailing how many people they helped and how many lives saved, families reunited and made sound again, based on how they used this new wealth for good.
They are very far from the end of their story, but the midpoint, so to speak, has been passed.
This deeply resonates. I got out of the game. The issue is that financial freedom was never a technology problem. Meatspace will always get their hands on anything with a moderate amount of traction.
Bitcoin doesn't take into account that humans are forgetful.
If you forget your bank card pin code they would post you a new card and pin, if you phone them up. I've done this a couple times in the past pre-smartphone banks.
If you forget your bitcoin password you are never getting access back.
The internet was about freedom (to most of its initial creators). It is now a cornerstone of the surveillance state. And yet, independent journalism is now possible only mostly through the existence of the internet.
AI & crypto may end up in a similar bucket. It is a paradoxical enabler of both freedom and imprisonment. No one gets to build a technology a declare a problem solved. Alfred Nobel made nitroglycerin safe and thus paradoxically ended up being called the Merchant of Death.
Freedom is not free. It is an eternal struggle.
I am grateful for the builders who try to build something for freedom. I do not spurn them when their invention gets corrupted. It is now our job and the job of future generations to fight the corruption.
One correction. Crypto is not zero sum. It is a potential minus 100% sum for all the players involved. Maybe with exceptions of the folks making cash from the transaction fees.
The miners and asic makers need to be paid.
Is it really a waste if you made enough money to retire?
Right, OP writes up crypto as being this terrible disease with no meaning. But outside of crypto there aren't many jobs that have real meaning either. I worked for the UN at one point, and that was actually one of the worse.
At the end of the day you are always just working to make someone else rich or to give them the promotion they want. If you get rich yourself along the way, take that as a win.
I respectfully disagree. Even if you told me that you felt like working at the UN was a waste of time, I’d still tell you that at least you contributed to a historically unique global institution which at least strives to bring people across the world together.
Bitcoin was just a waste of talent and resources.
Half the people here work for random SaaS and socially corrosive companies like Meta that have literally helped install dictators into power
You could do worse than building crappy blockchains
Not a lot of people here work for Meta, which is why you had to lump in "Random SaaS" like that's remotely comparable. I doubt most people here are working on anything harmful, let alone a fraction of what Meta does.
Unless you think Todo list apps cause Ethnic Cleansing.
> Bitcoin was just a waste of talent and resources.
What happens when a country's banking system fails.
> What happens when a country's banking system fails.
The people who looted it transport their ill-gotten gains away via Bitcoin, often enough.
What should the average citizen of that country do in that case?
Cooperate with their fellow citizens and fix their banking system, rather than trying to grab as much as possible for themselves?
>Cooperate with their fellow citizens and fix their banking system
That's exactly what Bitcoin was for.
I don't know where you live, but most places it's the banking system which fixes the citizens, not the other way around.
Only way I imagine being able to fix a bank is with a brick through the window. It's why one level up from where I'm at banks are closing their physical locations, keep no cash, and only have people for 1-2 hours in the morning when only the most obedient are awake and not occupied.
Make your own startup. I also hate working for people whom I consider less smart and/or capable or experienced than I am.
"In theory it's a great idea, in practice not so much."
I feel that's the lesson anyone who toyed with libertarians ideals ultimately come to. It just takes a bit longer for some than others. It's also harder to realize if you're making mad bank on it, rather than be part of the idiots who blew their hard-earned money on some technical misunderstanding, scam, or retro-active regulation.
Crypto helped me step up my cybersecurity skills forever, when someone was exploiting a race condition in my AI app, I only knew how to prompt AI to do atomic operations because of popular smart contract hacks.
I wish I got funded to make a Coinbase bitcoin wallet competitor or Dropbox competitor leveraging blockchain for storage.
Pivoting to AI has better unit economics and I have a handcrafted app architecture because of my crypto venture aspirations.
Doing nothing for years and trying to vibe code an equivalent AI app now wouldn’t be fun.
>Crypto helped me step up my cybersecurity skills forever, when someone was exploiting a race condition in my AI app, I only knew how to prompt AI to do atomic operations because of popular smart contract hacks.
What? Prompting AI is barely a skill, let alone a cybersecurity one.
> I wish I got funded to make a Coinbase bitcoin wallet competitor or Dropbox competitor leveraging blockchain for storage.
There's like 50000 of the former, and 1000 of the latter.
I didn’t know what atomic operations, important concept in cybersecurity until working with crypto and blockchain, prompting AI is a skill, there’s an obvious context engineering skill gap I possess. I built a desktop application in Rust in 2 weeks while the industry uses Electron. Try to clone my apps, with whatever model of the week, it wouldn’t be easy. Not all prompts are made equal.
I was one of the earliest React/React Native developers before the industry shifted to it. Early Tailwind and Node.js adopter as well.
My AI apps are nothing new either but I do have subscriptions because of how I engineered them. Majority of apps in the app store make $0. You can compare yourself to those, not me.
I don't think the author should be sad. He helped push an industry that lets people move value around freely without third parties being able to choke them off. That alone is pretty powerful. The people gambling with it would probably be gambling with something else instead. As for not learning to create something users want, nothing will prevent him from starting now
For me I find stablecoins very useful today, I can send money to my family in seconds with cents of fee. even if in my country there is not a lot of international financial institutions.
Also people in my country Venezuela, use usdt as a way for paying for things and saving money as the currency it's inestable.
I’d hesitate to say it’s wasted. Aren’t these some of the most complex, electronic, decentralized systems in human history? That skillset is going to be more and more important the more and more computers there are.
> Aren’t these some of the most complex, electronic, decentralized systems in human history?
There are more phone calls in a day, but orders of magnitude, than Bitcoin transactions. So, no, they aren't even close.
Statements about "I wasted years doing X" are almost always overblown. The more realistic take is "I didn't get the ROI I wanted in specific area X."
Sounds like the author may have "lost their religion" though.
Sold most of my BTC off at $120k, but kept a chunk not as an investment but as a sort of emergency fund that could be useful if for some reason I ever find myself needing to transact without using cash, bank accounts or credit cards.
Okay, so if your time felt wasted, that must mean there were better uses of your 20s.
But, how else would you have driven towards your goal of building a new financial system?
They could have worked for Stripe/Ramp/Brex/Mercury for example. They'd still be rich but with non-speculative impact.
And Stripe ironically is making a blockchain itself to facilitate stablecoin settlements globally
So you're back to square one
Tempo may have more users than all other blockchains combined.
Indeed, working hard towards a goal is never a waste, it can often be a learning experience regardless of the end result. And that learning is extremely valuable and also takes time.
> Indeed, working hard towards a goal is never a waste, it can often be a learning experience regardless of the end result.
What if the end result is harmful to society?
Then you learn, adjust and try to avoid that in the future, ideally helping others from making the same mistake. Everyone makes mistakes, the scope/extent is slightly different for all of us, but everyone should have chance at redeeming themselves even if they did harm. Otherwise we'll run out of compassion very quickly.
> everyone should have chance at redeeming themselves even if they did harm.
You're changing the subject. Nobody is arguing that the author is irredeemable. On the contrary, the author seems to have recognized his own mistake and changed his course, at least to an extent. The question is whether the author's years in crypto were a waste, and I would say that it's indeed a waste to spend 8 years on something just to "learn" that one shouldn't have done that thing.
> Everyone makes mistakes
This is also changing the subject. Everyone does not spend 8 years in crypto.
I've made some big mistakes, and I think I've also wasted a lot of time. The wasted time was not "valuable" by learning that I wasted my time. It was simply regrettable.
On the other hand, I don't think I've ever spent a lot of time and effort on an activity that broadly harms society. I don't need to do that in order to learn that I shouldn't do that. Some things are just blatantly obvious in advance, or should be. You shouldn't need to dedicate your life to crypto to realize it's all a big casino.
It's not about "learning to not do that single thing" but learning from everything you picked up during that period, good or bad. And even if what you did had the net-effect of being negative to society, you can learn from the things you experienced during that time, meaning it wouldn't be a waste, at least in my mind.
> I don't think I've ever spent a lot of time and effort on an activity that broadly harms society
Me neither. I worked in the cryptocurrency industry, sold drugs, interacted with gangs, and a bunch of other stuff but none of them broadly harmed society, so seems we're more or less the same on that point.
But everyone's frame of reference and reality is difference, there is no absolute truth here, trying to paint it as such is actively doing a disservice to any sort of discourse we could have about the subject.
One could surely argue that making "paid browser extensions" somehow have a net negative impact on the world, and if that was proven, would that mean all the time you spent on those sort of projects were suddenly wasteful and you should have realized this up front? Seems inhumane if so.
> you can learn from the things you experienced during that time
Of course you can learn from your experience, and the author did learn from his experience, which is the entire point of the tweet, so the author doesn't need to be told that he can learn from his experience. He already knows!
Nonetheless, the author considers his time to have been a waste.
> meaning it wouldn't be a waste
This does not follow.
> I worked in the cryptocurrency industry, sold drugs, interacted with gangs, and a bunch of other stuff but none of them broadly harmed society
Ok...
> One could surely argue that making "paid browser extensions" somehow have a net negative impact on the world, and if that was proven, would that mean all the time you spent on those sort of projects were suddenly wasteful and you should have realized this up front?
If that was proven? Well, prove it. Go ahead, make my day. Otherwise, this is just a silly piece of sophistry with no applicability.
I guess that would depend on your own personal moral backbone as to which direction you would go at that point. Undoubtedly you’ll learn something either way, but hopefully someone would adjust for their next effort.
Probably by choosing a more realistic goal. Who even thinks they can build a "new financial system?" When governments already control, by law, the current one?
It was always a pipe dream.
What a great perspective. I hope the author reads & responds.
By building a system that facilitates the economy rather than being inherently based around fraud and gambling. Crypto is not the only way to build a futuristic financial system.
Considering the transaction time and cost, crypto never made sense. As fast as I can tell, it's been pure speculation since its inception.
What? Most of networks nowadays are faster or as fast and cheaper than normal credit card and banking systems.
It's pretty obvious when people are using cached information from ten years ago.
Not really. Credit cards are immediate.
Bank transfers can be quick but also can be slow so fair point there.
I dont experience much friction paying for things though so I dont feel I need crypto for that.
Credit card payments may seem immediate for you, the customer. But for the business owner it's not always so since the customer than issue a recall and many people abuse this to great cost for the businesses. See "chargeback fraud".
Yes. By design because it is credit and under jurisdiction of consumer law.
Good thing the industry has moved on to another promising niche technology which is being hyped and ruined by greed.
I spent 2014 to 2016 working on crypto. I built crypto apps for a lot of companies, including some that are very very big now. Back then, I really believed in crypto. But after the Xth crypto bubble popping, I gave up. So much time had passed, and nothing was changing (for the better). Banks were NEVER going to adopt this (at least not any blockchain that the general public can profit from) and it would NOT dramatically transform the financial system the way I thought.
I had a ton of bitcoins and ethereum. I even bought ethereum in the presale. Present day value would have been around 5 million euros. But I sold it all back then, because I saw that crypto was never going to make a significant impact.
It turned out, I was right. Most of the bitcoin ATMs disappeared, most webshops stopped accepting it, it plays almost no role at all in the financial world. But I overlooked one major factor: the value of these cryptos isn't based on anything else than thin air. People are willing to pump anything as long as they can personally profit from it. And yes, the famous saying applies here: the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. I saw the fundamentals correctly, but the sentiment wrong.
You feel old when you read "crypto" and your first tought is about cryptography.
What stands out to me is how many smart people spent their best years optimizing around the constraints of a system that was fundamentally misaligned with real-world demand. The tech is fascinating, but incentives turned the whole space into a gravity well for speculation rather than creation.
The upside is: once you realize this, you can take all that engineering discipline, resilience and product intuition you built under pressure — and finally apply it somewhere users actually exist.
What's that saying... people won't understand something if they're being paid to not understand it.
Luke Smith had a good video that pretty much summarized what happens with projects such as Bitcoin that have noble goals to begin with; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-lS8Y79L7g
It's the usual story of technology divorced from morality.
Guy who was "enamored by the whole idea of Bitcoin being a private bank for wealthy individuals" is shocked to learn that the system "will lead to the long-term collapse of social mobility for the younger generation".
He's now wiser than the average Randian acolyte, but still seems to think this structural feature of capitalism is somehow unique to cryptocurrency.
Yes! I've been thinking for a while that crypto/libertarianism borrows a lot of language from anarchist philosophy, but redirects that energy towards an environment that's even more capitalistic than our liberal democracies. Which is the opposite of the supposed values of these crypto libertarians, but because libertarianism is a schizophrenic ideology that tries to combine capitalism with anarchism, it of course goes the way of all libertarian projects and turns into a nightmare (at least this time there's no bears).
“Surely allowing the world’s wealthiest people to shelter their capital from the greedy clutches of democratically elected governments will naturally lead to a more equitable and humanistic world order”
And yet I have never heard anyone admit to being a "Warlordarian"—but that's basically what you get.
It's not a complete waste. 8 years is a lot of time spent learning to build a tool that, sure, might not have been "good" but it was still time spent building a tool. Those skills are applicable elsewhere, and perhaps the most important thing to realize is that at least the time wasn't spent on NFTs.
I feel similar sentiments about working in Cloud. It's mostly vaporware.
I'm sorry if you've had a bad experience working with cloud technologies, but this comparison strikes me as pretty unfair. Public clouds have enabled thousands of companies to put their products into the world without having build and maintain hardware. They've been an enabling technology and have completely changed the landscape of computing.
I've talked to people that, around 2023, were still very deep into the "we are the revolution. open source decentralized finance will free humanity" belief, while it was obvious that more and more of it was blending with institutions and dubious characters. Pretty odd (but massively interesting as a sociological pattern).
Alternative to archive.is
Nitter lives on
HN commenters claimed it was dead
Use it all the time. Occasional hiccups.
2 friends of mine did an entire presentation on their deep dive into crypto. They started a long time ago, and very smartly: Instead of trading it themselves, they wrote bots to play the arbitrage game: Find price differences between 2 markets for the same product.
They made money with it. More and more, spending significant amounts on hosters to run their bots more often and on more markets.
It was an interesting presentation even if only for the technical details on how they implemented it all.
It took one whole hour. Somewhere near the end, about 5 seconds was spent on 'anyway I lost it all due to the fall of FTX', and then another 5 minutes on how they want to get back into it and what they're looking at, because an individual can no longer play the arbitrage game today.
I had to ask some fairly blunt questions to disillusion the audience. At the end of all that, and with all that effort, *they lost quite a bit of money in the endeavour*. And they wanted to get back into it.
What. the. heck.
I get that the crypto world right now is a casino, but the unfulfilled need is still there:
I want to be able to buy over the internet as anonymously as when I use cash in the real world.
The monkey's paw curls. Wish granted... but in the form of Palantir, Flock, etc. tracking your every move so those cash transactions can be just as anonymous as a credit card transaction.
I always wondered what "clever" people expected from crypto, apart from getting rich quick schemes. Boring.
We had such know-it-alls still with their pimples from Frauenhofer and Max Planck giving presentations. Even back then, 99% percent of the audience were skeptical, but sadly too many decision makers are just emperors with no clothing. There were so many immature, useless loud speakers given a junior professorship because old morons have FOMO too. That must have sucked for the valid academics with proven achievements. I'm glad I'm not one of the ones waiting in queue. There no single project having any sign of impact, naturally. While that can be said of a lot of academic work, crypto: more buzzwords, even less delivered.
As an outsider I have been most interested in the ability for blockchains such as Ethereum to serve as an automated escrow
For more enjoyable snippets like this, I recommend https://x.com/coinfessions/
Crytocurrency was the initial use case for blockchain, but blockchain is not limited to cryptocurrency.
I was saddened when crypto took this direction and became an industry. To me the interesting part was always the idea of someday having a digital medium for value exchange that cannot be controlled by any one or groups of government, billionaire, or corporate entities and to be able to transact privately and anonymously if needed.
Monero is still in this game but the entities listed above are doing everything they can to kill it so they can retain power. They claim we should think of the children and worry about crime, but they really only care about their power. The benefit to the economy if money could flow freely around the globe instantly would far outweigh any real harms.
There's a lot of talk these days about the enshitification of the Internet. What I rarely see mentioned is that the Internet's first steps towards enshitification started when we attached the banking system to the Internet.
Before you could make transactions online, if your infrastructure was hacked, it was your fault and your responsibility to implement better security. But once money was involved, you could complain to the police about a hack and involve the authorities - because now actual property was involved. This changed everything.
This was also about the time we started seeing spam, scams, and other negativity suddenly spring up. It's hard to believe that we used to post to usenet with our email addresses publicly exposed... and never worry about being added to a spam list.
Money attracted bad actors to the Internet. Bitcoin was money from the start. So of course the whole cryptocurrency scene is a magnet for bad actors - like we've never seen before. This was inevitable. And 95% of the cryptocurrency scene are some flavor of bad actors.
But Bitcoin mostly sits outside of the legal frameworks of the world. So it's much harder to call the authorities when your cryptocurrency is stolen. You can. It happens. But not much. And for this reason, the only path forward for this new technology/money is right through the middle of the hoard of bad actors. That means we have to create technological and social solutions for security instead of relying on the monopoly of violence (the police) to protect us.
The bad acts and just general greed in the scene are holding it back. But this is, unfortunately, necessary. This is a wall of resistance that has to be pushed through for a better tomorrow. It's part of the process.
The future that decentralized technology will bring us will be different from whatever we are imagining now. But we still have to keep imagining and building. Because even though it will be different than the fantasy, its still the right direction.
Did he at least make good money though? It's so strange to me that someone can get a sense of purpose from building something specifically for wealthy people tbh
I'm sorry this guy feels like that, and I agree that there are tons of fraudsters and casino players in the current crypto scene.
It also doesn't surprise me to read the reactions in here, as most of HN users are from the US or other first world countries.
For people like me who were born and have lived in developing countries or countries were we cannot fully trust our banking/monetary systems, Bitcoin IS a tool to escape possible problems. I'm old enough to have been in 3 monetary crises in my country: 1985, 1994 and 2008. I'm old enough to have seen countries like Argentina, Venezuela, Spain, Lebanon, Greece experience bank runs. And when that happens, only the rich and connected can do something, while individuals like us are left holding the bag and paying for the errors of others (Americans may remember the 1% movement, occupy wall street).
So, no. Bitcoin is and still will be a useful thing for me and a lot of people. First word.country citizens may not understand it, until it becomes too late .
I know which school I'd count on to not be based on gambling if I had to choose between a distorted view of libertarianism (and Aynd Rand) and the more pragmatic and sound principles of folks like Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett.
Crypto is NOT a casino.
In a casino the house always wins.
In crypto, every single player that's sat down for 5 years is a winner.
I suppose in the analogy, the house would be the creators of "shitcoins", or the people that aren't left holding bags of worthless crypto coins.
No, there are gamblers in the crypto space, like there are gamblers in the college football space.
It doesn't mean that college football is a casino.
Crypto is not necessarily just a casino; the tech has value but there is no mass adoption of the currency as of yet.
We'll probably see mass adoption of crypto if a crypto can become a store of wealth
There is no value in a currency that isn't mass adopted. That was the whole reason we switched from trading 100 breads for 1 pig etc.
In order to be that currency it cannot be volatile. Ask any country with high inflation how useful their actual currency is...
Crypto currency uses up to 1.5% of the world's electricity, makes up 2.5% of the world's money, uses up to 0.1% of the fresh water supply, and perhaps as high as 6-10% of silicon chips produced.
And yet, as you say, there's no mass adaption (yet). All it's doing is making tech bros and speculators even richer. It's possible that wider adoption will eventually happen, but as years pass this claim gets harder and harder to make. It's not any easier for "normal" people to use than it was ten years ago, and the main use cases are still "speculation" and "paying for drugs", also just like ten years ago.
From someone who also genuinely thinks the underlying crypto tech is fascinating, it's hard not to see the "currency" part of it as a kind of cancerous growth on the world economy.
Yeah, it's definitely a huge bubble right now. I think a lot of crypto bros have marketed it more as a casino than a solution to a decentralized currency.
A hypothetical good use case: one can have a "science crypto" where the transaction fees go to funding science. By using the cryptos you want you can essentially pay taxes to causes you think are important
> "I was a politically motivated person when I was a teenager. Of all the books that radicalized me, it was the Aynd Rand books (Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged) that did."
A heartfelt "Thank you!" to Ken on account of having at least the courtesy of saving cool people's time by putting the Origin Story into the first sentences.
At least you can tell they wrote it themselves — an LLM couldn’t write a sentence that bad.
That John Rogers' quote hits the mark again: “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
Is Atlas Shrugged really that bad? Heh, I started reading the fountainhead in my mid 30ies. The natural way you get introduced to new characters is great, but man I got so angry with the unrealistic robotic personalities I kept putting the book away and after 200 pages I really just could not continue. So Atlas Shrugged is similar? What a disappointment!
Anybody here that loved the books and would care to elaborate it speak to them so much?
As a teenager who went through quite a similar journey back in the day, it wasn't as much the books (which are quite badly written, I still have PTSD from that monologue) and more about the story very plainly supporting the view of the world I had back then... Champions of industry, unshackled by free enterprise, freed from the stagnation of governance etc.
If you're so cool and all, do you have a hypothesis as to why in Slavic languages they keep translatin' "Atlas Shrugged" as "Atlas Straightened His Shoulders"?
Wrong. People who use crypto as a casino - that is, "invest" into it or "trade" it - are a numerical majority but they aren't those who make actual money there. Actual money is made by those who use it for:
- Tool/facilitation of "brick and mortar" crime, as well as some cybercrime (moving drug money across borders, way to pay ransom in a way difficult to track, etc).
- Tool for scams.
- Hacks, including (but not limited to), on-chain hacks.
I know a lot of people who made 9-digit sums in crypto. None of them invested or traded coins (none were from the 'crime' category either). Most typical kind of people are those who did hard-core (hundreds of thousands of accounts) sybil attacks on ICOs and launchpads in their heyday in 2017-2021. So it was scripting/scraping/cloud deployments using residential proxies/buying passport scans on darknets.
Also those who ran Solana nodes from massive sybils too (up to 200 people - it's 1 node per person so one has to have many persons). While that probably qualifies as speculation/"trading" Solana, servers being little but a booster, so in part it was "casino".
It's unhealthy to ascribe religious or ideological ideas to money. It's a tool. Ideology needs to preach, to influence minds.
HN generally views blockchain tech negatively I've found, but I'll leave this here for the inevitable: crypto if a casino and has no real use.
https://kaveh.page/blog/what-is-blockchain-actually-used-for
regardless of the true merit of crypto, crypto articles have the tendency to fill the HN comment sections with the most unbearable people.
It's honestly kind of amazing, I never thought a person could be so intellectually condescending and smug while trying to sell you their shit at the same time.
I'm not trying to sell anything. I don't even work in crypto and have never had a full-time job in it. I am not even talking about crypto here whatsoever. The whole point of the article IS to distinguish between "cryptocurrency" and "blockchain".
I heard some people were talking about using crypto to build a full State on it, this is doomed to fail.
Let's say you loose your wallet. What do you do next? You call your bank to block your credit card and to take an appointment with the administration to make a new ID, driving license etc. The cash in your wallet is gone but everything else isn't. The process is annoying but at the end of the day you'll be fine.
Now if all this is based on a private key and you loose it, you're completely done, you're just not part of society anymore.
No one will ever embrace this because humans are messy and make mistakes all the time. Crypto and blockchain are so resistant to mistakes that for this specific case it's just not good at all.
Account Abstraction fixes this
Wait until you learn how much of life is gambling + entertainment. Is working for one of the many SV SaaS companies really that much different?
crypto means cryptography
It's sad that crypto might have succeeded if people like him weren't involved in it.
I've always been intrigued by the whole "decentralized and fixed supply" argument around Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies.
But the more I look into it, the more I wonder: if one Bitcoin can be split into 0.1, 0.01, 0.001 or even smaller fractions for transactions, doesn't that kind of undermine the whole “fixed total supply” idea?
Also, sure, cryptocurrencies are decentralized in theory and the transactions are hard to trace. But at the end of the day, anyone holding crypt is still very much under the control of governments. You can't magically escape regulations or enforcement just because the currency is "decentralized." It's an interesting tension between theory and reality that I don't think enough people talk about.
BTC cannot be split beyond 10^-8
With a soft fork it could easily.
Lightning Network already uses millisatoshis. Of course they can't be settled in sub-satoshi amounts on the main chain, until there's enough interest in a fork to do so.
The fixed supply describes the total sum of units that have been issued, and that are intended to be issued in the future - it doesn't relate to the divisibility of those units.
Thanks , I've learned something new today!
The max supply is what makes it "hard money." Splitting it into smaller pieces is a separate concept and does not devalue it.
Ah, got it! Thanks for the clear explanation, really appreciate the clarification on max supply vs. divisibility and the Satoshi limit.
> I built a casino. A casino that does not call itself a casino, but it is the biggest, [...]
That's what people involved in the creation of the stock market must have thought.
Aren't all financial systems about this one thing? Buying and selling risk for profit?
If you want to work on something else than a casino you should probably steer clear of any finance.
This is about cryptocurrencies, not actual cryptography.
> It would be a lie for me to say that I joined crypto without any financial motivation. As a reader, it may sound hypocritical to you that I decided to swear off the crypto industry, now that I have made enough money. Yes, maybe I am hypocritical. But maybe I also just feel sick about contributing to the cesspool of financialization and gamblification of the economy.
If they truly feel sick about it, they should donate the money they made (or the vast majority of it). Otherwise, hypocritical is right.
> Look at what they do, not what they say
Wasting your 20s sounds like you did nothing in your 20s. Instead you actively made the world worse by building a casino with power hungry technology.
Imagine how I felt wasting my professional life in cryptography.
What do people think of hiring people with crypto backgrounds? It is kind of a red flag to me - unless it's a really mainstream thing like coinbase
“The gamblification of the economy” is the real story here. Crypto, prediction markets, and omnipresent instant gambling apps are poisoning more and more of our society and draining money from folks in an entirely unproductive way. These things promise a quick path to fortune but the only people making money are the fraudsters or the platform owners (often the same people). Serious regulation of these things is long overdue, and no, forcing them to advertise gambling hotlines is not sufficient.
If crypto can no longer outperform S&P500 is it still worth buying?
don’t view it as a waste
you understand how to construct complex & stimulating games that people will play compulsively for money. that’s good.
next, craft games for which you can guarantee a house edge. should be small yet assured.
you’re already an experienced casino game developer
You seem to have missed the point. Casinos are bad and suck valuable time out of everyone involved
From a developer perspective, a big part of crypto’s problem is that complexity becomes a way to hide centralization.
Everyone talks about "decentralized bridges" but them end up as centralized swaps wrapped in jargon.
The hard problems aren't being solved, they’re being obscured.
Crypto adds no value to an economic system. It's an expensive way to move money in a big pile.
I'm glad OP has been enlightened. Growth can be painful.
Another article by a civilization wrecker who apologizes for working tirelessly for years to wreck civilization. Had he made off with a billion USD equivalents this wouldn't have even been written yet the outcome would be the same. Moralizing grifters can gtfoh
Ah yes, more bitcoin hate on the orange site, quelle surprise.
i would have expected more adequate comments on HN, unfortunately it's mostly boomer-minded condescending gibberish from people who don't understand bitcoin, hfsp
As OP says: He was radicalized.
I like some aspects of Ayn Rand, I like some aspects of crypto. I like some things Elon did.
One takes in info, incorporates it into ones world view. One does not go nuts following just one gospel as absolute truth.
This piece has nothing to do with Ayn Rand, or Crypto. It's just another example of how, when you're young, some oversimplifications can make you feel like you really understand the world. It's important to guide the young ones through this phase. I also remember putting down Atlas Shrugged thinking I'd find THE WAY. But it's the start of a learning process. Models (as in the models of the world we build in our heads) are useful, but always approximations. One needs to learn to appreciate that. For me that came with age, OP is going through something similar.
As someone who spent some time in "crypto land" and much time in the "real world", my surprise was usually that people seeing odd things in crypto land didn't realize that very similar odd things are also present in real world. E.g. the author's frustration at not being able to spot a real business. How many times have we seen an IPO or acquisition at an unfathomable valuation, for example?
Crypto is a casino (often fraudulent) and a scam factory.
It's also the source of at least one great new global public institution (Ethereum) and is likely to run much of the global economy in the coming decades.
If you hate or are skeptical about crypto, it is crucial to at least understand the difference between three things:
1. Casino/scams/hacks
2. Crypto/on-chain technology
3. Ethereum as a decentralized chain and global public institution
I've been a full-time Ethereum person for many years. I hate the casino. I hate the scams and hacks. But I see something very special going on here. So let me try to describe it
The casino is just terrible and it'll likely get much worse. The steady stream of scam shit tokens sold to unsuspecting investors shows no sign of slowing down. And wait until r/wallstreetbets discovers perps (perpetual futures). Perps for equities are already live and scaling up.
The scams will get much, much worse. Crypto (on-chain) lets you send bearer assets over the internet, it's scam fuel. The bad guys will have access to a sophisticated internet financial system, too.
Hacks in mature protocols should get much better over time due to improved bug-finding techniques, including AI/tool-assisted auditing and formal verification.
The technology of crypto offers the world a number of benefits, including inherently globalized payments and instant settlement.
Centralized deployments of crypto technology are a big segment of the future. For example, Stripe is actively working on a centralized chain named Tempo that's optimized for payments. It is basically fintech 2.0 on the blockchain, but entirely centralized.
The last and most important part of crypto is the rise of decentralized chains. There are only two chains that are remotely decentralized, Bitcoin and Ethereum. Bitcoin has no programmable app layer, so its utility is limited beyond the whatever value the world assigns to BTC.
Ethereum is a decentralized programmable chain, a new kind global public institution. Ethereum can make a highly credible commitment that the rules of the programming environment will be followed in all cases. This makes Ethereum a uniquely excellent neutral hub for global commerce.
Ethereum's decentralization (what we sometimes call "credible neutrality") is driving massive grassroots adoption among corporations and institutions. This is the #1 thing in crypto to keep an eye on because if Ethereum gets large enough it will become a de facto global economic backbone.
I understand you hate crypto. I've lived since 2018 full-time in the industry, and it's been often soul-sucking and harrowing. Many days I hate it. But Ethereum as a platform is benevolent, virtuous, productive, and probably a key part of humanity's future.
"Look at what they do, not what they say"
Is also something author should have applied to Randians and Libertarians from day 1.
I worked for a blockchain startup and left with PTSD (I was asked to leave).
They had started as yet another ICO and when that didn't work, pivoted into a financial space that actually was a great pitch for blockchain.
They were a small company and when I came aboard they had nothing viable, I helped them rearchitect it to something that could work, and the lead ops guy translated it back to the original broken architecture.
That guy was crazy, and claimed that everybody there was spook adjacent (ex NSA, etc) and that our tech was vital to some secret need. They all drank the koolaid.
I do like the concept of blockchain as a "commons" of data, but stil think that cryptocurrency is a colossal scam.
> I have zero doubt that BTC will hit $1m one day.
Well, there's your problem. Here is a potentially interesting math paper that comes to very different conclusions: https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/BTC-QF.pdf
They didn't think it would get to 120k either.
I once thought Bitcoin was overpriced at $17.
Almost everything other than Bitcoin and Etherium, and some of the stablecoins, has crashed hard. A lot of issuers made money, but few others did.
Believe in what is important and meaningful to you.
Eight years ago was 2017.
Everything you figured out about crypto was known then. You had to choose to disregard that information and continue on. And you did, and it took you eight years to figure it out. And now that you have money, you think you have special insight others did not. Sorry, you don’t. There’s going to be a significant portion of people reading this saying, “No shit”. But congrats on winning at the casino I guess.
Why not link to the archive.is page in the HN feed? I failed to discover how to open the original article link.
In online spaces it's generally considered best to link to the original source and put archive links in the comments
This is one of the signs that we are near bottom in the crypto market.
When peoples talks publicly about the signs that we are near the bottom, this is a sign we are not near the bottom. x)
oh come on dude, there'll be signs, look out for them
This is good for Bitcoin.
For me bottom seems like 25k usd, next February
If it is like 1999, we should see a bull market till FED starts QE then I don't know.
I have had some thoughts on crypto but basically trust is required in every system, yes there are trustless ways to do things but that isnt the main issue
I think the main issue is that our current credit/debit cards primitives can be stolen/worried about, there are companies which accept your free tier and will auto charge you and hope you forget etc.
Another issue is privacy, Crypto provides some privacy by having usdc <->monero <-> usdc <-> pay where you want.
Another issue is for teenagers, I am a teen, I can't create a banking account but I have accepted money for 0 fees well technically but exchanges are a mess and I have used those to buy domain names and similar via crypto.
I think that there are stable cryptocurrencies with low or 0 gas fees so it can allow some primitives like just having a public key online -> convert it to respective token's -> send lets say 0.1$ as a token of gesture and then like it can enable a sense of microeconomy but the people who try doing it try to mess it up by having their own coins or whatever whereas I believe stablecoins should be the one doing it
Personally I really prefer gold tokens because that is the best way to get "yield" in my opinion because most places like aave etc. kind of work via providing liquidity to traders or this gambling and due to ethics and just in my opinion, gold coins since pegged to gold have an 100x more volume which is genuine.
Personally as a teen, I have always loved the tech behind crypto because it can enable somethings impossible but its current implementation with 0 pegged coins,trading/gambling etc. sucks and is scummy. I think stablecoins are genuinely really nice
I have shared it in another comment but frankly let me reshare it : https://justforhn.mataroa.blog/blog/most-crypto-is-doomed-to...
Man, I really wish if there was someone who can work with me accepting crypto usdc <-> bank account as I know people in some industries who want to work with crypto but crypto is regulated with them in their country basically or like personally although I stay away from crypto even though I have built things on top of it (nanotimestamps), I would love working in stablecoins but I think that the market is saturated and it requires a lot of regulations and funding to establish a new stablecoin and for what basically when there are already good enough options?
Personally I dont think much of what I said makes sense if you are an adult (90% of the population) 90% of the time, privacy makes only sometimes sense when you are buying something very privacy sensitive and want to fundamentally be unable to link yourself with that identity
So mostly crypto would just be for ephemeral things, like I buy some monero right now instantly sell it to someone, like no need to "hold" things imo or only holding a very small amount
Or it can be good for teenagers which I wish man, people should do something about it.
Also for less transaction fees that visa/mastercard etc. take, I wish if companies can implement UPI transactions/Pix transactions or some system expands soon relating to it but UPI is genuinely so good that most of you do not know what you are missing out on if you aren't Indian. I have heard good things about Pix too
> The reality hit me like a fucking truck. I am NOT building a new financial system. I built a casino.
Hey now, you didn't just build a casino. You also built a way for pedophiles and drug dealers to move money around.
Wait, you can write full blogs on Twitter now?
You need to have a Twitter account to view comments
This helps with the comments, but not the actual article(?), which just gives me:
> This page is not supported. > Please visit the author’s profile on the latest version of X to view this content.
...I am using the version which their own server just served me.
I am always a little surprised Twitter (and Instagram, and Facebook, etc) are still going, when a link comes across the feeds I so monitor.
Once you stop visiting a sure regularly, it's easy to forget it's still "real" to some people.
Instagram is still massive. Twitter was never that big, it just had an outsized cultural influence because the people who used it professionalized being terminally online.
Facebook is the one that baffles me because the only people I know that actively use it for anything besides Messenger and Marketplace are over the age of 60. The younger ones have never even had a Facebook account.
Threads is the other one; it’s supposedly huge but I only know one person who uses it. I’ve never heard it referenced in any conversation and don’t hear about it on other platforms the way you’ll see a Twitter screenshot on Reddit.
How many with X?
> I believe it will lead to the long-term collapse of social mobility
I mean, isn't it the goal of US libertarians?
This is a sob story from someone who got wealthy from building an engine to finance crime.
There are paths towards redemption - the author could begin by donating every ill-gotten cent to a worthy charity.
What's that? Crickets? Thought so.
Theres this pattern where you make your wealth off dubious means, then one day become born again and start a new life where you gain more popularity and influence by speaking out against the reason you have a megaphone at all. These people interestingly never give away that naughty wealth they now regret so much.