8 ms·

Crypto has become the ultimate swamp asset

90 points by vnorilo 1y ago

vidialaxmi 1y ago
[dead]
tre7 1y ago
[dead]
sigwinch 1y ago
https://archive.is/HpY1R https://archive.is/HpY1R
grezql 1y ago
[dead]
rimbo789 1y ago
Crypto was a huge mistake. It should have been rigorously regulated right out of the gate to the point of being unusable for anyone. I have yet to see a use case that doesn’t amount to buying drugs or defrauding rubes.
- polygamous_bat 1y ago
  Money laundering is also a pretty large use case (https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/additional-12-defendants-charged-rico-conspiracy-over-263-million-cryptocurrency-thefts https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/additional-12-defendants-...)
- cherryteastain 1y ago
  Sending money without government interference to relatives living in countries with strict foreign exchange controls (Argentina, Lebanon, Turkey...) is one quite legit use case.
  - BillinghamJ 1y ago
    Legit from whose perspective though? Around an authoritarian government maybe widely viewed as reasonable/justified, but doesn't sound legitimate to those governments
    - frainfreeze 1y ago
      Wild argument
      - ionwake 1y ago
        hes grasping at straws no idea why
    - BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
      To some particular psychopath out there, I’m sure murder seems fine.
    - sigwinch 1y ago
      Or, since it’s important to preserve the anonymity of my Turkish, Argentinian, and Lebanese relatives; it’s important to preserve the anonymity of the bigger users: ransomware C2 operators funding North Korean rockets.
  - mannycalavera42 1y ago
    Let's not assume foreign exchange controls are always bad. Not saying they are not ... in some cases
  - helsinkiandrew 1y ago
    Unfortunately to governments and law enforcements that looks identical to organised crime and terrorists sending money. All three of those countries have restrictions/regulations on converting crypto currencies into local currencies - doesn't crypto just move the the problem to converting it to local currency?
    - 1y ago
- tazjin 1y ago
  It's useful for evading illegal US sanctions, and sometimes also works just as a payment method. I paid a hosting provider with it earlier this year, and that actually worked well.
  - sgt 1y ago
    Not sure why you're being downvoted. Most of us don't live in Russia, but if we did, I am totally sure that may HN-ers would come up with ways to evade sanctions. It's either that or leave the country, which I am sure many aren't willing to do.
    - tazjin 1y ago
      It's not like anything critical is affected by this. For ordinary people it's things like buying Western games, but those all have workarounds (e.g. through crypto).
- tacker2000 1y ago
  Who should regulate it? Due to its nature it is inherently extremely hard to regulate.
  - jsheard 1y ago
    The technology is hard to regulate, but the exchanges where the overwhelming majority of fiat-crypto trades happen are regular old businesses which can be regulated or sanctioned just like anything else. Blockchain magic wouldn't stop the feds from seizing Coinbase's assets and hauling Brian Armstrong off to prison if they wanted to.
    - liotier 1y ago
      Just like money laundering: choke it at the interfaces with the legitimate financial system.
    - tacker2000 1y ago
      Yes, the fiat input and output are the only points that can be controlled, but even then they can only be controlled by the local governments. And as you can see all of them are late to the party.
- resource_waste 1y ago
  If you can be objective enough to consider that not everyone likes keeping fiat currency, it was an interesting alternative. Bitcoin generally appreciated, where fiat had inflation. While the transaction costs/speed have eliminated this, there was a few years of my life that I both sent money to friends and used a Bitcoin debit card.
  - dr_dshiv 1y ago
    It’s funny, because the inflation of crypto comes not from the increase in the supply of individual coins (that’s controlled mathematically) but by increasing the number of cryptocurrencies themselves.
    - sigwinch 1y ago
      I’m not so sure I buy that. Do nondecreasing counts of NFTs and meme coins account for the psychological source of inflation?
      - dr_dshiv 1y ago
        Can’t say for the memecoins and NFTs — but when it goes from just bitcoin to hundreds of different competitive legit coins, that does seem like inflation of money supply.
        sigwinch 1y ago
        Do Camel Cash and Marlboro Miles count toward inflation?
    - hollerith 1y ago
      That is a perverse use of "inflation" unless a holder of BTC or ETH were somehow forced to spend some of his BTC or ETH on every new cryptocurrency -- or it happened automatically, and for the holder to prevent it from happening was risky or tedious.
  - ddimitrov 1y ago
- BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
  Buying drugs doesn’t have to be an illegitimate use case. Depends on the person, the drugs, the safety of the marketplace, etc.
- jMyles 1y ago
  > I have yet to see a use case that doesn’t amount to buying drugs Society has been struggling for decades to overcome prohibition via political channels, and watching as multiple generations have been damaged by its impact on local economies, civil liberties, and the boon to criminal cartels. Then, a mathematical solution arises which unambiguously undermines this regime, and somehow that's a bad thing?!
  - rollcat 1y ago
    It's not a "mathematical" solution. The maths are cryptographic hashes and consensus protocols, means to some end - exchanging value. You're proposing that it's a technological solution to a societal problem. These only last as long as a particular regulatory body / regime allows them to. Mining. It has long been infeasible for anyone without prior capital and investment. Ban that - you can easily get a lead through the electricity bill - viola. Private key custody. Even technologically-inclined individuals mess it up from time to time. Hence the proliferation of centralised services to keep the keys ("wallets") for you. Block the exchange. QED.
- seaourfreed 1y ago
  WikiLeaks was persecuted. Their credit cards processing was turned OFF. Bitcoin saved them. There have been free speech social media sites BLOCKED by Stripe and all credit cards, and debanked. They switched to crypto. Marc Andressen on Joe Rogan personally knows many dozens of people personally debanked because they were persecured by the government & debanked. Not for drugs or fraud.
- elif 1y ago
  You don't think 1000% returns over the last 5 years is useful to anyone? During the height of inflation?
  - rimbo789 1y ago
    Returns gained entirely from fleecing rubes. Fraud generally has good returns for the fraudsters.
    - elif 1y ago
      no one has lost money for buying bitcoin at any point in history. the only way to get "fleeced" like a "rube" is to sell or never buy.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- ohyes 1y ago
  Dont forget the “murder for hire” user story
- phyalow 1y ago
  Speculation is a legitimate use case. There is substantially more to it than that but I will let you chew that over just to point out how blatantly incorrect your prior is.
  - h2782 1y ago
    Speculation is as much valuable use case as my nails are to be chewed. Sure, it works, doesn't mean it's a good thing.
    - fisf 1y ago
      An alternative to an inflated, state controlled currency is another use case. The last few years should have made that plenty clear.
    - phyalow 1y ago
      Casinos, Financial Markets of all denominations, Horse Racing are also examples of pure play speculation. Speculation is often just a form of entertainment. Your moral equivocation is utterly irrelevant.
- ionwake 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - rimbo789 1y ago
    Imagine in the year of 2025 believing crypto has value beyond making fraud easy. After over a decade of this thing rattling around it remains a problem in search of a solution and by and large huge waste of everyone’s time.
    - ionwake 1y ago
      Imagine working in tech for years and not having bought the only 2 trillion dollar asset that could have freed you from your shackles. Then complaining about it.
      - ionwake 1y ago
        Imagine not being able to have a discussion without downvoting people
- dzikimarian 1y ago
  One of ours biggest customers is mainly used by Ukrainian refugees as easy way to pay abroad. USDC/USDT is simply cheaper and more available to them than regular USD.
- charcircuit 1y ago
  It prevents centralized entities being the gatekeepers to the modern financial world. The US maintaining their own digital version of cash would also work, but the government is slow, and does not want to compete against these centralized entities due to being advantaged as the government controls the currency itself. Payment processors essentially get to dictate what is and is not allowed to be financially viable which is a very powerful form of control over culture.
  - rimbo789 1y ago
    What’s wrong with centralized entities? There should be financial gatekeepers. They are much better than whatever crime syndicates benefit from crypto Crypto is just speed running the 19th century and making us re learn all the reasons why we made the pre crypto regulations.
    - charcircuit 1y ago
      >What’s wrong with centralized entities? Because the CEO of one could read a false news article about your site and prohibit you from transacting with them anymore. Your existence is at the whims of a few people.
  - Zanfa 1y ago
    > It prevents centralized entities being the gatekeepers to the modern financial world. In theory, but it doesn’t in practice. Most crypto transfers never make it to the blockchain, they happen entirely in SQL databases of exchanges. Also, Tether has complete control over USDT and can block or reverse any payment or freeze any account it wants. No bank or payment processor in the world has such centralized control over the traditional financial system. If anything, crypto is more centralized by comparison. Both in terms of payment processors as well as wealth distribution.
    - charcircuit 1y ago
      >In theory, but it doesn’t in practice. In practice neither exchanges or Tether have made any attempts at refusing to allow payments to legal businesses as far as I'm aware. So in practice it does.
- Hilift 1y ago
  Today's society cannot protect people that are easily influenced. Social media has brought remote fraudsters right into your aunt/uncles inbox. Some people are going to get fleeced unless their money is put into something that only dispenses PEZ amounts at a time. This increases if dementia occurs.
- MrDisposable 1y ago
  > I have yet to see a use case that doesn’t amount to buying drugs or defrauding rubes Russian here. My forgotten Bitcoin stash saved my ass multiple times by providing a way to transfer money to a friend abroad who then paid for my western expenses (hosting, VPNs etc.) using his Visa / MC cards. Also, a lot of programmers who emigrated from Russia to countries such as Georgia in 2022 were using USDT as a way to receive their salaries.
  - hkpack 1y ago
    And also it helps your government to transact with Iran, India, and China in convenient currencies, bypassing US-imposed sanctions and prolonging current war and planning for the future ones.
- survirtual 1y ago
  Let's regulate mathematics. No, it isn't enough...let's regulate physics itself. If we could just control when molecules are allowed to form, we could make it so mean molecules don't exist unless they're allowed to exist by our Council of Very Good People Who Have The Most Money. Since they have the most money, they know better than everyone else. /s Did you know in some countries, a good loan for someone with perfect credit is 20% apr? Do you know in some countries police can confiscate all the money you have and never give it back? Have you ever heard of civil asset forfeiture? Did you know in some countries, just protesting can have your accounts frozen? Did you know in some countries, sending money can take over 3 days with no knowledge of what is happening to your money during that time? Did you know that Debit and Wire transfer often cost well over $20 to perform? This list could go on for days. Only fools would speak about crypto so confidently without doing a minimal investigation into its utility.
  - rollcat 1y ago
    > Only fools would speak about crypto so confidently without doing a minimal investigation into its utility. Only fools would speak about a technological solution without understating the reality, that technology still leans on society, power structures, and ability to enforce laws. Civil disobedience works as a means to shift the rules, the balance of power; you can't maintain it perpetually. P2P eventually shifted the attention of the recording industry to online distribution. People jumped to Netflix and iTunes, because they became more convenient, while providing good value for the money.
    - survirtual 1y ago
      Look, I know it is hard for an ego to hear the things I say and the way I say them sometimes. For that, I am sorry. But I am not arguing with you, I am informing you. Challenging media empires was child's play compared to challenging the world's financial system. Bitcoin has successfully illustrated a new and better way. Presidents have been killed for less. Civil rights activists have been killed for less. Bitcoin and the crypto economy is now inevitable, just as gasoline vehicles became inevitable, and a nuclear armed world became inevitable. The world is changing, please do not let your self-identity interfere with the reality of this. When a new and revolutionary invention becomes part of the human mental strata, you cannot take it back. This has never been done before since the knowledge of building a campfire or sharpening rocks. It doesn't matter how powerful, stable, beneficial, or otherwise the old system was. It has been super-ceded by something that outcompetes it. That's reality. I hope that you and others like you realize it and have a prosperous life.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- ecocentrik 1y ago
  - repatriating and distributing cartel drug money - paying/receiving bribes - bypassing international sanctions to finance wars There's a lot of uses for cryptocurrency and only a very small fraction are good for individuals.
- AngryData 1y ago
  There is lots of porn that credit card companies and proccessors don't want to touch. Plenty of kink sites have had problems with them, porn sites have blanket restrictions on keywords like hypnosis and shadow ban certain kinds of legal content in order to not get hamstrung by financial restrictions. Also there are plenty of blackmarket goods that are heavily restricted and legally punished without good cause, and I do not believe just because something is "illegal" that it is automatically bad.
- bufferoverflow 1y ago
  You can buy drugs and defraud rubes with USD too. Crypto has many different useful applications. One of the main ones: limited supply (I am aware not all crypto has a cap).
- mvdtnz 1y ago
  > I have yet to see a use case that doesn’t amount to buying drugs or defrauding rubes. Hey now. There's also trading child pornography.
simonw 1y ago
That's the thing where if you have significant assets your family members get kidnapped until you irreversibly transfer those assets to criminals, right? I'm not sure how crypto continues to gain mainstream adoption in the face of that, no matter how much excitement there is for it in the current US administration. My previous argument was that a technology where losing your password means you lose your net worth was incompatible with how human beings actually work. This kidnapping thing appears to be getting a whole lot more media coverage than that.
- pawelduda 1y ago
  Kidnapping and ransom existed before crypto
  - simonw 1y ago
    Reducing the barrier to successfully executing a kidnapping-for-cash turns out to make that crime more common.
  - jsheard 1y ago
    So did pump and dump scams, but crypto brought in a new golden age of pumping and dumping. It's a matter of scale and ease of execution.
    - pawelduda 1y ago
      Getting kidnapped happens against victim's will, whereas getting into a global PvP casino, taking a risk and getting burned is self-inflicted. Sure, it's easy to fall into it when everyone, especially celebrities shill these scams but still, nobody's holding gun to anyone's head here. I've bet on wrong thing many times but ultimately it was my choice
      - surgical_fire 1y ago
        Are you really arguing that victims of scams deserve it if no violence or coercion was involved?
swalsh 1y ago
Crypto should be taking off in use in the AI age. Right now I have credits I paid open AI for so I can use their API. I have anthropic credits, I have some credits in a video generator app. A2A is becoming a thing, and now it's a realistic thing to potentially expose an agent on a public endpoint to do useful work. Agents working with agents is a very clear future direction. But everything is a closed ecosystem. But with the addition of a few extra fields to an Agent card (chain name, accepted tokens, cost) and perhaps a transaction addition to the task/send interface. We could build a network of agents working for agents. Compatible with each other. It doesn't have to be all on-chain. It's just the economic layer. You host the agent, the agent accepts payments. The agent makes payments. All the crypto tech we need already exists. Use USDC, don't have to worry about speculation driving up costs. Use a network like SOL, AVAX, SUI and the transaction will be finalized in seconds. Credits should be transferable, and not locked in little ecosystem. We could take it one stop further. Prices could be dynamic. If GPU usage is high, cost should be high. If demand low, price should be low. Outages are a pricing issue, not a technical issue.
- rcxdude 1y ago
  Sure, but a) this doesn't require blockchain, and b) there's no incentive for the various players to make credits portable.
  - swalsh 1y ago
    I'm tired of the "this doesn't require blockchain" argument. The alternative is a centralized entity that controls payments. Is that REALLY your preferred solution?
    - munksbeer 1y ago
      Are you talking about a stablecoin crypto? Because why would I buy tokens on a chain where the value of the tokens can change wildly from day to day? How do the services that accept those tokens value them and charge appropriately?
    - carlob 1y ago
jbverschoor 1y ago
[flagged]
keiferski 1y ago
The history of crypto is pretty much a story of technical people creating something interesting with a cyberpunk/ open ethos - then the financial industry realizing it can be exploited to make money in ethically dubious ways, while simultaneously destroying the philosophy behind it. The bitcoin paper is still one of the most elegant technical documents I’ve ever read, a decade+ since it was published. I’m not sure why this simple narrative isn’t more common, but one guess is that the media is largely dominated by institutional players (deeply plugged into finance) and the simultaneous “death” of cyberpunk & cypherpunk as original culture, rather than just a video game aesthetic. Makes me wish that Satoshi had released bitcoin in 1995 or 2005, when that culture was still alive.
- repler 1y ago
  > the media is largely dominated by institutional players and also tech journalism as a whole is pretty abysmal to begin with
  - safety1st 1y ago
    Speaking as someone who had a passion for journalism and wanted to become a journalist when I was in high school at the end of the '90s, these days I am comfortable with that industry being completely eradicated. How did we get here? The Telecom Act of 1996 legalized cross-media ownership and an unprecedented degree of consolidation across all forms of media, news and otherwise. Those rules existed to promote local journalism and independent voices. We now have no local journalism and no independent voices that are staffed and budgeted for doing real, investigative journalism. Now journalists say what their corporate parent tells them to say; the ones who refused were fired years ago. The ones who stuck around work really hard to obscure this fact because they're clinging to their jobs in a declining industry. We went from a press that was the envy of the world to a cartel of decaying shills. Either reform the industry and break up the monopolies or just terminate it and fire everyone.
    - okr 1y ago
      Commerce subsidizes journalism. Or art. Or any other "hobby", where i do something, that feels right for me. I have time on the side, because working for the man gives me the freedom to do things other than surviving. Long lives commerce and capitalism.
hengheng 1y ago
What I'm always missing with these takes is the "what if" component. Nobody really dares to paint the whole picture in articles like this. Authors seem to go as far as to find the moral infraction, and then stop. But that doesn't do what is happening justice. No, crypto does not need regulation. Law-based order needs crypto regulation. That's a big difference already. But we can go further than that. What if we don't get crypto regulation, what happens to law-based order exactly? Trump is not the kind of guy to build businesses and create wealth. He more like kinda goes through them. He's not the guy to invest, he's the guy to cash out. Right now, he's cashing out of the US economy. Lots of real value is there for him to extract that is completely unprotected. Trump is right. All those assets exist, and he can take them, destroy them, and liquidate them. He has that power. He is permitted. It is a programme, and his execution is successful. There's no point saying "but he can't do that, it would be unethical". Sure it's unethical, dumb, and nonsensical, but at face value, he can do all of that. No point in saying "but he can't do that, America would never be the same". That argument is reactionary, of course everything was going to change anyways. So, let's face it. A president that is not going to miss his chance to join the true billionaires club (10+ b), a ruling class of industry leaders like it existed 120 years ago. Whether he stays president doesn't even matter. Government programmes are going down the drain, America's influence in the world deteriorates, trade volume breaking down, a less smart military will have to deal with more conflicts. The only question in that turmoil is going to be what constitues a winner. Right now, everybody is buying crypto like lottery tickets, and it becomes self-fulfilling. Mid-term it might be Florida real estate. Long term? Who knows. I'd actually like for somebody to really paint this picture and fill in the details. Stopping at the first inflection point that is somewhat scary is unproductive, we've been reading those takes for a year now.
- olelele 1y ago
  With the speed up of climate change coming due to trump administration policies Florida might not be very attractive in the future…
  - hengheng 1y ago
    Hence 'mid-term'. Lots of new money taking refuge there, but it won't be for long. Harder and harder to be on the winning side in this overall.
noisy_boy 1y ago
I would be interested to know from a developer working in Crypto about how is the day-to-day work experience compared to working in a similar role in, say, a hedge fund. The latter is fast paced and I have heard that the former is too but would be interesting to hear from people actually in the seats.
ionwake 1y ago
I just think its wild you all have subscriptions to the economist
- rimeice 1y ago
  Why? Probably the easiest and quickest way to get a read on everything that’s going on outside of tech and therefore understand the global context our industry sits in…
  - ionwake 1y ago
    I prefer my own curated news sources that never required me to pay. I dont think Ive ever paid for an online newspaper.
    - rimeice 1y ago
      Honestly, I would start. If we don’t support good journalism all we’ll be left with is twitter. God forbid.
- hiatus 1y ago
  There are some sites that sell them at a discount.
- tim333 1y ago
  I don't. It's not that hard to read anyway. You can use the archive.ph version https://archive.ph/HpY1R https://archive.ph/HpY1R or the bypass paywalls extension, or probably a number of other ways.
- concrete_head 1y ago
  My local libarary has a subscription, I can access articles through their app.
zkmon 1y ago
Where would the crypto millionaires spend their money? They have to chase some real world assets such as homes, jacking up prices for those. So, for someone who invested in the real world assets, they see their asset value going up. It hardly matters where you invest. It's all in the same pond.
TrackerFF 1y ago
I've followed crypto since late 2011, and the ideology today is completely detached from what it used to be. Back in the day you had crypto maximalists that mainly viewed it as freedom from authority, regulations, and traditional banking. No more expensive fees for sending cash, no more third parties like PayPal to charge fees and potentially freeze your money. Detaching your wealth from political systems. Yes, a lot of techno anarchist and ancaps were part of the scene - with grand dreams of defi taking over the world. These days it has just evolved into play money for finance bros and hedge funds, and more lately, a mechanism for circumventing corruption for the powerful and wealthy.
- rainsford 1y ago
  I'm not sure the evolution you're describing is as much of a change as it might superficially appear to be. The modern crypto participants may look different than the original enthusiasts, but the philosophy of being free from authority and regulations is still 100% there. It's just that instead of it being about scrappy cypherpunk rebels, it's about billionaires who want to use their wealth to supplant governments and usher in a techno-feudalism future or whatever. Of course some folks are just in it for the get rich quick scams, but there is an obvious ideology around the cryptocurrency space today that is still anti-authority but for all the wrong reasons.
  - topranks 1y ago
    Yeah. It reveals the basic truth that if we have no government, laws or regulation we ultimately end up with the rich and powerful controlling things and doing what they want.
- topranks 1y ago
  It’s the natural result of the technology’s original goal to be “unstoppable” and beyond regulation or laws. Makes it a perfect place to run investment frauds, scams, Ponzi schemes and other activities that would be illegal in the regular financial sector. Also attracts criminals, tax evaders and money launderers. Meanwhile it’s slow and cumbersome enough that anyone not seriously motivated to operate beyond the reach of the law stick with existing systems for convenience.
Hilift 1y ago
The next logical step is US Treasury Bonds to be redeemed in Crypto. The current administration is proposing a 2026 budget that adds $5 trillion in new debt (more spending than revenue). Jerome can't print money that fast. Even the Fed is counting on the "economy to grow faster than the debt". It's like a fiction world. I fully expect a "crypto equivalence" executive order for things where the US can muscle trade partners.
tre7 1y ago
[dead]

90 points by vnorilo 1y ago

vidialaxmi 1y ago

[dead]

tre7 1y ago

[dead]

sigwinch 1y ago

https://archive.is/HpY1R https://archive.is/HpY1R

grezql 1y ago

[dead]

rimbo789 1y ago

Crypto was a huge mistake. It should have been rigorously regulated right out of the gate to the point of being unusable for anyone. I have yet to see a use case that doesn’t amount to buying drugs or defrauding rubes.

polygamous_bat 1y ago
Money laundering is also a pretty large use case (https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/additional-12-defendants-charged-rico-conspiracy-over-263-million-cryptocurrency-thefts https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/additional-12-defendants-...)
cherryteastain 1y ago
Sending money without government interference to relatives living in countries with strict foreign exchange controls (Argentina, Lebanon, Turkey...) is one quite legit use case.
- BillinghamJ 1y ago
  Legit from whose perspective though? Around an authoritarian government maybe widely viewed as reasonable/justified, but doesn't sound legitimate to those governments
  - frainfreeze 1y ago
    Wild argument
    - ionwake 1y ago
      hes grasping at straws no idea why
  - BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
    To some particular psychopath out there, I’m sure murder seems fine.
  - sigwinch 1y ago
    Or, since it’s important to preserve the anonymity of my Turkish, Argentinian, and Lebanese relatives; it’s important to preserve the anonymity of the bigger users: ransomware C2 operators funding North Korean rockets.
- mannycalavera42 1y ago
  Let's not assume foreign exchange controls are always bad. Not saying they are not ... in some cases
- helsinkiandrew 1y ago
  Unfortunately to governments and law enforcements that looks identical to organised crime and terrorists sending money. All three of those countries have restrictions/regulations on converting crypto currencies into local currencies - doesn't crypto just move the the problem to converting it to local currency?
  - 1y ago
tazjin 1y ago
It's useful for evading illegal US sanctions, and sometimes also works just as a payment method. I paid a hosting provider with it earlier this year, and that actually worked well.
- sgt 1y ago
  Not sure why you're being downvoted. Most of us don't live in Russia, but if we did, I am totally sure that may HN-ers would come up with ways to evade sanctions. It's either that or leave the country, which I am sure many aren't willing to do.
  - tazjin 1y ago
    It's not like anything critical is affected by this. For ordinary people it's things like buying Western games, but those all have workarounds (e.g. through crypto).
tacker2000 1y ago
Who should regulate it? Due to its nature it is inherently extremely hard to regulate.
- jsheard 1y ago
  The technology is hard to regulate, but the exchanges where the overwhelming majority of fiat-crypto trades happen are regular old businesses which can be regulated or sanctioned just like anything else. Blockchain magic wouldn't stop the feds from seizing Coinbase's assets and hauling Brian Armstrong off to prison if they wanted to.
  - liotier 1y ago
    Just like money laundering: choke it at the interfaces with the legitimate financial system.
  - tacker2000 1y ago
    Yes, the fiat input and output are the only points that can be controlled, but even then they can only be controlled by the local governments. And as you can see all of them are late to the party.
resource_waste 1y ago
If you can be objective enough to consider that not everyone likes keeping fiat currency, it was an interesting alternative. Bitcoin generally appreciated, where fiat had inflation. While the transaction costs/speed have eliminated this, there was a few years of my life that I both sent money to friends and used a Bitcoin debit card.
- dr_dshiv 1y ago
  It’s funny, because the inflation of crypto comes not from the increase in the supply of individual coins (that’s controlled mathematically) but by increasing the number of cryptocurrencies themselves.
  - sigwinch 1y ago
    I’m not so sure I buy that. Do nondecreasing counts of NFTs and meme coins account for the psychological source of inflation?
    - dr_dshiv 1y ago
      Can’t say for the memecoins and NFTs — but when it goes from just bitcoin to hundreds of different competitive legit coins, that does seem like inflation of money supply.
      - sigwinch 1y ago
        Do Camel Cash and Marlboro Miles count toward inflation?
  - hollerith 1y ago
    That is a perverse use of "inflation" unless a holder of BTC or ETH were somehow forced to spend some of his BTC or ETH on every new cryptocurrency -- or it happened automatically, and for the holder to prevent it from happening was risky or tedious.
- ddimitrov 1y ago
BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
Buying drugs doesn’t have to be an illegitimate use case. Depends on the person, the drugs, the safety of the marketplace, etc.
jMyles 1y ago
> I have yet to see a use case that doesn’t amount to buying drugs Society has been struggling for decades to overcome prohibition via political channels, and watching as multiple generations have been damaged by its impact on local economies, civil liberties, and the boon to criminal cartels. Then, a mathematical solution arises which unambiguously undermines this regime, and somehow that's a bad thing?!
- rollcat 1y ago
  It's not a "mathematical" solution. The maths are cryptographic hashes and consensus protocols, means to some end - exchanging value. You're proposing that it's a technological solution to a societal problem. These only last as long as a particular regulatory body / regime allows them to. Mining. It has long been infeasible for anyone without prior capital and investment. Ban that - you can easily get a lead through the electricity bill - viola. Private key custody. Even technologically-inclined individuals mess it up from time to time. Hence the proliferation of centralised services to keep the keys ("wallets") for you. Block the exchange. QED.
seaourfreed 1y ago
WikiLeaks was persecuted. Their credit cards processing was turned OFF. Bitcoin saved them. There have been free speech social media sites BLOCKED by Stripe and all credit cards, and debanked. They switched to crypto. Marc Andressen on Joe Rogan personally knows many dozens of people personally debanked because they were persecured by the government & debanked. Not for drugs or fraud.
elif 1y ago
You don't think 1000% returns over the last 5 years is useful to anyone? During the height of inflation?
- rimbo789 1y ago
  Returns gained entirely from fleecing rubes. Fraud generally has good returns for the fraudsters.
  - elif 1y ago
    no one has lost money for buying bitcoin at any point in history. the only way to get "fleeced" like a "rube" is to sell or never buy.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
ohyes 1y ago
Dont forget the “murder for hire” user story
phyalow 1y ago
Speculation is a legitimate use case. There is substantially more to it than that but I will let you chew that over just to point out how blatantly incorrect your prior is.
- h2782 1y ago
  Speculation is as much valuable use case as my nails are to be chewed. Sure, it works, doesn't mean it's a good thing.
  - fisf 1y ago
    An alternative to an inflated, state controlled currency is another use case. The last few years should have made that plenty clear.
  - phyalow 1y ago
    Casinos, Financial Markets of all denominations, Horse Racing are also examples of pure play speculation. Speculation is often just a form of entertainment. Your moral equivocation is utterly irrelevant.
ionwake 1y ago
[flagged]
- rimbo789 1y ago
  Imagine in the year of 2025 believing crypto has value beyond making fraud easy. After over a decade of this thing rattling around it remains a problem in search of a solution and by and large huge waste of everyone’s time.
  - ionwake 1y ago
    Imagine working in tech for years and not having bought the only 2 trillion dollar asset that could have freed you from your shackles. Then complaining about it.
    - ionwake 1y ago
      Imagine not being able to have a discussion without downvoting people
dzikimarian 1y ago
One of ours biggest customers is mainly used by Ukrainian refugees as easy way to pay abroad. USDC/USDT is simply cheaper and more available to them than regular USD.
charcircuit 1y ago
It prevents centralized entities being the gatekeepers to the modern financial world. The US maintaining their own digital version of cash would also work, but the government is slow, and does not want to compete against these centralized entities due to being advantaged as the government controls the currency itself. Payment processors essentially get to dictate what is and is not allowed to be financially viable which is a very powerful form of control over culture.
- rimbo789 1y ago
  What’s wrong with centralized entities? There should be financial gatekeepers. They are much better than whatever crime syndicates benefit from crypto Crypto is just speed running the 19th century and making us re learn all the reasons why we made the pre crypto regulations.
  - charcircuit 1y ago
    >What’s wrong with centralized entities? Because the CEO of one could read a false news article about your site and prohibit you from transacting with them anymore. Your existence is at the whims of a few people.
- Zanfa 1y ago
  > It prevents centralized entities being the gatekeepers to the modern financial world. In theory, but it doesn’t in practice. Most crypto transfers never make it to the blockchain, they happen entirely in SQL databases of exchanges. Also, Tether has complete control over USDT and can block or reverse any payment or freeze any account it wants. No bank or payment processor in the world has such centralized control over the traditional financial system. If anything, crypto is more centralized by comparison. Both in terms of payment processors as well as wealth distribution.
  - charcircuit 1y ago
    >In theory, but it doesn’t in practice. In practice neither exchanges or Tether have made any attempts at refusing to allow payments to legal businesses as far as I'm aware. So in practice it does.
Hilift 1y ago
Today's society cannot protect people that are easily influenced. Social media has brought remote fraudsters right into your aunt/uncles inbox. Some people are going to get fleeced unless their money is put into something that only dispenses PEZ amounts at a time. This increases if dementia occurs.
MrDisposable 1y ago
> I have yet to see a use case that doesn’t amount to buying drugs or defrauding rubes Russian here. My forgotten Bitcoin stash saved my ass multiple times by providing a way to transfer money to a friend abroad who then paid for my western expenses (hosting, VPNs etc.) using his Visa / MC cards. Also, a lot of programmers who emigrated from Russia to countries such as Georgia in 2022 were using USDT as a way to receive their salaries.
- hkpack 1y ago
  And also it helps your government to transact with Iran, India, and China in convenient currencies, bypassing US-imposed sanctions and prolonging current war and planning for the future ones.
survirtual 1y ago
Let's regulate mathematics. No, it isn't enough...let's regulate physics itself. If we could just control when molecules are allowed to form, we could make it so mean molecules don't exist unless they're allowed to exist by our Council of Very Good People Who Have The Most Money. Since they have the most money, they know better than everyone else. /s Did you know in some countries, a good loan for someone with perfect credit is 20% apr? Do you know in some countries police can confiscate all the money you have and never give it back? Have you ever heard of civil asset forfeiture? Did you know in some countries, just protesting can have your accounts frozen? Did you know in some countries, sending money can take over 3 days with no knowledge of what is happening to your money during that time? Did you know that Debit and Wire transfer often cost well over $20 to perform? This list could go on for days. Only fools would speak about crypto so confidently without doing a minimal investigation into its utility.
- rollcat 1y ago
  > Only fools would speak about crypto so confidently without doing a minimal investigation into its utility. Only fools would speak about a technological solution without understating the reality, that technology still leans on society, power structures, and ability to enforce laws. Civil disobedience works as a means to shift the rules, the balance of power; you can't maintain it perpetually. P2P eventually shifted the attention of the recording industry to online distribution. People jumped to Netflix and iTunes, because they became more convenient, while providing good value for the money.
  - survirtual 1y ago
    Look, I know it is hard for an ego to hear the things I say and the way I say them sometimes. For that, I am sorry. But I am not arguing with you, I am informing you. Challenging media empires was child's play compared to challenging the world's financial system. Bitcoin has successfully illustrated a new and better way. Presidents have been killed for less. Civil rights activists have been killed for less. Bitcoin and the crypto economy is now inevitable, just as gasoline vehicles became inevitable, and a nuclear armed world became inevitable. The world is changing, please do not let your self-identity interfere with the reality of this. When a new and revolutionary invention becomes part of the human mental strata, you cannot take it back. This has never been done before since the knowledge of building a campfire or sharpening rocks. It doesn't matter how powerful, stable, beneficial, or otherwise the old system was. It has been super-ceded by something that outcompetes it. That's reality. I hope that you and others like you realize it and have a prosperous life.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
ecocentrik 1y ago
- repatriating and distributing cartel drug money - paying/receiving bribes - bypassing international sanctions to finance wars There's a lot of uses for cryptocurrency and only a very small fraction are good for individuals.
AngryData 1y ago
There is lots of porn that credit card companies and proccessors don't want to touch. Plenty of kink sites have had problems with them, porn sites have blanket restrictions on keywords like hypnosis and shadow ban certain kinds of legal content in order to not get hamstrung by financial restrictions. Also there are plenty of blackmarket goods that are heavily restricted and legally punished without good cause, and I do not believe just because something is "illegal" that it is automatically bad.
bufferoverflow 1y ago
You can buy drugs and defraud rubes with USD too. Crypto has many different useful applications. One of the main ones: limited supply (I am aware not all crypto has a cap).
mvdtnz 1y ago
> I have yet to see a use case that doesn’t amount to buying drugs or defrauding rubes. Hey now. There's also trading child pornography.

simonw 1y ago

That's the thing where if you have significant assets your family members get kidnapped until you irreversibly transfer those assets to criminals, right? I'm not sure how crypto continues to gain mainstream adoption in the face of that, no matter how much excitement there is for it in the current US administration. My previous argument was that a technology where losing your password means you lose your net worth was incompatible with how human beings actually work. This kidnapping thing appears to be getting a whole lot more media coverage than that.

pawelduda 1y ago
Kidnapping and ransom existed before crypto
- simonw 1y ago
  Reducing the barrier to successfully executing a kidnapping-for-cash turns out to make that crime more common.
- jsheard 1y ago
  So did pump and dump scams, but crypto brought in a new golden age of pumping and dumping. It's a matter of scale and ease of execution.
  - pawelduda 1y ago
    Getting kidnapped happens against victim's will, whereas getting into a global PvP casino, taking a risk and getting burned is self-inflicted. Sure, it's easy to fall into it when everyone, especially celebrities shill these scams but still, nobody's holding gun to anyone's head here. I've bet on wrong thing many times but ultimately it was my choice
    - surgical_fire 1y ago
      Are you really arguing that victims of scams deserve it if no violence or coercion was involved?

swalsh 1y ago

Crypto should be taking off in use in the AI age. Right now I have credits I paid open AI for so I can use their API. I have anthropic credits, I have some credits in a video generator app. A2A is becoming a thing, and now it's a realistic thing to potentially expose an agent on a public endpoint to do useful work. Agents working with agents is a very clear future direction. But everything is a closed ecosystem. But with the addition of a few extra fields to an Agent card (chain name, accepted tokens, cost) and perhaps a transaction addition to the task/send interface. We could build a network of agents working for agents. Compatible with each other. It doesn't have to be all on-chain. It's just the economic layer. You host the agent, the agent accepts payments. The agent makes payments. All the crypto tech we need already exists. Use USDC, don't have to worry about speculation driving up costs. Use a network like SOL, AVAX, SUI and the transaction will be finalized in seconds. Credits should be transferable, and not locked in little ecosystem. We could take it one stop further. Prices could be dynamic. If GPU usage is high, cost should be high. If demand low, price should be low. Outages are a pricing issue, not a technical issue.

rcxdude 1y ago
Sure, but a) this doesn't require blockchain, and b) there's no incentive for the various players to make credits portable.
- swalsh 1y ago
  I'm tired of the "this doesn't require blockchain" argument. The alternative is a centralized entity that controls payments. Is that REALLY your preferred solution?
  - munksbeer 1y ago
    Are you talking about a stablecoin crypto? Because why would I buy tokens on a chain where the value of the tokens can change wildly from day to day? How do the services that accept those tokens value them and charge appropriately?
  - carlob 1y ago

jbverschoor 1y ago

[flagged]

keiferski 1y ago

The history of crypto is pretty much a story of technical people creating something interesting with a cyberpunk/ open ethos - then the financial industry realizing it can be exploited to make money in ethically dubious ways, while simultaneously destroying the philosophy behind it. The bitcoin paper is still one of the most elegant technical documents I’ve ever read, a decade+ since it was published. I’m not sure why this simple narrative isn’t more common, but one guess is that the media is largely dominated by institutional players (deeply plugged into finance) and the simultaneous “death” of cyberpunk & cypherpunk as original culture, rather than just a video game aesthetic. Makes me wish that Satoshi had released bitcoin in 1995 or 2005, when that culture was still alive.

repler 1y ago
> the media is largely dominated by institutional players and also tech journalism as a whole is pretty abysmal to begin with
- safety1st 1y ago
  Speaking as someone who had a passion for journalism and wanted to become a journalist when I was in high school at the end of the '90s, these days I am comfortable with that industry being completely eradicated. How did we get here? The Telecom Act of 1996 legalized cross-media ownership and an unprecedented degree of consolidation across all forms of media, news and otherwise. Those rules existed to promote local journalism and independent voices. We now have no local journalism and no independent voices that are staffed and budgeted for doing real, investigative journalism. Now journalists say what their corporate parent tells them to say; the ones who refused were fired years ago. The ones who stuck around work really hard to obscure this fact because they're clinging to their jobs in a declining industry. We went from a press that was the envy of the world to a cartel of decaying shills. Either reform the industry and break up the monopolies or just terminate it and fire everyone.
  - okr 1y ago
    Commerce subsidizes journalism. Or art. Or any other "hobby", where i do something, that feels right for me. I have time on the side, because working for the man gives me the freedom to do things other than surviving. Long lives commerce and capitalism.

hengheng 1y ago

What I'm always missing with these takes is the "what if" component. Nobody really dares to paint the whole picture in articles like this. Authors seem to go as far as to find the moral infraction, and then stop. But that doesn't do what is happening justice. No, crypto does not need regulation. Law-based order needs crypto regulation. That's a big difference already. But we can go further than that. What if we don't get crypto regulation, what happens to law-based order exactly? Trump is not the kind of guy to build businesses and create wealth. He more like kinda goes through them. He's not the guy to invest, he's the guy to cash out. Right now, he's cashing out of the US economy. Lots of real value is there for him to extract that is completely unprotected. Trump is right. All those assets exist, and he can take them, destroy them, and liquidate them. He has that power. He is permitted. It is a programme, and his execution is successful. There's no point saying "but he can't do that, it would be unethical". Sure it's unethical, dumb, and nonsensical, but at face value, he can do all of that. No point in saying "but he can't do that, America would never be the same". That argument is reactionary, of course everything was going to change anyways. So, let's face it. A president that is not going to miss his chance to join the true billionaires club (10+ b), a ruling class of industry leaders like it existed 120 years ago. Whether he stays president doesn't even matter. Government programmes are going down the drain, America's influence in the world deteriorates, trade volume breaking down, a less smart military will have to deal with more conflicts. The only question in that turmoil is going to be what constitues a winner. Right now, everybody is buying crypto like lottery tickets, and it becomes self-fulfilling. Mid-term it might be Florida real estate. Long term? Who knows. I'd actually like for somebody to really paint this picture and fill in the details. Stopping at the first inflection point that is somewhat scary is unproductive, we've been reading those takes for a year now.

olelele 1y ago
With the speed up of climate change coming due to trump administration policies Florida might not be very attractive in the future…
- hengheng 1y ago
  Hence 'mid-term'. Lots of new money taking refuge there, but it won't be for long. Harder and harder to be on the winning side in this overall.

noisy_boy 1y ago

I would be interested to know from a developer working in Crypto about how is the day-to-day work experience compared to working in a similar role in, say, a hedge fund. The latter is fast paced and I have heard that the former is too but would be interesting to hear from people actually in the seats.

ionwake 1y ago

I just think its wild you all have subscriptions to the economist

rimeice 1y ago
Why? Probably the easiest and quickest way to get a read on everything that’s going on outside of tech and therefore understand the global context our industry sits in…
- ionwake 1y ago
  I prefer my own curated news sources that never required me to pay. I dont think Ive ever paid for an online newspaper.
  - rimeice 1y ago
    Honestly, I would start. If we don’t support good journalism all we’ll be left with is twitter. God forbid.
hiatus 1y ago
There are some sites that sell them at a discount.
tim333 1y ago
I don't. It's not that hard to read anyway. You can use the archive.ph version https://archive.ph/HpY1R https://archive.ph/HpY1R or the bypass paywalls extension, or probably a number of other ways.
concrete_head 1y ago
My local libarary has a subscription, I can access articles through their app.

zkmon 1y ago

Where would the crypto millionaires spend their money? They have to chase some real world assets such as homes, jacking up prices for those. So, for someone who invested in the real world assets, they see their asset value going up. It hardly matters where you invest. It's all in the same pond.

TrackerFF 1y ago

I've followed crypto since late 2011, and the ideology today is completely detached from what it used to be. Back in the day you had crypto maximalists that mainly viewed it as freedom from authority, regulations, and traditional banking. No more expensive fees for sending cash, no more third parties like PayPal to charge fees and potentially freeze your money. Detaching your wealth from political systems. Yes, a lot of techno anarchist and ancaps were part of the scene - with grand dreams of defi taking over the world. These days it has just evolved into play money for finance bros and hedge funds, and more lately, a mechanism for circumventing corruption for the powerful and wealthy.

rainsford 1y ago
I'm not sure the evolution you're describing is as much of a change as it might superficially appear to be. The modern crypto participants may look different than the original enthusiasts, but the philosophy of being free from authority and regulations is still 100% there. It's just that instead of it being about scrappy cypherpunk rebels, it's about billionaires who want to use their wealth to supplant governments and usher in a techno-feudalism future or whatever. Of course some folks are just in it for the get rich quick scams, but there is an obvious ideology around the cryptocurrency space today that is still anti-authority but for all the wrong reasons.
- topranks 1y ago
  Yeah. It reveals the basic truth that if we have no government, laws or regulation we ultimately end up with the rich and powerful controlling things and doing what they want.
topranks 1y ago
It’s the natural result of the technology’s original goal to be “unstoppable” and beyond regulation or laws. Makes it a perfect place to run investment frauds, scams, Ponzi schemes and other activities that would be illegal in the regular financial sector. Also attracts criminals, tax evaders and money launderers. Meanwhile it’s slow and cumbersome enough that anyone not seriously motivated to operate beyond the reach of the law stick with existing systems for convenience.

Hilift 1y ago

The next logical step is US Treasury Bonds to be redeemed in Crypto. The current administration is proposing a 2026 budget that adds $5 trillion in new debt (more spending than revenue). Jerome can't print money that fast. Even the Fed is counting on the "economy to grow faster than the debt". It's like a fiction world. I fully expect a "crypto equivalence" executive order for things where the US can muscle trade partners.

tre7 1y ago

[dead]