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Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place

stephendiehl.com

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Re: Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place

#11

Post by pjc50 »

> The public's trust in markets is finite. Every dollar lost on a self-referential game labeled a market consumes a small piece of that finite trust, and the consumption over fifteen years has been considerable

Yes, and not just in crypto. People have started to view a high-trust society like a rainforest: a natural resource that has lots of life-sustaining positive externalities, but you can just burn it down to make a quick buck instead. This has been bad since the GFC, and accelerated by the modern rightwing influence sphere.

There's a very real tendency to people to go "I don't trust mainstream source for ", and then immediately jump to totally trusting some random youtube or tiktok conspiracy theorist.

Re: Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place

#15

Post by audunw »

SquareWheel wrote: post #5

Note that this post includes a major spoiler for the show The Good Place . The show is fantastic, so I'd suggest not reading unless you've already finished season 1, or have decided it's not for you.

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

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

Re: Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place

#16

Post by keiferski »

thrownawaysz wrote: post #2

>Meet Mike. Mike is a college freshman who is exposed to crypto through social media. He downloads Coinbase, buys ten dollars of CumRocket because his friend group is in on it, watches the price move, and feels for the first time the dopamine rush of gambling on non-economic random walks. By his sophomore year he is onto harder drugs: 0DTE options on triple-leveraged single-stock ETFs he does not understand, traded o…

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

Re: Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place

#17

Post by d--b »

> The price of a meme coin reflects only the collective belief of meme coin holders that they will be able to sell to a greater fool

Author is at times a little too emphatic, but he has some sentences like this one that are really efficient in conveying the idea.

Re: Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place

#19

Post by l23k4 »

titanomachy wrote: post #3

> A shadow dollar system, newly blessed by federal statute, is quietly migrating the savings of the global poor onto the balance sheets of a handful of opaque private companies. I'm out of the loop on this one. Is he talking about some crypto thing?

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

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

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

Re: Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place

#20

Post by mindwok »

righthand wrote: post #14
SquareWheel wrote: post #5

Note that this post includes a major spoiler for the show The Good Place . The show is fantastic, so I'd suggest not reading unless you've already finished season 1, or have decided it's not for you.

[flagged]

You should be kinder to people if you want them to come around to your way of thinking.
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