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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

#41

Post by righthand »

insanitybit wrote: post #21
righthand wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Yes, we're so starved for content about the corruption in our country, thank god there's this one article that explains these hidden secret issues.

Oh okay, let me try to advise instead what you are suggesting:

Dont read anything about the corruption in this country, because it might not be entertaining as 10 year old TV show. You need a healthy entertainment diet of non-corruption content, so that you don’t feel the need to contribute to democracy.

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

#43

Post by INTPenis »

I've been sharing author's view for quite a while now, namely that there must exist a market of goods to give a currency real value.

But I must contradict the author, because there is a market of goods, and bitcoin is indirectly involved in it. Namely the dark web market of drugs.

People love drugs, and they use a lot of them, drugs turnover a huge amount of value. And right now people are buying bitcoin, because it's often safe to buy, and exchanging it for monero, that they then use to buy drugs.

I'm very much interested in this market, and how it affects crypto.

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

#44

Post by PaulHoule »

The weird thing about it to me is that it lumbers on. There was that time I’d dread going to parties because that crypto guy was there. That time Bloomberg got its best writer to write a whole issue of Businessweek about it a week before the SBF fraud broke. Then there was that weird time between when crypro brown jumped on the AI bandwagon before Ezra Klein did.

And now the crypto bros are still talking… to each other. Still looking at the price of Bitcoin obsessively. And the rest of us hardly ever hear about it.

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

#45

Post by himata4113 »

Cryptocurrency is very much a double edged sword, on one hand it enables people to transact monetary value bypassing for-profit operators such as western union and paypal as well as hinders corrupt government institutions from confiscating or otherwise devaluing what you own. Of course this also allows people with harmful intentions to do the same, bypass centralized systems that keep fraud in check, mitigate theft and whatnot.

But all I know is that the only reason why some of my friends are able to work remotely from their country is crypto currency as that is the only way they're able to get paid without 30% to 40% being lost in fees as well as being stored in a currency that might lose a majority of its value overnight. They work real, productive swe jobs and earn enough to support not only themselves, but everyone around them as well making the place they live in a tiny bit better.

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

#47

Post by RobotToaster »

deweller wrote: post #10
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?

I assume he is referring to the uptick in stablecoin adoption. USD Stable coins are US dollar-backed cryptocurrency tokens that are intended to always hold a value of $1 USD. Stablecoins are not backed by a central bank. Instead their source of value comes from a private company that holds actual US dollars or USD-equivalent reserves (like treasury bills, etc).

I've always wondered, how do the companies that run stablecoins make a profit? Are they buying treasury bonds?

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

#48

Post by insanitybit »

righthand wrote: post #41
insanitybit wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we're so starved for content about the corruption in our country, thank god there's this one article that explains these hidden secret issues.

Oh okay, let me try to advise instead what you are suggesting: Dont read anything about the corruption in this country, because it might not be entertaining as 10 year old TV show. You need a healthy entertainment diet of non-corruption content, so that you don’t feel the need to contribute to democracy.

Where is this "anything" coming from? Do you think this is the only article about this topic? This isn't even new.

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

#49

Post by rob74 »

> Each one, taken alone, would have been a bleak, dystopian fever dream ripped from the pages of a William Gibson cyberpunk novel.

Or rather, a totally outrageous parody of a William Gibson cyberpunk novel. If this wasn't real, I probably couldn't stop laughing about it. But unfortunately, it is...

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

#50

Post by alehrs »

I've been deep into crypto for years and I was a big stablecoin supporter. I was fascinated by the tech and I still am. But everything outside the tech itself is just trash, scams, and gambling. I've come to believe that "pure" decentralization is neither practical nor particularly convenient. The only real use case that makes sense to me is giving people in developing countries access to a stable currency they can actually hold, trade, and invest in, meaning USDT or USDC. Outside of that, as an EU/US citizen I don't see why I'd hold stablecoins instead of fiat. It's actually riskier in every meaningful way, and I already have access to every form of investment I could want. It's genuinely fascinating to think about a technology that can empower people who otherwise have no access to financial tools. But that comes at the cost of millions of people around the world gambling with money they can't afford to lose, convinced they're investing their way to wealth.
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