Isn’t this related to financial nihilism where normal people can’t invest or earn enough to grow money for basic life costs like housing and college with standard investments or jobs. They need a moonshot, hence gambling has become normalized. It isn’t even about the White House or crypto per se, it’s a desperate embrace of risk to catch up.
Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place
51–60 of 561 posts
Re: Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place
#52I'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'…
Ive been saying this for a while. Cryptocurrencies are an index tracker for the underground economy.
They're not without value and theyre not all speculation but what value they do have is almost entirely about facilitating transactions which at least one state considers illegal.
I used to think that this would mean that they'd be outright banned eventually but it seems that the "index tracker for the underground economy" proved to be too profitable an investment for western oligarchs and the chance to undermine rival countries' capital controls proved too alluring for the imperialists in government.
Re: Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Oh okay, there are multiple articles on the same thing, don’t read or inform yourself of anything because they might spoil an old TV show!
The article isn’t a light refresher on corruption, it literally has suggestions of how to change cryptocurrency investment for the better. It is frankly very indepth and lengthy and very good. But one wouldn’t know that if they skipped over it because of few lines might hurt their entertainment viewing-surprise ego.
Re: Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place
#54> 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).
Is it similar to WildCat banking?
Re: Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place
#55I'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 a…
Exactly. Cryptocurrency is useful as as a backup system against failing/weak institutions. Just that. Like insurance, it was not there to make anyone's lives better but simply to become a safeguard to avoid complete collapse.
Re: Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place
#56Cryptocurrency 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 a…
And they also make their place they live and the rest of the planet a tiny bit worse due to the energy consumption of bitcoin, if they support bitcoin in any form even with lightning.
A question though: How do they exchange their crypto into local fiat?
Re: Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place
#57>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…
I read it as another verse of Eminem's "Guilty Conscience".
Re: Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place
#58I wish I could just read the prompt rather then the very long article full of tiny mistakes that was generated from it.
Re: Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Yes, bonds, sometimes corporate debts, often money market participation.
Re: Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place
#60> At no point in this pipeline does Mike's capital touch productive enterprise. This is an interesting economic/philosophical angle. What is the logical conclusion of this? What happens as a higher fraction of people deploy their capital in zero-sum games? Is "deployment" even the right framing? A bet doesn't necessarily "tie up" capital in the same way as a real investment (you could place your bet moments before it…
Buying crypto actually 'doubles' money by increasing risk:
You buy crypto and give out fiat. Now you have apparently 1 crypto worth 1 fiat and someone else now has 1 fiat.