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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

#131

Post by close04 »

mothballed wrote: post #113
thomashabets2 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate to break it to you, but anything can legally be taken away from you by the justice system. And fighting the government can put you in prison, too. It's just LARPing.

Yet the government went out its way to ban bearer shares, bearer bonds, numbered anonymous bank accounts, large denomination currency, anonymous companies, and all the other methods of anonymous banking. Seems they were having trouble "taking it away by the justice system." For the same reason government across the world have pressured or banned exchangers of monero.

GP added the "by the justice system" where OP only said "can be taken away". Both digital and fiat currency can be taken away from you through courts, legislation, trickery, or coercion.

Crypto is surrounded by vast amounts of misinformation, misdirection, or misunderstanding. So you get these myths and generalization propagated through lack of education. "I heard crypto is completely anonymous", "I heard crypto can't be taken away from you". Then someone gets tricked out of their crypto, or uses BTC to commit some crime and gets a quick reality check.

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

#132

Post by krelian »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #122
this_user wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it enables people to transact monetary value bypassing for-profit operators such as western union and paypal You are not even getting rid of that, you are just replacing them with a different set of middlemen in the crypto ecosystem who are demanding substantially higher fees than, say, a Wise does.

Who are these middlemen? The miners?

At the other end when you need to convert your crypto to real currency.

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

#133

Post by dghlsakjg »

netsharc wrote: post #123
ozgrakkurt wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in less developed countries so it is actually useful for me but I see it the same way as you wrote here. Low-life businessmen ruined the technology outside of some spaces where there is strong tech leadership. They did too much damage to reputation of the whole industry They did the same butchering to LLM/AI tech.

Silicon Valley was a place of engineering invention, and then the money-people saw, "Oh, there's riches to be made here!"...

Silicon Valley came up as a result of the military industrial complex in the Cold War.

Money was always the point.

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

#134

Post by dghlsakjg »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #126
akoboldfrying wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agriculture. Plumbing. The printing press. Electricity. Vaccines. Fiat money itself, which is a technology that is better than the technology of barter, which is better than each person having to grow or make every material thing they need.

"How do we remove feces from our living spaces" and "how do we stop dying from pathogens" are not social problems.

I can’t think of many better examples of social problems than sanitation and public health.

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

#135

Post by Nursie »

RobotToaster wrote: post #27
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…

Propaganda always works best when it's true, but selective. People that ended up homeless heroin addicts 2 years after smoking cannabis exist , the propaganda just neglected to mention that they are a minority. Just like the failure of the war on drugs, trying to ban crypto and arresting anyone that owns it would almost certainly be a dismal failure.

That's why the on and off ramps should be regulated, heavily, instead.

Presuming you want to 'kill' cryptocurrency, starving it of interactions with the real economy seems a much easier way to do it.

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

#136

Post by mrhottakes »

netsharc wrote: post #123
ozgrakkurt wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in less developed countries so it is actually useful for me but I see it the same way as you wrote here. Low-life businessmen ruined the technology outside of some spaces where there is strong tech leadership. They did too much damage to reputation of the whole industry They did the same butchering to LLM/AI tech.

Silicon Valley was a place of engineering invention, and then the money-people saw, "Oh, there's riches to be made here!"...

They explicitly built cryptocurrency as a way to hoard more wealth. It was the "engineers" not just the money people.

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

#137

Post by mrhottakes »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #126
akoboldfrying wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agriculture. Plumbing. The printing press. Electricity. Vaccines. Fiat money itself, which is a technology that is better than the technology of barter, which is better than each person having to grow or make every material thing they need.

"How do we remove feces from our living spaces" and "how do we stop dying from pathogens" are not social problems.

Those are perhaps the biggest social problems that humanity has ever faced.

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

#138

Post by randusername »

nytesky wrote: post #51

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.

[flagged]

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

#139

Post by mrhottakes »

rglullis wrote: post #55
alehrs wrote: post #50

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 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.

It's not even useful for that, it's controlled by those same institutions now.

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

#140

Post by mrhottakes »

rglullis wrote: post #87
pjc50 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, I think there's an argument that the existence of that backup, or at least its marketing, might of itself encourage people to make the institutions fail so they can profit from it.

That's a weak argument. If the institutions can collapse because a few powerful people can work against it, then the institution has already failed in the first place. Trump and the general rise of Populism is not the cause of the fall of Western democracies, it is a consequence .

You don't seem to grasp that the answer isn't "oh well, Western democracies were just going to fail I guess"
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