Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place

stephendiehl.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 561 posts

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

#161

Post by sanex »

this_user wrote: post #107
himata4113 wrote: post #45

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 a…

> 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.

You're entirely wrong about that. A bitcoin transaction costs me pennies a wire transfer costs me $40.

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

#162

Post by john_strinlai »

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.

if you do not consider public health a social issue, what do you consider to be one?

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

#163

Post by drptech »

deepvibrations wrote: post #145
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #83

I do agree that there's a huge amount of fraud and scams, and obviously that's only got worse since the President of the US started being part of that ecosystem. But at the same time there is also finally real finance happening on-chain too. Backpack launched a SpaceX token at IPO that can be moved between on-chain and your brokerage. I think Coinbase announced their on-chain equity offering will have the same capabi…

Is it possible that these companies simply fork the existing protocols and use the technology without buying into the existing "crypto world"? Yes it won't be quite so decentralised, but say a number of major banks all spin up a node for say a JPM asset trading blockchain , it becomes semi-decentralised, so they have some advantage of a using a more secure shared ledger, but they also retain more control and thus pro…

[dead]

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

#164

Post by gom_jabbar »

astoor wrote: post #72
rglullis wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If it was just a backup against failing/weak institutions it would be relavively benign, but the problem is that it incentivises machiavellian types to undermine society and nation states for their own personal profit - see e.g. The Sovereign Individual[0]. Combined with effective accelerationism[1] you can see why we could be heading towards somewhere a whole lot worse than The Bad Place. [0] https://en.wikipedia.or…

[dead]

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

#165

Post by sunshine-o »

WJW wrote: post #151
vlian2088 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Outside of that, as an EU/US citizen I don't see why I'd hold stablecoins instead of fiat. because fiat can be taken away from you.

Why do you think stablecoins cannot be taken away? There are already many cases where eg Tether got a court summons and handed over the contents of certain wallets to the local authorities.

The original stablecoin, DAI, used since 2017 by a lot of people living in countries ravaged by horrible inflation cannot be taken away.

It can just be a smart contract with overcollaterised crypto backing it. And the idea is kind of genius.

All the USDT and USDC which appeared later on a just "proxy" for "real" dollar hold by Tether or Circle. There is nothing permissionless or decentralized about them.

So "stablecoin" can mean very different things in practice.

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

#166

Post by ozgrakkurt »

mrhottakes wrote: post #136
netsharc wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I worked at blockchain companies for 4 years and this is not true.

The ratio of degenerate engineers is maybe 30% but business people is 80%.

People I have worked with were much better compared to other companies I worked in like aviation or consulting

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

#167

Post by jerf »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #134
jakelazaroff wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I think it would be a reasonable definition of "social problem" that it requires two people to have it, and that they must have it in relation to each other, which is to say, some sort of social interaction or communication must be involved as well.

Sanitation is a problem for one person as well, as is health. Social problems arise specifically with the interaction of two people. You can't have a scam without two people, for instance.

Definitions that collapse the entire space under discussion into one category are useless. If sanitation is a "social problem" then everything is a social problem, and the reason why that is useless is just that a definition that does not distinguish has no utility. In mathematical terms, to say that something conforms to that definition yields zero bits of information. "Public health" is its own category. In the real world no two categories can ever be fully separated from each other but just because plausible scenarios can be spun out in which sanitation becomes involved in a social problem doesn't mean that on the whole it is much better understood and talked about as a separate category.

Crypto has social problems. If one person sits in a basement and "does crypto" by themselves who cares? They can declare they own as many basement-coin as they like. It takes a second person to have a problem.

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

#168

Post by api »

neonstatic wrote: post #128
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.

I think the point that is missed is all of these solved real problems that needed solving. I feel over the last decade we have exhausted the obvious benefits of the Internet revolution and more often than not we were seeing clever technology being developed, that wouldn't solve any problems. Then long and painful search for applications of that technology would ensue. Cases in point: crypto, llms.

You’re comparing crypto and LLMs?

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

#169

Post by cyphar »

danielvaughn wrote: post #117
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…

I got into crypto in 2017 when I came across the phrase "money is a technology". That idea fascinated me. But fast forward several years later, and it's obvious that money might be a technology in the sense that it's a tool, but more importantly, money is a culture .

I mean, cultures are also a kind of technology, arguably one of the first we developed as Homo Sapiens.

In my view the actual issue has always been that cryptocurrency folks don't understand what purpose money serves, mostly because they're all basically gold bugs. To strain the "money is a technology" metaphor, this is a product-market-fit issue -- like trying to build a cloud orchestration framework that only works on DIY Belwulf clusters or a web framework that only looks nice on teletype.

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

#170

Post by Joel_Mckay »

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.

[dead]
Post reply on HN