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Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place

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

#171

Post by groceries8192 »

keiferski wrote: post #85

It is really striking how technologists keep disregarding any aspect of ethics, philosophy, proper usage, etc. and just focus entirely on the technology itself. Cryptocurrency, AI, social media, on and on. I used to think it was merely an innocent ignorance, just a soft subject that technologists weren’t familiar with. But anymore it seems like actively hostile to me, a kind of blind belief in the idea that technolog…

Technological nihilism, in a way. The displacement of the philosophical foundations of science and western civilization in the last hundred plus years is still becoming manifest. We've been coasting on the fumes for a long time!

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

#172

Post by tialaramex »

lmz wrote: post #150
tialaramex wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that does vary is whether "it's not harming me" works out. Booze in particular has massive social consequences, drunk people harm non-drinkers not just themselves. I've never worried that degenerate gamblers leaving a slot machine parlour at 2am will attack me - but outside the bars that's definitely possible which is why they're required to hire security and have police contact

Some gamblers will inevitably run out of money and resort to crime.

Maybe, surely mostly white collar crime though because of the numbers involved?

Nobody trusts junkies with $100 so it makes sense that shoplifting or burglary can get them the money they need, but a lot of people who have a gambling problem are six figures down, stealing a neighbour's PS5 is a drop in the bucket.

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

#173

Post by CodingJeebus »

over_bridge wrote: post #146
danielvaughn wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

Or if you read Sapiens you'll know money is a story we tell each other. You can't literally do much with a coin or bank note or numbers on a screen but as long as we all believe it has value, it does. It becomes part of the culture, as you say. Crypto also has to tell a story about why it's valuable. There was a lot of anti government rhetoric and fear mongering (from libertarians) but the public never really believe…

> There was a lot of anti government rhetoric and fear mongering (from libertarians) but the public never really believed the story was true.

The public never believed it because it runs squarely into the basic fundamentals that underpin the global financial system.

The finance industry learned long ago that currencies have to be stable and predictable in order to be trusted, and therefore NOT financial instruments to speculate heavily on. There's been this reality distortion field that crypto can be both a currency and speculative asset, but that hasn't borne out. If your digital dollar can gain/lose 5% of its value in a day, how do you trust it to transact with?

Crypto has been speed-running into many lessons we learned decades ago from the "Free Banking" era before the Fed, back when states ran their own banks, currencies, etc. Government got involved in banking management as a way to improve the stability and security of the financial system since things like fraud were rampant.

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

#174

Post by toomuchtodo »

zmgsabst wrote: post #116
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 use crypto for exchange between friends (US + EU) and myself (SE Asia). Our options are IBAN (slow!), WesternUnion (fees, denials, hassles) or crypto (10min, cheap). We chose crypto - because it’s the practical path from their bank to mine. CashApp and Coinbase interface with my actual bank accounts, on my end. If you don’t do international banking, then much of the utility is diminished — so I’m not surprised by y…

I use Wise often to move money between USD, EUR, and AUD, and it plugs right into my US credit union and brokerage accounts. International transfers settle in under a minute to Australian and European bank accounts in my experience.

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

#175

Post by seemaze »

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 highly recommend the recently published The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World's Most Powerful Money by Brendan Greeley. It's an accessible look at how individuals, governments, markets, and value all intertwine to create a stable and widely used currency.

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

#176

Post by samch »

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…

The war on drugs, due to its targeting of specific socioeconomic and racial groups, is probably not the best analogy here.

While I do get your point about the FUD it generated, a better parallel might be the rise (and eventual fall) of the tobacco industry. There was a lot of fraud and deception in the 20th century about the health effects of smoking. There were ads touting that more doctors preferred brand X. The idea was to correlate something genuinely dangerous and lethal with good health.

Crypto and betting markets, to the author’s point, are repeating this pattern again today in terms of personal finances.

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

#177

Post by epochbtc »

Two things can be true at the same time:

- Bitcoin was and is a massive, historic accomplishment in creating digital scarcity for the first time and the long term effects are still playing out.

- Virtually all of the "crypto" or Bitcoin 2.0 schemes in the 15 years since have been scams. Essentially a way for a tech founder to mint tokens out of thin air, and then try to convince others to treat them as money so he can get a huge (fiat-denominated) exit. Stablecoins are basically the only crypto innovation of note that have achieved PMF.

Don't confuse the former for the latter!

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

#178

Post by not-kinsale-joe »

tialaramex wrote: post #95
pjc50 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a "vice" thing. Vices are things which match this pattern like alcohol or drugs: - many people don't indulge at all - many people indulge occasionally to no real harm - some people indulge in a way that makes a short term recoverable mess - a few people get addicted and are unable to stop. May or may not also be harmed at this point, but this tends to lead to cumulative harm - a few people really mess up trag…

One thing that does vary is whether "it's not harming me" works out. Booze in particular has massive social consequences, drunk people harm non-drinkers not just themselves. I've never worried that degenerate gamblers leaving a slot machine parlour at 2am will attack me - but outside the bars that's definitely possible which is why they're required to hire security and have police contact

People with big gambling problems do cause massive social consequences. I know of lost family homes and separation that has massive impacts on the kids. Embezzlement occurred at the accounting firm I use due to an accountant's addiction to gambling.

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

#179

Post by jakelazaroff »

john_strinlai wrote: post #162
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.

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

You're putting words in my mouth. "Public health" deals with social problems regarding health, but it's a subset of "health" which also includes problems that are not social in nature.

There are absolutely social issues around vaccines — how do we fund their development? how do we distribute them? how do we convince people to use them? — but as a technology I would say they solve a problem that is mostly independent of human relationships.*

* Obviously, you could say that vaccines actually do solve a social problem because pathogens are often passed between humans, but I think then the definition of "social problems" becomes so broad as to be meaningless.

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