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Sure, but what is the scale vs what has been done with Pan/Sui etc. by Alph, Amaz, others?
Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place
201–210 of 561 posts
Re: Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren’t there fees to convert fiat from/to crypto on both ends?
Yes — there’s fees converting from/to fiat and when sending the crypto. You’ll generally have the conversion slippage and transaction fee regardless - so the difference is the second conversion. In practice, that isn’t too expensive and worth it for the speed; though that may change if you’re sending larger or smaller amounts than I am (in $1k-10k range). Edit: Replying by edit due to rate limits — but subcontracting…
I’m curious - under what circumstances are you exchanging $1k-$10k with friends internationally?
Re: Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place
#203I'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…
>The only real use case that makes sense to me...
Cryptocurrencies have a great and really boring application. You have to think "who needs a reliable ledger distributed among many entities?"
The answer is institutional banks the likes of JPMorgan. They have a few cryptocurrencies, you need to be another large bank to use them. Big banks send each other large sums of money constantly back and forth. In no sense do they send each other "real" money, it's just accounting... a ledger.
"Cryptocurrencies" are better thought of as mathematically proven accounting software than money. Plenty of organizations need to be able to keep track of money is between a collection of mostly-trusted peers. With cryptocurrencies they can ditch a lot of the transaction and accounting software.
Re: Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place
#204At this point, cryptocurrency is just a distributed cult. I genuinely feel bad for my handful of friends who remain under the influence of these gambling chip protocols. Somehow they still can't manage to read the room when awkwardly bringing up cryptocurrency at social gatherings and casual conversation.
Thankfully, the rampant fraud and scams have made it obvious to most people, with LLM hype now drowning out the siren song that captivates people vulnerable to FOMO of the week.
Re: Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place
#205> 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).
> 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).
Yes but the problem is there are already a lot of US dollars and the pandora box was opened since the end of WW2 at least.
Is the US dollar you hold in a bank outside of the US the same as the one in the US? no...
Are they all insured and backed by the Federal Reserve? absolutely not.
In a sense if you are abroad the USDC you get from Circle on a blockchain are much closer to a "real" dollar than most of us can get their hand on.
Re: Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place
#206I'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…
When people in a developing country cannot hold foreign currency it is a result of a deliberate decision by their government. That creates a number of issues. They may well be breaking the law holding stable coins. It means practical difficulties in buying stable coins (they need someone who will sell stablecoins in their currency).
Re: Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>You're putting words in my mouth.
"how do we stop dying from pathogens" is like, the textbook public health problem. it's pretty much the question which the entire concept of public health spawned from.
so, if you specifically wanted to talk about the technology of vaccines or whatever instead of general pathogen prevention, you should just say that instead. i cant read your mind.
Re: Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place
#208Two 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 ca…
of course you would include bitcoin in the latter, too, right? Right?
Re: Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Or a service like Wise which is cheap and takes a few minutes most of the time. Never had much of a need for other services when transferring across the globe.
I suspect parent is using "a service like Wise" even though they believe they're using Crypto. That's because for an end to end transaction to complete in under 10 minutes it has to be performed by an exchange (not actually settled on chain). There are many cases like this where the "crypto" part is just theater. Money is being moved the tradition way by altering records in a non-distributed database.
Re: Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
When you send USD to an AUD account via Wise, no money actually travels between the US and Australia. Wise maintains massive pools of local currency in bank accounts all over the world. When you deposit USD, it goes into Wise’s US bank account. Wise's software detects the deposit and instantly triggers an internal payout from Wise's Australian bank account to the recipient's AUD account. Because Wise is using local banking networks on both ends (like FedNow or RTP in the US, SEPA Instant in Europe, and NPP/Osko in Australia), the transfer can settle in seconds. It’s essentially a matching engine, not an international wire.
Credit risk and identity dictate the speed of the funding step. If you stripped KYC out of the equation entirely, the bottleneck wouldn't just be speed — the legacy banking system would refuse to route the transaction at all.
It is important to distinguish that you are fundamentally involved in a credit network, pulling funds not pushing funds, that just gives the illusion of speed. For verified users, the sub-minute speed is a mix of local real-time banking rails and Wise extending short-term trust that the incoming funds won't bounce. For an unverified or high-risk user, Wise forces a holding period until the money physically clears, dragging the process back down to standard banking speeds.