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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

#271

Post by mothballed »

close04 wrote: post #199
mothballed wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you toss a bag of cash in a hole buried under a grave in Timbuktu, or toss a bitcoin seed phrase in there. Cover it up, leave Timbuktu back to your western country. Then vow to die before giving up the location (you can claim torture or whatever works, but many people in history have decided to be tortured to death without giving up the information). You can be essentially 100% assured it will never be taken. Poss…

> You can be essentially 100% assured it will never be taken. If we take the creative approach, then according to the equivalence of inertial reference frames in the principle of relativity, taking you away from the money is exactly the same as taking the money away from you. Taking the money from you don't imply someone else must have it, just that you don't. Someone could take your HW crypto wallet even if they can…

>If we take the creative approach, then according to the equivalence of inertial reference frames in the principle of relativity, taking you away from the money is exactly the same as taking the money away from you. Taking the money from you don't imply someone else must have it, just that you don't. Someone could take your HW crypto wallet even if they can't access the money, happens a lot with wallets confiscated by the government.

It's not the same. That's why governments and the FATF at great cost and effort spent decades snuffing out anonymous bank accounts and bearer assets, they didn't do it for the lolz. If you take the person away from the money then any surviving persons can escape and reclaim the money. The person in jail can utter the code/location to a comrade, maybe even before they go to jail. In a western country, the person might even be released from contempt after a time (decades+ contempt sentences are so rare they make headlines) and if criminally charged they will often be out on bond where they can utter the location/codes to others. It's a completely different animal than the government seizing the actual asset and putting it in its vault guarded by armies of police or military as non-human seizure.

>There is no difference for all practical purposes

Only if you ignore the practical differences.

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

#272

Post by simonra »

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…

What would drive a love of technology over ones peers in the formative years? And when society further obstructs the path to working with one's interests by further exposure to the peer group and its passions, why would the society become beloved by the individual? People demonstrably cannot be put on the path of caring for others without being showed that they are seen and cared about themselves, and no intro to philosophy, or ethincs for graduates course, has ever focused on that aspect.

Not to say that all who love technology are outcasts, but hoping for reaching the ones behaving problematically by talking about the academic sport of philosophy or related disciplines doesn't seem effective if the goal is more pro-social behaviour.

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

#273

Post by ncruces »

th0raway wrote: post #158
kakacik wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds more like social security avoidance, or general taxation avoidance. Which country will take 30% cut from incoming foreign transaction? The highest combined fees I could find are for Sub-Saharan Africa and those are below 10%, supporting tax/social evasion claim. Could be completely legal but when folks don't provide details its often safe to assume the worse scenario when it comes to money, taxation and screwi…

What they are often talking about there is countries where the official exchange rate is very different from a real world exchange rate: This happened in Argentina quite often. That led to special black market stores where people would give you local currency for dollars at better rates, and often also had some crypto support. You are then going past the legal market either way.

Possibly? Yes. But for every Argentina, there's 10 other countries where you'd loose (far more than) 40% to social security, taxes, and middleman that will handle all the paperwork for for you, particularly if we are talking about "real, productive swe jobs [that] earn enough to support not only themselves, but everyone around them as well making the place they live in a tiny bit better."

I basically have one such job, living in a stable but bottom of the table EU economy, and 40% is exactly the ballpark.

People love to rationalize tax evasion like that.

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

#274

Post by atomic_cowprod »

glitchc wrote: post #264
trollbridge wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Euros, dollars, pounds, francs, and yen are all more stable and easier to use than cryptocurrencies. It gets even easier once you toss in Visa, Mastercard, Discover, Amex, various debit card and regional networks, and ubiquitous banking services. Checks and online ACH payments are free or nearly free. Payment card platforms are cheap in consideration the value you get for them. Meanwhile actually spending crypto is q…

The key difference is that they all require identity to use and can be traced back to a person.

That is by design and is a good thing to everyone except cartels and communist governments.

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

#275

Post by bigfishrunning »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #269
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…

Crypto was initially interesting to me because scarcity based economics is failing us and crypto give us a way to explore alternatives. But so far, nearly everything we've built with it has just been a clone of some scarcity-based thing that already exists outside of crypto. Since then I've come to the conclusion that it's never worthwhile to buy crypto with fiat. Any scheme which asks that of its users creates too m…

Isn't the whole point of an economy a method of resolving scarcity? Money is a proxy for participation; it keeps me from having to agree to paint the miller's fence in exchange for some flour.

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

#276

Post by JyB »

nradov wrote: post #250
over_bridge wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Fiat currency isn't just a matter of belief or stories. If you interact with the US financial system in any significant way then you're likely to end up owing some income taxes, and those can only be paid in US dollars. If you don't pay then eventually law enforcement officers will seize your assets (real estate, cattle, gold, cryptocurrency, whatever) by force and auction them off to settle your tax debt. And if you…

While that is true, the overarching point is that it fundamentally still is, just a story. You're just describing real world consequences, precisely because humans/societies believe in that story and enforce it.

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

#277

Post by hirako2000 »

echelon wrote: post #200
cyphar wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Crypto exists to make early crypto holders money. You get in on the speculative promise of making yourself wealthy. It's sold to you by the people at the top, and the message is amplified by the grifters and the pick mes in their orbit. It's never been a convenient exchange of money. If they'd focused on this, maybe the argument would have worked. Instead, it's wacky and has the worst UX of any banking apparatus in t…

Migration for certain prominent projects is already underway, e.g Ethereum.

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

#279

Post by BadBadJellyBean »

I think the problem of crypto for mainstream usage was that it had no real purchasing power on its own. Every time you want to buy a good with crypto you have to pay the current market value of the coin in the local currency. There is usually no way to buy something for a fixed bitcoin value because at the end everyone want to exchange it for "real" money.

Without this it's always just a something to speculate on and shift "real" money with.

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

#280

Post by ifwinterco »

echelon wrote: post #200
cyphar wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Crypto exists to make early crypto holders money. You get in on the speculative promise of making yourself wealthy. It's sold to you by the people at the top, and the message is amplified by the grifters and the pick mes in their orbit. It's never been a convenient exchange of money. If they'd focused on this, maybe the argument would have worked. Instead, it's wacky and has the worst UX of any banking apparatus in t…

Post quantum cryptography is not fundamentally that hard, the only issues are the signatures are bigger (so the chain is less efficient), and migration of existing chains (biggest problem).

Quantum computers might harm BTC or some other chains if the devs can’t get their house in order soon enough, but there’s no reason to think it fundamentally alters whether cryptocurrency is mathematically viable

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