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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

#291

Post by Ar-Curunir »

Sharlin wrote: post #69
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…

Technological solutions to social problems only tend to work when the problems are of the type "I wish it were easier to rid people of their money".

There are plenty of technological solutions to social problems. This is a tired trope.

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

#292

Post by Ar-Curunir »

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.

How do we maintain large urban communities is a squarely social problems, and parts of it are amenable to technical solutions such as wastewater management, supply chains, large scale agriculture, etc.

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

#293

Post by altruios »

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…

> Fiat currency isn't just a matter of belief or stories

... Then how do we, as a society, determine how much a dollar is worth?! We do use force to enforce the stories we tell about fiat. But 'believe this story about how much a dollar will buy you and how much you owe, or else we will send thugs to your house' isn't disproving the point at all.

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

#294

Post by Ar-Curunir »

snarfy wrote: post #252
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…

As an outsider not paying too much attention, how do you beat the ledger problem? Crypto only works if there is a ledger. I don't want a ledger of every transaction I made. Seems like an insurmountable fundamental privacy issue.

There are plenty of solutions to this problem. See eg the Zerocash paper and the Zcash chain, both decade+ old now

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

#296

Post by BlackFly »

cherryteastain wrote: post #152

Agree re. prediction markets and predatory marketing but disagree so hard with this > The private interest is genuine, a global market's appetite for a frictionless way to hold dollars, captured by the saver who holds the token and the issuer who books the reserves. The cost is paid by everyone outside that transaction. What looks rational for the individual Nigerian saver is corrosive for Nigeria. The way this is fr…

That's not the framing:

> The private interest is genuine, [...] rational for the individual Nigerian saver

You expand upon that rationale. It is individually rational precisely because of corruption, incompetence, external sanctions and many other situations across the world.

This choice is corrosive for Nigeria regardless of whether the Nigerian government is benevolent or malevolent because American monetary policy is ignorant of what would be beneficial for Nigeria and the more people that make that choice the more the future of their society is tied to American monetary policy. It is an incompetent policy by construction. Now you have two problems: corruption, and an inability to effect monetary policy.

You might think, well if and when we solve the corruption problem we can transfer the stable coin back to effect a monetary policy... triggering the run that will drop the peg because the private entities backing the coin aren't regulated like a bank. Although comically, maybe the American taxpayer will then bail out the entity and the Nigerians will get their money!

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

#298

Post by TacticalCoder »

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'm not into it but I'm fascinated by the cryptographic aspect and the legal aspect of it all.

> Outside of that, as an EU/US citizen I don't see why I'd hold stablecoins instead of fiat.

Especially as an EU citizen: in the EU it is illegal, by law, to have stablecoin yield. So for example the HN unicorn Coinbase can give 3.5% yield annualized (or whatever the current yield is), automatically, to anyone in the US that owns USDC. But in the EU the very same Coinbase is forbidden, by law, from giving the same yield on the exact same USDC.

Now I'm not saying the yield on EUR on a EUR bank account is exciting: what I'm saying is holding a currency losing to insane inflation and which doesn't give anything back is wild.

And it's only for stablecoins: for example as an EU citizen on my brokerage account, where I have real USDs, they automatically yield when they're idling.

So it's not that you cannot get yield on currencies in the EU: it's the way they categorized stablecoins.

Now as I understand it there are ways to get yield on stablecoins in "smart contracts" but that's another can of worms for IIUC atm there have been scams upon scams upon hacks upon thefts upon neverending shenanigans.

So yup: stablecoins as an EU citizen, not good.

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

#299

Post by Ar-Curunir »

toenail wrote: post #249
sunshine-o wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are forgetting Ethereum which is the defacto main standard and driver in the "crypto industry". Most of those chains are in fact EVM based (so outside of Bitcoin, XRP or Solana). The people in and around the Ethereum Foundation are solving very interesting problems but nobody talk about it on HN. For example I believe they are at the forefront of the use zero-knowledge proofs. Just dig into [0]. Is the Ethereum F…

Ethereum promised smart contracts where "code is law", but rewrote the rules of their system when a bug was found in the first popular smart contract, the DAO. That's when I lost all interest in it.

Cool. Do you still use computers, or?
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