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

301–310 of 561 posts

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

#301

Post by SonOfLilit »

randusername wrote: post #144
SonOfLilit wrote: post #58

I wish I could just read the prompt rather then the very long article full of tiny mistakes that was generated from it.

What was the "tell" for you that makes you think this was AI-generated?

I started keeping my eyes open when the wrong season was given for the Bad Place spoiler (I see this was since corrected, and maybe the flow there was improved as well?). In the first sections the obvious tells were edited out (but the thinking still feels like AI), by its ends you have "The business was never aggregation, or saving, or hedging. The business is sucker farming: manufacturing a product whose counterparty is a retail customer who does not understand that he is the one being farmed. It could have played by the existing rules. It has decisively chosen not to.", and from there the frequency of LLMisms, uh, increases not linearly, but exponentially.

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

#302

Post by mothballed »

leoedin wrote: post #215
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…

If you're being detained for the rest of your life while your money languishes in a hole in Timbuktu, it has been taken from you. Money is only valuable because it has utility. If you can't use it, it's not yours.

Then you've already yielded the difference in practicality. Executing or detaining a person for life is less practical for the government to do in western countries (and even most shitholes, as ungovernable militia back regions would resist such violence) than seizing your titled or banked assets.

The mere fact you've delayed the use of money doesn't mean the value is gone. I can't do dick with my money until I've at least logged into amazon or driven to the local walmart, yet it's value remains, of course the longer I have to wait to spend it the worse it is. The time value of money means its less valuable to me if I'm locked up for decades before I can get it, but even in jail indefinitely I could secretly reveal it to a friend who could share the money to get some nice ramen packets or cigarettes.

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

#303

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #275
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's the perspective that our current systems are based on. And back when the majority of the problems that people were up against had to do with there being not enough of something to go around--when it took half of us working in the fields just to feed the rest of us--then the system worked relatively well. 9 times out of 10, when somebody got a loan (which is the event that injects dollars into the system) it had something to do with alleviating the not-enough-stuff problems that we faced.

The quickest route to profitability had something to do with solving problems in ways that--by happenstance--let them stay solved. This is relevant since profitability is how banks decide whether to grant a loan, and loans are what cause USD to enter the system. Previously, we mostly had good reason to want people's ventures to succeed.

But nowadays, most loans are for zero-sum ventures that have more to do with capturing a share of some fixed resource (attention/influence mostly), or building something that helps some of us at the expense of others (missiles, datacenters, planned obsolescence, surveillance, etc). It's no longer clear whether we're better off with the success or failure of a randomly chosen business venture. Maybe that venture seeks to harm us.

The quickest route to profitability has changed. Now it's about making things worse for the many while benefiting the few (since it's the few who have all the money). Yet we're still treating dollars as valuable despite the fact that they're issued on the basis of profitability, a property that no longer has much to do with making our lives better.

So I think we need a system that understands consent. When I accept some abstraction from my employer in exchange for my labor I need to be able to look at it and decide whether accpepting it helps people who are helping me, or whether it helps people who want to poison my drinking water for their mining endeavor. Dollars don't carry enough information to enable me to make that decision, and so far neither does crypto.

We don't have to banish scarcity entirely before building monetary systems that are not based on it. Once we figure out the better way, it'll likely be crypto-shaped, except it won't ask you to buy it, it'll just ask you to use it. It'll be a rejection of the old ideas about value.

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

#304

Post by dghlsakjg »

jerf wrote: post #167
dghlsakjg wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peo…

Sanitation: If your neighbour has unmanaged sewage, it is certainly not a problem that is limited to them.

Health: If your neighbour has a contagious disease, that is going to be an issue for society as well.

Are we going to pretend that COVID as a problem doesn't fit your chosen definition perfectly: "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 and health are social problems because if they are not handled they have an extreme effect on society in general. Hell, for plumbing we ONLY care about it as a social problem. If you go live somewhere far enough away from people, we don't care if you shit in a bucket. If you live in a city, we absolutely care about the social effects of not having sufficient plumbing.

If my neighbour has a broken TV, that's a problem that will never affect society. If my neighbour has a contagious disease, or even a non-contagious condition, there are a LOT of ways that affects society.

Same with a neighbour with plumbing that isn't up to code. There's a reason we send government agents in to verify plumbing installations, but we don't give two shits about your TV setup.

I suspect that anyone that says that plumbing or health is not a social problem is living in a place where those things are handled well enough as a social problem that you have never seen what happens when they aren't handled.

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

#306

Post by loughnane »

avanai wrote: post #245
giancarlostoro wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> neither practical nor particularly convenient My only take away with crypto is, think of that one movie "In Time" but instead of the whole time = currency concept and the arm clock, what if crypto could be applied to a physical piece of e-paper like thing, where it says what its worth, and its worth what it says, you can transfer it on a whim from the paper to your phone (to a wallet) and back and forth. If anyone…

I think you just described cash.

That's the idea---to my mind---that's worthwhile for crypto to work toward. Something that has all the traits of cash but that can be used over the internet.

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

#307

Post by pants2 »

sfmz wrote: post #76
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…

An emerging use-case is a bank account for AI agents. I read that Coinbase 'Base' Ethereum layer2 is popular for AI banking.

I recently set up an agent with a Base wallet and made a few x402 API calls. Pretty convenient!

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

#308

Post by notpushkin »

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.

I think it’s okay. Crypto devs can’t make a hard fork each time they want to revert something, and even if they do, people decide how much it’s worth to them (by staying on the old chain, like ETC in this case).

People’s opinion is the ultimate law. If you find a loophole in a contract that gives you everybody’s money, people will just take it back.

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

#309

Post by inigyou »

__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…

https://github.com/CirclesUBI/whitepaper/blob/master/README.... seemed interesting because it uses a different model that's not interchangeable with any current system. It died in 2024 however.

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

#310

Post by xtracto »

snarf21 wrote: post #288
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…

What is the main success for an Ethereum project that solves something that can't be solved without crypto or in a hugely more efficient/better way? I'm a crypto skeptic and I've never been introduced where crypto actually solves a problem.

Read the GP comment again. I don't know if Ethereum has, is or will ever get to whatever grandiose goal they have. But the one thing that I love has done is provide intelligent people with funds to research things like ZKSNARKs and similar cryptographic constructs.

It's like war: We don't like war, we don't like people being killed, but man, the amount of technology progress made during war is good.

So, even if you hate crypto; the fact that it is enabling research in cryptographic theory (even if for stupid goals) is good.

Post reply on HN