Live data from Hacker News

Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place

stephendiehl.com

421–430 of 561 posts

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

#421
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…

My guess is a lot of people had too much expectations for blockchain and crypto.

I remember here on HN 10 years ago everybody wanted to put everything on a blockchain. Some were betting on the collapse of the financial system.

None of those things happened but ethereum created a neutral, stable, secure cheap and transparent programmable financial platform.

Because it is neutral a lot of people ported the bad things happening in the traditional financial system to crypto: the scams, debt, speculation, etc.

And then most people started to hate it.

I guess 20 years ago most porn was hosted on Apache web servers, now it would be nginx. Should we hate nginx because of porn?

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

#422

>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…

> and he is meaningfully poorer at every stop along the way. or meaningfully richer as the case may be

Exactly. 90% of gamblers quit just before hitting it big.

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

#423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They explicitly built cryptocurrency as a way to hoard more wealth. It was the "engineers" not just the money people.

I worked at blockchain companies for 4 years and this is not true. The ratio of degenerate engineers is maybe 30% but business people is 80%. People I have worked with were much better compared to other companies I worked in like aviation or consulting

All it takes is for the engineer in charge to be degenerate and the others willing to go along with it, that's how you get a Meta, etc

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

#424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't seem to grasp that the answer isn't "oh well, Western democracies were just going to fail I guess"

The answer to what?

The answer to institutional collapse, the topic of the post to which I replied.

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

#425
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You spin up agents and want them to paid without opening a bank account... or spin-up hundreds of agents... or your country isn't very well integrated with western banking rails. I think there is more to consider.

You don’t need to open a bank account to get a prepaid debit card.

Which reloadable debit cards have no KYC requirements?

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

#426
post #415
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>If sanitation is a "social problem" then everything is a social problem Social = society, keep that in your head. The vast majority of problems you are going to face in your life are social problems because you live in a vast interconnected society with millions/billions of other individuals. And it is important to remember that almost all problems are social problems, we get a quite a few of the libertarian types o…

> And it is important to remember that almost all problems are social problems, we get a quite a few of the libertarian types on HN that think "I'll just ignore other people and now I've solved every problem in the world". It's why this group of people thinks this way, it makes the problem way easier if you ignore reality.

You see this a lot from people who have been lucky enough to live in places where problems get addressed somewhat automatically. When you spend enough time in places where that isn't true, you quickly realize how indoor plumbing - or almost anything, really - becomes a social problem.

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

#427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that was my favorite one so far. Although I didn't much like the pact that if we're friends we assert that each other's tokens are equal in value. I know that's in the spirit of UBI but if you're building a web of trust then it seems like a missed opportunity to create incentives around being so damn useful to your community that people treat your tokens as more valuable than somebody who is less useful. To mak…

How would that work? I (an important person who is very loved and trusted by thousands of people) agree to give you (a nobody) 0.20 of my tokens for every 1 of your tokens? That smells like financialization, I'd effectively profit 80% on all of your transactions through me.

Well, if I had it fully worked out I'd be telling people to try using my system. But vaguely...

In circles the agreement is that trust creates a 1:1 value ratio. I value the tokens you mint periodically as equal to my own, and this influences the number of tokens I give you in exchange for a loaf of bread or something. If I value the bread at 6 of my own tokens, that's the price I change you: 6.

But maybe we value each other's contributions to society differently, perhaps we consult the graph and end up with a 2:3 ratio where I trust you more than you trust me. This ratio influences prices. That loaf which I value at 6 of my tokens (times two, divided by three) I offer to you at a price of 4.

Or maybe you're working to cause me trouble, damming the river I drink from or somesuch, so the trust graph gives us a 5:1 trust ratio. In this case I'm going to need 30 of your tokens in exchange for this bread because I'm aware that by feeding you, I'm giving you energy that you'll spend harming me.

After exchange, the tokens get wrapped in a layer that indicates me as well. Since the next person to accept it will be benefiting both you and me by doing so (contributing to a system that supports our various activities), they'll have to consider the trust ratio between themselves and both of us in order to determine whether to value it. This creates a risk on my part: maybe I'll accept your token and be unable to find anybody who will subsequently accept it from me because everybody I associate finds your activities problematic. (These dynamics are all implementation details, humans just scan a QR code and see a price that was determined by the weighted trust graph).

You don't encounter tokens with problematically large stacks of wrappers because demurrage counteracts inflation. We're constantly minting new tokens for ourselves, and the value of existing tokens are constantly degrading so nobody has a token that's 100 years old. That is to say, they have a half life, they decay out of existence eventually, so there's an incentive to continue to be trustworthy and useful, rather than just hoarding enough that you can then opt out of being trustworthy for the rest of your life.

> I (an important person who is very loved and trusted by thousands of people)

The ratio we end up will not be a function of how many people trust you, or how many people trust me, it'll only consider cases where I've trusted somebody who trusts you, or where you've trusted somebody that trusts me. We opt-in to the asymmetry by using variable degrees of trust to enable or prevent the activities of our peers. It restores balance to the "vote with your wallet" situation. Currently, the only way to vote with your wallet is to vote yes or to abstain. This lets you vote no.

For a first pass I'm considering using https://github.com/cblgh/appleseed-metric for the trust graph. But I don't intend to start by making apps like the one I've described here--nothing so politically charged as money. I figure I'll get the protocol working with things that are low stakes and easy to get on board with and try my hand at making something money shaped only once it's performing well for other stuff.

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

#428
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…

So, Eyeball Coin?

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

#429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So having foreign currency in stable coins is allowed in South Africa?

iirc isn't the whole point of crypto that no one knows what you have or what you do with it?

They know even less with cash!

Crypto is not as reliably anonymous as cash. Anything with a distributed ledger is pseudonymous so if one transaction can on your wallet can be linked to you, so can all other transactions, including historical ones, to that wallet.

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

#430
post #56

Cryptocurrency is very much a double edged sword, on one hand it enables people to transact monetary value bypassing for-profit operators such as western union and paypal as well as hinders corrupt government institutions from confiscating or otherwise devaluing what you own. Of course this also allows people with harmful intentions to do the same, bypass centralized systems that keep fraud in check, mitigate theft a…

And they also make their place they live and the rest of the planet a tiny bit worse due to the energy consumption of bitcoin, if they support bitcoin in any form even with lightning. A question though: How do they exchange their crypto into local fiat?

> they also make their place they live and the rest of the planet a tiny bit worse due to the energy consumption

Energy consumption isn't the problem. It's how the energy is generated that is relevant to planetary health, and even then, whose to say the tradeoff isn't worth it. Crypto mining is estimated to take up 3% at most which means 97% is spent on other things. What makes this other 97% more worthy of this energy than crypto mining? The fact you don't see it as valuable?

Also many mining operations take advantage of stranded energy, so energy that would go to waste if not used for on-site mining.

Post reply on HN