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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

#441

Post by munksbeer »

INTPenis wrote: post #43

I've been sharing author's view for quite a while now, namely that there must exist a market of goods to give a currency real value. But I must contradict the author, because there is a market of goods, and bitcoin is indirectly involved in it. Namely the dark web market of drugs. People love drugs, and they use a lot of them, drugs turnover a huge amount of value. And right now people are buying bitcoin, because it'…

In the UK, you have to do KYC checks, and any crypto you buy will be visible to HMRC (taxman). If you dispose of it for monero, this is a taxable event, and they can tell your crypto has moved. You may not get pinged immediately, but HMRC can and do come after people retrospectively.

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

#442

Post by skybrian »

derangedHorse wrote: post #430
blenklo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ener…

But switching from Bitcoin to something based on proof of work is always going to use less energy. Bitcoin was innovative when it was invented, but now it’s antique, inefficient tech that’s still being used because apparently fame overwhelms all technological considerations.

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

#443

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

inigyou wrote: post #437
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ea…

I think all or nothing sounds better. There was a top HN story yesterday about the curse of excessive granularity. Not only does it require excessive attention to maintain the right values - and now you're requiring coin selection as well - but can also lead to outcomes being contradictory to your intention. Circles trust isn't about how much I actually trust you to deliver the product I bought and not harm me - it's…

It was inspired by this mural I saw when I visited Chile. There was this whole saga of exploitation by outsiders, terminating with a brown person shoving another brown person's hand into a blender and accepting a credit card from a white person (it's right outside the street art tour place in Valparaíso). It was pretty striking to be there, a white tourist with a credit card in hand, and to see how the locals felt about the way foreign money was impacting their society.

All or nothing means that we have to chose between excluding outsiders entirely, or treating them as equals. A rich outsider shouldn't be able to use a pile of money that the locals don't have a say in and act like a king, but on the other hand there should be a gradual path to gaining the trust of the locals which has to do with whether you're helping or harming them.

I'll have to think about Nash equilibria. As for making the system harder to use... I guess there will always be the problem of displaying different prices to different people based on how trusted there are, but I think it's a small price to pay compared with avoiding the exploitation that rich foreigners visit upon poor nations: exploitation mediated by the fungibility of money. As for the other complexities of use, that's just software implementation details.

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

#444

Post by close04 »

mothballed wrote: post #271
close04 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 b…

> Only if you ignore the practical differences.

You'd think that it would be easier to just name a few but here we are discussing burying a bitcoin seed under a grave in Timbuktu.

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

#445

Post by WorldMaker »

Sparkyte wrote: post #376

Crypto is just unregulated stocks.

This article is about how crypto is so much worse than that. A stock is a hedge on the realities like expected revenue of a corporation. Crypto doesn't have enough reality underpinning it, it's almost always pure gambling, often exactly the negative sum gambling of a casino (the house always wins).

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

#446

Post by mothballed »

close04 wrote: post #444
mothballed wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 b…

> Only if you ignore the practical differences. You'd think that it would be easier to just name a few but here we are discussing burying a bitcoin seed under a grave in Timbuktu.

I used that because it was charitable to the fiat argument because you could put both the fiat and crypto into the hidden hole in a way that would make seizing fiat money as difficult as seizing the crypto. If you don't like that, you can simply memorize a seed phrase in your head, it will accomplish essentially the same thing in a far more practical and more commonly practiced manner. If you insist on the realistic case it's far more charitable to crypto than fiat but I stretched it to be kind to your argument -- clearly a mistake since you only took it as an opportunity for hostility.

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

#447

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

mech998877 wrote: post #439
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

>But nowadays, most loans are for zero-sum ventures... That's an enormous claim and I really doubt it.

All I can say is that I've been trying and trying to find work that actually solves a problem, and each time I become familiar with a business it seems like we're actually causing most of the problems we solve.

The exceptions to this pattern that I've come across don't have enough money to be hiring people.

Maybe I've just been unlucky.

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

#448

Post by jchanimal »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #303
bigfishrunning wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

Thanks for sharing your perspective. It’s reminding me of how I was feeling about crypto in the early days. I begin specifying a project on those lines way back when and the ideas behind it are still interesting. Maybe you’ll enjoy: https://www.wired.com/2014/07/document-coin/

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

#449

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

DANmode wrote: post #428
__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…

So, Eyeball Coin?

Oh hell no. Biometrics on a blockchain are a terrible idea. But web of trust stuff along the same lines as https://github.com/CirclesUBI/whitepaper, figuring out where PGP went wrong and getting it right, yeah.

I'm not really excited about blockchains at all actually. They put you in the wrong sector of the design space that falls out of the CAP theorem. CRDT's and partition tolerance however, I think there's something useful in there.

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

#450

Post by doublepg23 »

rsynnott wrote: post #404
SquareWheel wrote: post #5

Note that this post includes a major spoiler for the show The Good Place . The show is fantastic, so I'd suggest not reading unless you've already finished season 1, or have decided it's not for you.

It is, in fairness, a pretty common trope. See also https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=936 , and also Iain M Banks' Surface Detail; both predate _The Good Place_. (WARNING: The above comic contains the same spoiler as the article, more or less.)

Jacob's Ladder (1990) is one I'm thinking of too.
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