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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

#491

Post by pphysch »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #487
pphysch wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin was not much in the public consciousness by then. It was trading at ~$10, mainly on MTGOX. It's likely its transaction volume was much lower than other non-crypto digital assets (and MTG cards) at the time.

2011 is when it had its first big public boom - and bust, accompanied by even generalist press reporting on it. And the nerds at Valve would have been *in particular* aware of it. So causality is more likely to be reversed in that example.

You claiming that Valve hired an economist to study digital scarcity, not because of Valve's booming ingame economies, but because Bitcoin was at $10. Sure.

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

#493

Post by its-summertime »

bunderbunder wrote: post #331
toenail wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entertainment industry tried for decades to achieve artificial scarcity for profit. All scammers?

I do think there’s a difference between charging a price and creating artificial scarcity. This isn’t to say that the entertainment industry hasn’t pulled some awful shenanigans. But they’re generally willing to sell to as many people as are willing to pay the price they set. For the most part they haven’t tried to place hard limits on how many total people are allowed to watch a movie and control it with some sort o…

Disney Vault comes to mind instantly. There was also limited periods for buying deluxe/collectors' editions of both movies and games.

(Releasing collectors' editions of an IP before the very first episode/movie/game/etc is a whole another issue just by itself.)

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

#494

Post by Retric »

coldtea wrote: post #468
Retric wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, “unintentional poisoning deaths numbered 75,761 in 2023” > About 100,000 die annually from drugs in the US alone. A single substance vs all drugs including prescription, over the counter, and hard drugs while including suicide etc is hardly the support you think it is. Further actually using the correct numbers and then trying to justify US drug policy based on hard drug overdoses fails when you look at ha…

> In the US, “unintentional poisoning deaths numbered 75,761 in 2023” So you agree that hard drugs are poison (or even worse than poison, about 75K vs about 100K deaths / year). > A single substance vs all drugs including prescription, over the counter, and hard drugs while including suicide etc is hardly the support you think it is. "but, hey, poison also kills people" is is hardly the counter argument you think it…

A flawed argument doesn’t mean the position is incorrect, only that the person making the argument failed.

> So you agree that hard drugs are poison (or even worse than poison, about 75K vs about 100K deaths / year).

Read my first post. I never said hard drugs were good for you, just that being poison alone does not inherently warrant anything past a warning label. And again that 100k number you want to use isn’t limited to hard drugs.

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

#495

Post by d4ng »

Two of many things to answer:

1. Why must an industry provide public good? How do you define public good? If it must, can your claim be proved objectively without relying on feels? All these articles decrying gambling, crypto and prediction markets are begging this one simple question.

2. Why must exchanges be split up? The whole trading industry is based on trading against each other for estimated personal gain. This is the definition of trading, whether cows, binary crypto options or bets on an orange man’s Xs. Exchanges’ trading against the client isn’t endemic only to crypto. Look at all the CFD and spread betting brokers. There are all sorts of techniques.

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

#496

Post by danielvaughn »

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…

They shoot you because they themselves believe in it. The violence is downstream from the belief.

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

#497

Post by Dilettante_ »

blenklo wrote: post #60
titanomachy wrote: post #30

> At no point in this pipeline does Mike's capital touch productive enterprise. This is an interesting economic/philosophical angle. What is the logical conclusion of this? What happens as a higher fraction of people deploy their capital in zero-sum games? Is "deployment" even the right framing? A bet doesn't necessarily "tie up" capital in the same way as a real investment (you could place your bet moments before it…

Buying crypto actually 'doubles' money by increasing risk: You buy crypto and give out fiat. Now you have apparently 1 crypto worth 1 fiat and someone else now has 1 fiat.

I go to the store and buy a pencil. Now I have apparently 1 pencil worth 1 fiat and someone else now has 1 fiat? What a preposterous notion!

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

#498

Post by rglullis »

cduzz wrote: post #484
rglullis wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've created a strawman. In no point a said "society collapse". I am talking about failing institutions. You can find on this very same comment section a handful of people who live in places where cryptocurrency enables people to work around failing institutions and/or protect their wealth from systemic corruption.

I think I offered a pretty concrete example of a real situation and how the imagined utility of crypto magic isn't actually all that helpful. Now, perhaps what you're suggesting is "I've got millions of units of money that I've acquired through locally illegal means and I want to transport that money someplace else and I don't feel like renting a private airplane and diamonds up my prison wallet are uncomfortable and…

How is the view from your imaginary moral high horse?

Try this: you are a paralegal working with translating/notarizing documents from Spanish to English in Argentina. You have clients in the UK - a wine importer. You send an invoice for your work, it's circa GBP 500, about 1 million Argentinian Pesos.

Then, you tell them about the payment options:

- pay via SWIFT. will have a 30% surcharge to account for difference between the "official" exchange rate and the "black" one, and the fact that it takes at least 7 days to clear. Keep in mind that you live in a country facing 30%+ annual inflation rate.

- pay via cryptocurrency, which can be settled immediately, you can convert to Pesos faster and at a better rate than the official one.

Are you saying that the only correct moral action is to go through the banks?

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

#499

Post by warkdarrior »

raincole wrote: post #124
this_user wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it enables people to transact monetary value bypassing for-profit operators such as western union and paypal You are not even getting rid of that, you are just replacing them with a different set of middlemen in the crypto ecosystem who are demanding substantially higher fees than, say, a Wise does.

It's a very weird comment as people who actually use crypto (not flipping or holding) are those who without other viable choices. They're not replacing something. Those transactions would simply not happen without crypto. Notice that the parent comment didn't use the word replacing .

No, the parent used the word "bypassing", which implies someone being replaced by nothing.

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

#500

Post by Dylan16807 »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #481
Dylan16807 wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost certainly less than $1. What kind of harm do you have in mind here?

Stuff like influencing the government to eliminate NIH funding for vaccine research so that that I have to worry about whether my niece will get measles and end up with brain damage.

I don't think I enable that in any meaningful amount by taking money from a person that used to have a tesla.

And if they only gave me $60 or so, and I made $10, I find it extremely unlikely the amount of harm tied back to musk is also in the range of $10.

Also sorry to be blunt but in the vaccine situation I almost entirely blame the person directly in charge of your niece's vaccinations.

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