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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

#111

Post by pjc50 »

StilesCrisis wrote: post #109
pjc50 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a "vice" thing. Vices are things which match this pattern like alcohol or drugs: - many people don't indulge at all - many people indulge occasionally to no real harm - some people indulge in a way that makes a short term recoverable mess - a few people get addicted and are unable to stop. May or may not also be harmed at this point, but this tends to lead to cumulative harm - a few people really mess up trag…

I think this description is deceptive because it assumes bucket sizes ("many," "some," "a few"). Those bucket sizes work for alcohol and some recreational drugs. But they're tragically wrong for others--very very few people partake of heroin "occasionally with no real harm." You're almost certainly heading towards the last two buckets.

True, but if you start counting codeine as an opiate the bucket gets a lot larger. And includes the Purdue Pharma scandal. Lots of people use opiates under medical supervision, with varying degrees of help and harm.

> assumes bucket sizes ("many," "some," "a few")

I was trying to be as vague as possible here!

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

#112

Post by yfontana »

rvz wrote: post #36

I think we have a clear idea on what sort of crypto is useful (stablecoins) and which ones are not (memecoins, Bitcoin). As we have seen with Stripe [0], Shopify [1], PayPal [2] and many others have all figured out its utility is in stablecoins like USDC, which you can send them worldwide, same day, 24/7 in seconds close to $0 with no room for speculation and pay for things and soon agents will do the same. [3] We ge…

I bet the first failure of a large stablecoin will be fun (for external onlookers at least).

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

#113

Post by mothballed »

thomashabets2 wrote: post #93
vlian2088 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Outside of that, as an EU/US citizen I don't see why I'd hold stablecoins instead of fiat. because fiat can be taken away from you.

Hate to break it to you, but anything can legally be taken away from you by the justice system. And fighting the government can put you in prison, too. It's just LARPing.

Yet the government went out its way to ban bearer shares, bearer bonds, numbered anonymous bank accounts, large denomination currency, anonymous companies, and all the other methods of anonymous banking.

Seems they were having trouble "taking it away by the justice system."

For the same reason government across the world have pressured or banned exchangers of monero.

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

#114

Post by akoboldfrying »

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".

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.

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

#115

Post by kriro »

pjc50 wrote: post #75
kriro wrote: post #38

The fun ahead will probably be capable LLMs + smart contracts. There are probably a lot of issues that can be discovered.

Fun for the first person that prompt injects their way to a billion dollars, I suppose?

Yeah just to clarify, I meant there are probably a lot of issues in existing smart contracts that can be discovered with Mythos style LLMs. And given how many exist and are fairly blindly trusted (who ever reads the audit reports) this could be a pretty epic meltdown spiral that gets triggers.

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

#116

Post by zmgsabst »

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 use crypto for exchange between friends (US + EU) and myself (SE Asia).

Our options are IBAN (slow!), WesternUnion (fees, denials, hassles) or crypto (10min, cheap). We chose crypto - because it’s the practical path from their bank to mine. CashApp and Coinbase interface with my actual bank accounts, on my end.

If you don’t do international banking, then much of the utility is diminished — so I’m not surprised by your perspective. But once you try to move money between continents, even with ID and documentation, you’ll understand that Coinbase is a godsend.

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

#117

Post by danielvaughn »

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 got into crypto in 2017 when I came across the phrase "money is a technology". That idea fascinated me. But fast forward several years later, and it's obvious that money might be a technology in the sense that it's a tool, but more importantly, money is a culture.

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

#118

Post by zmgsabst »

this_user wrote: post #107
himata4113 wrote: post #45

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…

> 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.

CashApp doesn’t seem any different than Wise; I routinely use both — including CashApp for crypto.

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

#119

Post by whiplash451 »

zmgsabst wrote: post #116
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 use crypto for exchange between friends (US + EU) and myself (SE Asia). Our options are IBAN (slow!), WesternUnion (fees, denials, hassles) or crypto (10min, cheap). We chose crypto - because it’s the practical path from their bank to mine. CashApp and Coinbase interface with my actual bank accounts, on my end. If you don’t do international banking, then much of the utility is diminished — so I’m not surprised by y…

Aren’t there fees to convert fiat from/to crypto on both ends?

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

#120

Post by onionisafruit »

keiferski wrote: post #16
thrownawaysz wrote: post #2

>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…

Just because the methods used by the war on drugs failed doesn’t mean that drugs are somehow good for you. It just means that the methods were ineffective.

Not just ineffective, but counterproductive. Kids saw through the propaganda and that made many of them discount all warnings about drugs. That’s why we shouldn’t abide well intentioned propaganda.
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