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

321–330 of 561 posts

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

#321

Post by pphysch »

epochbtc wrote: post #177

Two things can be true at the same time: - Bitcoin was and is a massive, historic accomplishment in creating digital scarcity for the first time and the long term effects are still playing out. - Virtually all of the "crypto" or Bitcoin 2.0 schemes in the 15 years since have been scams. Essentially a way for a tech founder to mint tokens out of thin air, and then try to convince others to treat them as money so he ca…

The first thing is false or worded poorly. Before Bitcoin became globally popular, there were many examples of digital scarcity driving significant transaction volume: Early online games with tradeable game objects, gimmicks like Million Dollar Homepage, etc.

Valve hired economist and future politician Yanis Varoufakis in 2012, when Bitcoin was well below $1000, to study "in-game economies" (i.e. digital scarcity) because it was such a big deal in their existing online games.

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

#322

Post by inigyou »

mrhottakes wrote: post #140
rglullis wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a weak argument. If the institutions can collapse because a few powerful people can work against it, then the institution has already failed in the first place. Trump and the general rise of Populism is not the cause of the fall of Western democracies, it is a consequence .

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?

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

#323

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

inigyou wrote: post #309
__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…

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.

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 make position, and not amount, the desirable thing. To make trustworthiness profitable.

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

#324

Post by dghlsakjg »

neonstatic wrote: post #226
api wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re comparing crypto and LLMs?

Yes. In fact, crypto is ahead, because it does have a legitimate use case. Two, actually - money laundering and sanctions evasion.

I'm not sure I agree on your definition of legitimate...

If we want to say that any value generating - including crime - is inbounds, then LLMs are FANTASTIC scam machines. There are incredible uses for LLMs in a lot of stealing money spaces.

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

#325

Post by inigyou »

tryptophan wrote: post #255
snarfy wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an outsider not paying too much attention, how do you beat the ledger problem? Crypto only works if there is a ledger. I don't want a ledger of every transaction I made. Seems like an insurmountable fundamental privacy issue.

Ethereum based research projects are addressing this. There is a currently active and usable project called Railgun which allows for hidden balances and transactions. Aztec network is launching soon which is a fully private L2 chain. It has taken a really long time but it seems the next few years will bring real privacy.

Monero solved it

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

#326

Post by inigyou »

stevenjgarner wrote: post #210
toomuchtodo wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Wise often to move money between USD, EUR, and AUD, and it plugs right into my US credit union and brokerage accounts. International transfers settle in under a minute to Australian and European bank accounts in my experience.

When you send USD to an AUD account via Wise, no money actually travels between the US and Australia. Wise maintains massive pools of local currency in bank accounts all over the world. When you deposit USD, it goes into Wise’s US bank account. Wise's software detects the deposit and instantly triggers an internal payout from Wise's Australian bank account to the recipient's AUD account. Because Wise is using local b…

When you send USD to an AUD account by any mechanism no money actually travels between the US and Australia. Usually USD is transferred from one US bank to another, and AUD is transferred from one Australian bank to another.

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

#327

Post by tootie »

inigyou wrote: post #316
tootie wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly as much as people complain the US Federal Reserve really just proved their enormous value and thoroughly vindicated fiat currency. The financial crisis of 2007-8 should have been a new Depression and it wasn't. Instead we've seen uninterrupted growth for close to 20 years. Markets have really internalized that the US economy is indestructible and the Fed will always protect us from disaster. Will it last for…

The fundamental structural problems from 2007-8 are still here. The system has been running with paper over the cracks in the foundation for almost 20 years.

Every system ever has been a patchwork. Dodd-Frank and it's orderly liquidation rules are a genuine benefit. We had a commercial bank collapse a few years ago and there was no contagion.

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

#328

Post by jakelazaroff »

john_strinlai wrote: post #207
jakelazaroff wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're putting words in my mouth. "Public health" deals with social problems regarding health, but it's a subset of "health" which also includes problems that are not social in nature. There are absolutely social issues around vaccines — how do we fund their development? how do we distribute them? how do we convince people to use them? — but as a technology I would say they solve a problem that is mostly independent…

> You're putting words in my mouth. "how do we stop dying from pathogens" is like, the textbook public health problem. it's pretty much the question which the entire concept of public health spawned from. so, if you specifically wanted to talk about the technology of vaccines or whatever instead of general pathogen prevention , you should just say that instead. i cant read your mind.

Maybe read a couple ancestor comments up to figure out the context of what I'm responding to?

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

#329

Post by SquareWheel »

righthand wrote: post #297
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.

[flagged]

Well, I wasn't intending to violate any guidelines, and I don't believe I've dismissed the article besides. I was just trying to save some people from potential frustration, as there was no warning provided upfront.

edit: Ah, I see. You left this comment after having your last response flagged.

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

#330

Post by inigyou »

toenail wrote: post #254
bunderbunder wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though, there’s a part of me thinking that the basic idea of creating artificial scarcity for profit is hard to separate from scamminess. It’s giving De Beers.

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

What are you talking about - the entertainment industry is the most famous scam industry ever, giving the most famous artists just enough money to keep them dependent and pocketing 90% of it themselves.
Post reply on HN