This is a really fun well-written and on point set of articles. Thank you for sharing.
I feel like at this point there isn't anybody defending stablecoins who isn't using them primarily speculative investment/trading. There has yet to be a usecase for distributed ledger that isn't solved better by a centralised ledger other than niche counter-culture solutions whose users are typically blinkered to the fact that they are already a self-selected techno-elite who can't bring their utopia to the commons. That ended a bit more nasty sounding that I intended, apologies.
The other legit use for stablecoins is allowing people in Venezuela, Argentina, etc. to hold US dollars while the US government pretends they don't know this is happening. (Officially the US does not encourage dollarization of other economies against their will.) I agree that a centralized US dollar CBDC that isn't run by scammers would be a simpler way to do this.
This is basically the valid use case, yes. It turns the bitcoin goldbug inflation paranoia on its head: the stable currency is defined to be the US dollar, and an elaborate proxy system allows people to access that stability when their local government doesn't want them to. Circumventing exchange controls and so on.
Although the current government is having a good go at reducing the value of the currency, it's barely budged on the chart.
You think the same system that chose to bail out the banks in 08 should be fully responsible for our financial future? I believe a more distributed financial system would provide more stability for all of us. The GENIUS Act establishes some very strong standards that I believe will strengthen the economy, the dollar, and enable more people to enter the financial services industry in a competitively healthy way. A scammer would have a hard time 1:1 backing their stablecoins with bonds and equivalently stable assets.
That's thanks to the legacy of Bretton Woods and other things like the petrodollar. It's not a result of our monetary policy or output. The US is good at war and has the benefit of convenient geography. Those are the things that hold up the hegemony we see today.
i use one of the largest credit unions in the usa (grown through m&a over the last twenty years). their ability to follow instructions is at best at tech-intern level. their fees are incredibly fat and their people exhibit serious cya and complacency in almost every interaction. my confidence is at an all-time low in their competence.
It's not just places with hyperinflation. It's any country. Why should anyone be restricted from holding USD or have to pay crazy fees to buy dollars?
> I agree that a centralized US dollar CBDC that isn't run by scammers would be a simpler way to do this.
I don't think it's a stretch to imagine that the government would ban all other stable coins and strictly control what "valid commerce" is allowed to be done with the centralized coin (see Operation Choke Point)
If a country does not allow their citizens to exchange currency, then this is as good as a black market and comes with the same risks as obtaining currency through any other black market means.
Expensive relative to what? When people are rescuing their hard-earned savings of 200k USD out of a third-world country, they would be happy to pay even double-digit per cent commissions, and crypto is much, much cheaper, faster and safer than all other available options.
Of course, if you're a US citizen transferring 200k USD from Chase to Bank of America, crypto doesn't make any sense.
Who are these people in 3rd world countries that have 200k USD cash? You make it sound like they've scrounged to make it happen... But its far far more likely to be people either trying to wash the money or they were from less than legitimate sources.
Definitely not lower class people like you seem to imply (or perhaps I'm just reading into it?)
I only know the situation which touched dozens of my friends and acquaintances. Say, you’re a relatively successful software professional in Russia, who has a small apartment and a car in a big city. Then the war with Ukraine starts, and all Russians are automatically sanctioned and blacklisted from the international financial system. You don’t want to make drone software or facilitate black-market oil trading, so you decide to sell everything and leave the country with your wife and kids to work elsewhere.
What, in your opinion, are your options for transferring abroad the cash you got from selling your hard-earned assets?
He didn't imply he was referring to "lower class people." He's referring to people who have savings in countries with volatile currencies. Even for $100, having a stablecoin reserve can be a saving grace. Especially when trying to find asylum elsewhere.
In Argentina, the money changes pay more pesos for 100 dollar bills than 20 dollar bills, and won't accept money that is too beat up. Definitionally it's not the poorer people who can buy dollars in large denominations.
The reason they don’t want a CBDC is to be able to collect interest on behalf of the people holding the currency. If the state launches a blockchain CBDC, the state will profit. It’s too much money not to corrupt the most powerful people on the planet.
> There has yet to be a usecase for distributed ledger that isn't solved better by a centralised ledger
what about situations where centralized ledgers won't serve you? e.g. someone who wants to buy drugs, or sex workers want to get paid. And you mention "niche counter-culture solutions" but I don't think it's so niche - in 2002, the government of Argentina stole 2/3rds of everyone's savings by forcibly converting their dollar-denominated bank accounts into pesos at a terrible exchange rate. Not having to worry about this because you have a trustworthy government is nice, but it puts you into an elite class of your own.
What you're talking about, resistance to government meddling, is more of a function of the currency than the ledger. Cryptocurrencies only work because of people silly enough to buy them in exchange for actual "valuable" or official currencies (which can be imposed on some people in the world at gunpoint). If a cryptocurrency was forced on you at gunpoint, it most certainly would not be one that provided any anonymity.
Do cryptocurrencies provide value to people living in third-rate hellhole countries? Perhaps, because they are connected to the outside world. Ideally you could just have a foreign bank account that your country cannot touch. If the big governments gang up on crypto exchanges, then crypto will be worthless. The only reason they don't gang up on the exchanges seems to be that they (the people in government) use crypto for nefarious activities and money laundering.
The technological innovations of cryptocurrencies make for good thought experiments or puzzles, but serve as a distraction from their inevitable uselessness.
I can’t really think of a better, more concise pitch for cryptocurrencies than “ideally you could just have a foreign bank account that your country cannot touch.”
I'm sure you forgot that your country can send a uniformed guy to seize said foreign bank account on a whim. Or you think you'd keep it for long, while being roughed (or simply stored) in a dark cellar?
You are misinterpreting his comment. He is saying that the idea that you need to store your money in a foreign bank account to keep it safe is an argument in favor of cryptocurrency, because that way you don’t need to rely on a foreign bank at all.
> serve as a distraction from their inevitable uselessness
I don’t understand your point. You said that crypto is only useful as long as governments use it for nefarious purposes and money laundering — so basically it’s a guaranteed relevancy in the future, no? How is that inevitable uselessness?
People hold dollar-backed stablecoins because they believe the US dollar to be the most durable unit of account on the planet.
All the proof you really need for that is that most crypto users outside the US still consider the value of their crypto tokens in terms of how many US dollars it’s worth.
The author of this article talks about this being a “parasite” to the US monetary system, but it’s hard to think of a better thing that could’ve happened for the US. Not only has it reinforced that dominance… it’s also driven hundreds of billions of dollars of US treasury bills purchases from providers like Tether and USDC.
Stable coins are mostly backed by Treasuries, so it’s engineering instability: a run on coin redemption triggers treasury sales which raises interest rates which triggers a run on any asset backed by treasuries like coins, and so on.
It’s like the 2008 crash: people speculating because they think housing never goes down, except a market-scale drop can trigger an uncontrollable rush for the exit. With banks and companies permitted to hold coins as assets, the impact is broad but impossible to regulate ex ante, and difficult to model monetarily.
It’s what I would do if I were Putin and Xi, frustrated with the western controls on the banking system (that have mostly enabled us not to have to go to war).
You're right that they aren't speculative in the financial sense of "hopefully gaining value over time", but you do speculate (in the more general sense) on the fiat-pegging mechanism(s) to work to preserve the value you are storing in them...
There are different flavors of stablecoins though. There's the ponzi scheme flavor that is propped up based on hand waving alchemy, and there's the boring (and now regulated) flavor that's actually backed by real money.
Sure, in the same way that holding USD is speculating that the government won't halve its value tomorrow. There's speculation, and then there's speculation.
Would you consider Stripe and PayPal also interested in speculative investment/trading? They seem responsible to me. Also, stablecoins aren’t speculative. Cryptocurrencies absolutely are. But stablecoins are pegged to USD, hence “stable.”
I think you’re right to criticize crypto as a techno-elite project. However I think stablecoins have a legitimate use case for billions of people who don’t have access to good banks, or a stable currency, and can’t afford traditional fees. IMO it’s one of the best things to come out of crypto.
> There has yet to be a usecase for distributed ledger that isn't solved better by a centralised ledger
As I understand it, many countries in the European Union use distributed ledgers for elections. Essentially it lets you cross reference votes and store that database across servers in multiple countries. It also prevents post-election data tampering by the state holding the election.
My understanding is this this system is not an open to every random Joe who wants to have a server (like bitcoin is). I think you still need to be a state actor to be part of the distributed database (so it's not a zero trust environment).
(Unfortunately, I don't have any good links to back this claim up)
I agree with the premise that on a tech basis, a centralized ledger is just as good, if not better, than a decentralized one.
The problem stablecoins are solving are self-inflicted: KYC to open a bank account, restricted nationalities, account freezes, capital controls, taxation over-reach, etc.
At some point someone figured out that if they start over, there is a lot of “value” to be unlocked out there; and paid/lobbied/sponsored the right person to execute on that.
E.g."Stablecoins won’t bank the unbanked, because people get stablecoins by purchasing them on a crypto exchange, and no crypto exchange will open an account for a customer unless they have a bank account."
Well, I understand that US has dystopia level of financial surveillance, but in many places in the world you can change cash in person to crypto without many issues. And you don't need to use any major exchange for that, that defeats the whole point.
And yes, Russians, Iranians, Palestinians are known to use crypto, for example. And the majority of them don't have US bank accounts.
One of the core features of crypto that it's not an American (or anyone else) thing, like paypal, stripe, or any other system and American laws can be easily ignored if both parties are outside of the US. That's already a very liberating feature for at least a billion of people of nations hostile to the US and potentially to 8+ billions of people more.
I don't think any first world country makes it possible to do banking, if you decide to simply not comply with AML/KYC regulations. You very much become unbanked, if you simply don't want to or can't comply with those things. (European here)
First of all, who says that it has to be a global standard?
It's not an 'all-or-nothing' thing.
Those are instruments which already help many people (those you define as questionable for some reason). I'm actually pretty happy to see that the world has a tool to help millions of people with "questionable" religious, cultural, political, ideological views or sexual orientations. That reduces the pressure and advantage of people who want to make their lives harder.
If you don't need it, don't use it. That's totally cool. It doesn't have to be global. To be honest, I don't think anything needs to be global. That gives too much leverage to a single group at the expense of everyone else. The world is better off having many options for everyone.
In any world where the standard is convergent, not explicitly agreed upon, and there's no natural boundary between shady users and non-shady users. An x% shadiness user joining the network grants justification to the next x-0.001% shadiness user.
In the world where the non-questionable financial organizations decide who can access them or not, based on the place they were born at. I.e., the current world.
Questionable individual here. My bank accounts are all blocked now just for the reason of my nationality, nothing else. Crypto is currently my lifeline.
How do you find work, or business perhaps, that pays you in crypto to begin with? I've been paid in crypto on multiple occasions but it can be tricky to find a party that's willing, so I'm curious.
I learned to write some useful code for crypto trading firms (portfolio management, automated market making, risk screening), so that part is covered. Looking for customers is still tricky though. Even crypto firms are now increasingly about compliance and sometimes refuse to work except by hiring me, and then reject my application because of my passport (why we even invented crypto then...)
recently i made a cash withdrawal from my personal account ahead of a trip abroad (they asked me why) and within days received a FinCEN notice in the mail warning me about “ structured transactions”… having made no other cash transactions days or even check cashing or writing days before or days after.
Introducing - the bhurka-bitcoin. Should you try to buy sexual services, like OF-subscriptions or similar filth, the coin will automatically buy a bhurka for all content, hiding those models behind decency textile filters. Halal and wholesome!
Bhurka-bitcoin! Now with the first bodymounted organic cellphonestand for loyal customers!
At the end of the day, most crypto has a built in way to turn fossil fuels into significantly less money than you paid for them, so it doesn't even apply to the US unless they've started requiring KYC for ASICs and GPUs.
I am not convinced this carbon-intensive form of money laundering is a good thing, but it certainly exists.
EDIT: went looking for data and it's estimated that ~63% [1] of power used in bitcoin proof-of-work operations. I honestly thought this figure would be higher, but with the insane campaign the American government is doing to invest and expand on drill operations this could go up in the short term. Long term though it's unlikely that this will keep up and we should see renewable sources gaining space more and more, just because it's the smart thing to do.
Outdated view since 99.9% of transactions happen on proof of stake systems which have a very low carbon footprint - not much more than Visa or Mastercard.
Okay; so what? Go mine one of the POW coins and buy what you actually want on an unregulated exchange. You're still burning fossil fuels to get it.
My general point is that you can exchange money for energy and energy for crypto, and nobody can really stop you if you're doing it at a small enough scale. Siphon the fuel from your car and run a generator, pretend you're charging your EV, whatever.
> And yes, Russians, Iranians, Palestinians are known to use crypto, for example
Yes and mostly (as in 99% by amount of crypto moved) it's their governments
For example Russia it is not legal to pay with crypto, and to cash it out allowed crypto exchanges must submit your transactions to the government etc otherwise they get blocked.
But the bandit state is free of course to use it to trade with its friends like NK (which basically runs its nuclear program on ransomwared crypto) or Hamas;)
> For example Russia it is not legal to pay with crypto, and to cash it out allowed crypto exchanges must submit your transactions to the government etc otherwise they get blocked.
Sorry, but it's very naive to think that Russian people use only "allowed" crypto exchanges and comply with the laws. That would be an impossible country to live in.
Direct connections with people and being street-smart are important kinds of skills in such societies. And even without connections, you can easily go to some popular Russian exchange aggregators and find no-KYC options with cash delivery, as far as I know.
EDIT: I've actually just checked for you: starting from 10,000 USDT, you can cash out anonymously with cash delivery for 1% in Moscow right at this moment from a publicly accessible resource with reviews.
He "just checked for me" online and he thinks I'm the one naive
I'm from Russia. People who get paid tether travel out to cash in anonymously. I know because I know them. Believe me you don't want to gamble on this
> That would be an impossible country to live in.
Really? I have no words. Not being able to use crypto and it's now an impossible country to live in? How about this, people just use cash. 99.9999% of people cashing in loads of tether are criminals or connected to the government or both. Who do you think is so rich they just casually throw around tens thousands tether? On average a good salary is like 1k at best
Yes, I say government (or let's just say criminals) is at least 99.9% of all crypto moved. The war machine needs feeding. Sanctions. Think about it will other countries use worthless ruble that is pretty much not convertible? Will russia use winnie pooh money (also not convertible)? People who move tether because maybe they found some real work abroad or because they are helping a family or something is rounding error
International businesses which is also small minority and if they do stuff legally anyway I don't see why they would use crypto and if they do stuff illegally I don't see why they would trust randos in Moscow to give them cash and possibly get burned...
Well, hello from a rounding error. I am Russian, I live in another country, and my bank accounts are closed because of "sanctions" even though I support Ukraine and will be immediately sent to prison were I to return to Russia. So I am sorry, don't touch my crypto.
As someone working with African companies (legitimate businesses, mid-sized transactions), the key use case is payments in stablecoins—their banking infrastructure doesn’t allow for reliable and consistent foreign remittances.
These deals would be practically impossible without stablecoins.
(And to be clear, I’m someone who has never been particularly enthusiastic about crypto or blockchain.)
Do you know why people would choose to use stablecoins, rather than trade shares in an ETF that held government bonds, or something like that? That's what stablecoins are, effectively just a share in the holding company's bank account.
I think for the same reason that most people hold cash in a bank account rather than putting all of their money in ETFs/bonds. Convenience, stability, and security.
Consider living in a country with an unstable and fiscally irresponsible government. And having a net worth <$10k. Suddenly being able to hold your money in USD, on an account that cannot be seized, and can be used globally, becomes incredibly attractive.
You don’t need financial literacy, there is no min-buy in like ETFs/bonds, and there is minimal KYC or other identity restrictions. I think this is an incredible boon for the billions of people living in such conditions.
As someone who tried to figure this out. The answer is essentially you must actively seek out a broker that lets you do this in the first place and let me tell you, in my country there are only a handful of them that make it easy and even those will still require you to fill out a signed form on paper and mail it to them.
Or a CD, or maybe just a bank account. I think of stablecoin issuers as banks because why not: they keep your cash, pay you some yield and promise to give it back to you when you ask them. Walks like a bank, quacks like a bank…
The GENUIS act and I think MICA both disallow that part, exactly for this reason... traditional banks were seeing the writings on the wall and lobbied for such yield distributions to remain their own privilege only. For now.
But you can pretty easily find similar/better yield using DeFi and stake/bond some of your crypto assets in various strategies.
The difference is that there are virtually no minimum and usually no KYC... but there are also not many guardrails/gatekeeping, which leave the place to many scams/traps. It's best to stick to the largest platforms/communities and not fall for insane APY claims.
Does holding stablecoins require any sort of KYC? Or do I just need to maintain the security of a private key?
If the latter, I think that explains why stablecoins are popular in countries with weak institutions.
In a country with strong laws, and strong rule-of-law, "Code is Law" is a solution in search of a problem. But in a country with weak laws, it can be a lifesaver.
Can you give more details on this? Why is it that the existing banking system cannot do this kind of foreign remittance? E.g. correspondent banking via Swift?
Is it high fees, is it overly burdensome sanctions/AML checks, something else?
Not OP, but we have contractors in Nigeria, and paying them via regular bank transfer is nearly impossible. For example many banks will outright refuse to make SWIFT transactions to Nigerian accounts.
This is just one example of a few factors that lead to a sort of isolation from international banking.
>many banks will outright refuse to make SWIFT transactions to Nigerian accounts
The flipside of this is crypto turbocharging online scammers.
"The industry in Cambodia now generates more than $12.5 billion annually – half of the country's GDP, according to the United States Institute for Peace."
"The criminal gangs entice trafficking victims with fake job offers posted on social media and then force them to financially exploit people online including through fake romances or “pig-butchering” schemes in which the scammer builds trust with a victim before stealing their money, Amnesty said."
The scammers will make friends with someone online, persuade them to deposit increasingly large amounts into a "crypto trading platform", then finally run with the money.
Crypto has created an alternative financial system with many fewer rules. This can either be good or bad depending on the circumstances.
I think it has the potential to be a good thing in the long run. In the short run, however, people need to learn to instinctively distrust crypto as a scam. Especially if the situation involves a friendly attractive lady you've been chatting with online who's really good at trading cryptocurrency and wants to share her secrets with you.
It's high fees, burdensome sanctions/AML checks (especially if the said country has been recently or is still on a GAFI list), plus the suboptimization of the core banking systems regarding international transfers, that make the whole things happen in weeks (or sometimes never happen if the end beneficiary doesn't start pinging, emailing or phoning its bank every now and then). The whole unreliability/unpredictability of the thing makes it undesirable for regular operations.
Why can they not just use America's banking infrastructure directly instead of using America's banking infrastructure indirectly through meaningless overengineered abstractions like stablecoins?
I am not an expert but I don’t believe most countries would allow their citizens to use American banking infrastructure, nor would most American banks accept a foreign account. Stablecoins get around these limitations, while also providing lower fees and higher availability.
How do they open the bank account? Looks like a foreigner opening a bank account in the US would need proof that they have a US address. (Or at least, the major banks I checked did.)
> They aren’t as stable as they claim to be, and the stability they do have arises from free-riding on the US banking system and monetary policy – and as we’ll come back to, if stablecoins are able to keep gaining market share, these parasites might eventually endanger their hosts.
Strong statement, where is the evidence? The GENIUS Act is quite brilliant in my opinion. It strengthens the dollar by simultaneously creating demand for USD and US Treasuries.
I looked at crypto a little for a startup - the thing that isn't usually mentioned is the huge downside of custody. Not your keys, not your coin - and holding those keys securely, think fire, theft, hacks, backdoored hardware wallets, etc - is really really hard to get correct. And if you mess up once anywhere - poof - all your money is gone and there's nothing you can do to get it back.
Yeah who in this world has never had to reset a password? That’s what this means. That laser inscribed metal fob with you keys on it may as well be made of platinum.
And I’ve never felt clear on how people trust wallet, hot or cold — at some point they connect to the internet for transactions, and all the vendors seem suspect. I really doubt most users are building their wallet from code reviewed cryptographically signed source… but maybe I’m wrong?
I think most users have no clue how any of it works - there are so many footguns doing it yourself that probably an exchange like Coinbase is the best bet, but again, not your keys, not your coin...
> That laser inscribed metal fob with you keys on it
Unless you manually inscribe it with a laser (good luck), that wouldn't really be a great idea unless the computer assisting you in the inscriptions is completely air-gapped.
Stamping/manually engraving your seed on fire resistant stainless steel (308 is my preference) is still one of the most "air-gapped" way to do this.
> at some point they connect to the internet for transactions,
Some don't, for example ColdCard. It is possible to use it without ever connecting it to a computer. Using a power source and a USB cable, they even offer a way to avoid using power adapters (using common batteries) as these tend to become "smarter" these days and could one day be the source of an exploit.
I guess with QR codes the ColdCard is fairly airgapped. Nifty. Is it a trustworthy company? Is the intermediate PSBT human readable — can you confirm contents before submitting to network?
I almost feel like crypto bros are all into HODL because spending coins is just too much effort!
Best you can do is to split your crypto among many different hardware wallets and some metal cold storage wallets. Maybe even try to memorize at least one wallet password. It just seems so stressful.
Exactly. Crypto is like having all of your money as cash that thieves can teleport out of your safe. It must be incredibly stressful to have most of your wealth in crypto knowing this.
I think the biggest problem with fintech is that the financial system is already decentralized, and full of tech. It really just seems like it involves using unregulated technology, which allows the skipping of restrictive regulations. This might actually be a good thing, but once a path has been proven to be non destructive the banks can just take over the market by begging the government for deregulation.
> It really just seems like it involves using unregulated technology, which allows the skipping of restrictive regulations. This might actually be a good thing
Yeah, it's basically Uber for finance/banking/etc. Reap the free real estate created by rules and regulation by..skirting the rules and regulations.
It also adds indirection, which in turn allows all the parties involved to point fingers at each other Spiderman-style. "Oh I thought $X was responsible for $COMPLIANCE." Eventually, y'all get audited and shape up but that's a years-long process. And in that time you've grown and grown and finance/banking/etc is pretty sticky. Kaching :)
Except that stablecoins are strictly regulated thanks to the GENIUS Act and hopefully the CLARITY Act will provide the same guidelines for crypto as a whole. Gary Gensler did nothing to create regulation. David Sacks is out there doing God’s work.
A lot of tech is very weird, as the author suggests. It often seems like there's good ideas but everything must go through a hype wave. Unfortunately, the hype wave makes it difficult to distinguish good actors from bad ones. Consequently the bad ones win because it's easier. It's like we've designed everything to be a lemon market. It's like we're not trying to build tech to make life better and make money along the way but to find the most exciting looking or sounding thing and figuring out how much money we can make with it.
I mean look at something like the Rabbit R1. I'm an AI researcher and I saw my peers get fucking excited about it because it was a leap ahead of all the state of the art research we knew. Sorry, but what? It takes time for research to get into a product, sometimes years, even in tech, even in the fast pace AI world. Like you think they put what normally takes at least one $10k GPU and put that into a $200 device? That they could leverage GPT and not have a subscription fee? You're not going to beat ChatGPT by using ChatGPT lol.
Somehow stuff like this keeps happening and we never learn our lesson. Author is right, they're just chasing. And the irony is that that chase is actually preventing us from getting what we're really chasing
I agree on most points with the author, but stablecoins have fundamental value to countries that are not US whose currency gets devalued faster than US dollar, or want to do cross border transaction.
USD has its own woes with inflation and trade wars so fundamentally isn't stable, compared to say gold. Other currencies have runaway inflation or much higher friction to transact.
However the promise of stablecoin is that it can be exchanged 1:1 with USD with transaction fees much lower than CC fees (on exchanges like Solana e.t.c).
Unlike fraud from FTX, USDC stablecoin buys US treasuries dollar for dollar. This generates demand for USD as well as Circle makes profit from treasury yields.
Elegant idea in a way. Fast, cross-border low fee transactions in USD.
Bitcoin now has proven itself as inflation-hedged store of value. USDC is proving itself as a way to transact on goods and services.
Obviously trust is earned as droplets but leaves in buckets.
US dollar derivative that will lower government tax collection in long term with all negative consequences...
Despite all talks around - financial blow up in next up to 3-6 months is inevitable so brace for impact
IMO US is heavily exporting its inflation by leveraging its world reserve currency status as other countries have to buy it's treasuries (petrodollar system legacy). No other country would be able to run 30+% budget deficits and sell long duration government bonds under 5%.
This will break, sooner or later.
When external buyers stop buying treasuries US will have to massively inflate its money supply, taking bondholders and a bunch of other groups to the cleaners. Such events have a lot of collateral damage, which may fit the definition of financial blow up. But I would place us much further away than 6-12 months, likely at 5-10 years. If there is a viable alternative to US treasuries, potentially sooner, but still not in 12 months. My 2c.
Interesting, almost inevitable (I think) and scary in more ways than one; but I agree, this is probably not going to happen tomorrow, nor in 2026.
In the shorter term...
NVIDIA is 8% of the US stock market.
88% of NVIDIA’s revenue comes from enterprise-scale GPUs primarily used for generative AI, and half of that is purchased by only 4 companies, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta.
By the end of 2025, these 4 companies will have spent over $560 billion in capital expenditures on AI in the last two years. Their AI revenues? Around $35 billion.
And then there's Tesla, which is 'worth' more than Ford, GM, VW and Toyota combined.
So, 6 out of the 7 largest companies in the US are in a strange position.
Only Apple, the laggard in AI, seems relatively safe to me.
This is already happening if you know where to look and it isn’t esoteric data. The share of retail in treasury buyers has been increasing for years. If the administration doesn’t reduce spending (it won’t since it can’t) yields will blow out, we had a taste of this a couple times in the past years. Watch 5.5% on the 10. Expect YCC. Possibly buy gold if you think of buying treasuries…
Yes. When I said 5-10 years it wasn't to say that the effects would start then. That was my WAG at the time when normal, mild methods like localized YCC stop working and we should expect significant system-level problems.
For investments, I think now "buying index" will stop working well and buying chosen quality, profitable companies will work much better. My 2c.
> For investments, I think now "buying index" will stop working well and buying chosen quality, profitable companies will work much better. My 2c.
Eh, that's what the index should be comprised of anyway, with some lags.
Or, to put it differently, nothing new: it was always much better, if you knew which companies will exceed expectations. After they do so consistently, they get included in the index eventually.
Gold was also inversely correlated to long term US interest rates, which no longer holds true. So, nations and large institutions already hold the opinion that inflation will be higher (>2%) for longer in the future. Maybe the target should be moved to ~3%, which is defacto the case.
The other half of technology is the people using it. If that other half is stupid, the technology side will have to overcompensate or will maliciously abuse them. Neither is good.
And I am talking about myself here. My only excuse is that I simply don't use my money. Which is not necessarily a good thing either.
> Repeat after me. Do not use technology to try to solve people problems.
I am saying the solution to make people smarter or empower the people. Buy now pay later, credit cards, and all these bespoke algorithms is just an illusion to make people feel better when they get ripped off.
When I was growing up, I didn’t understand check cashing places, payday loans, the layaway counter in the stores, home equity loans, reverse mortgages, auto leasing, and such.
And looking back, I’m amazed how much nonsense is out there. These are more traps than tools.
>If that other half is stupid, the technology side will have to overcompensate or will maliciously abuse them.
And what I am saying is that this sentiment, right here? Is exactly what leads to your later observation below, because the only ones willing to pay someone to implement a technical system, are inevitably the greedy ones looking to extract value from the suckers, and pay a techie to o make the little blinkenlights do their thing. You can't look at the technical side as the "hero" in this encounter, because the technical is what is propping up the fintech dystopia in the first place.
>I am saying the solution to make people smarter or empower the people. Buy now pay later, credit cards, and all these bespoke algorithms is just an illusion to make people feel better when they get ripped of.
You are dead on with this observation, but again, the answer to this is not something the technical world can solve. It's a people problem. We have to start talking about how whether these practices around are fundamentally exploitive or not, and whether they have a place in our society. Whether we should even be trying the money lenders offering them. That set of questions is firmly in the realm of people problems (problems that are fundamentally questions of human interaction, and whether something should or should not happen), rather than the technical, to which most systems in the fintech basically boil down to being a CRM, a set of ledgers/accounts, an invoicing/bill payment system, and some email/login/account viewing screen.
As someone with over a decade having been wasted trying to find a way to genuinely help people through the financial/insurtech sector (I know, what an idiot, right?), you cannot use technology on the service provider side, without it morphing into a more efficient value extractor, and often the other side of the transaction, the ones being fleeced, are in the worst place to say no in the face of a tech enabled lender.
Hence, I know it sounded sort of glib, but I'll say it again. No using tech to solve people problems.
This reminds me of something I read here the other day. There was an exchange about social implications of technology, and the idea of designing software based around our understanding of these matters more in the future.
Someone responded like "lol, sure, we can find some sociologists to start programming our apps", and I thought Damn. That's really missing the point. And it seems so arrogant. Like, not only do we laugh at the idea of people doing our jobs, we also need to laugh at the idea of the relevance of their fields.
Yet we really should depend on their insights to further our field, in my opinion. No profession truly stands alone, just like no person does.
I think we'll get better about this over time. Right now we've definitely got some growing pains.
Well put! Turns out “tech bros” aren’t that good at sociology either!
Even in computing, a profession dominated by scientists and engineers, has a lot of failing. Even the damn SPEC benchmarks don’t know to average numbers correctly.
One problem with this is crypto AMM (automated market making) works best with stability and low volatility. For example, it's terrible in the context of prediction markets. Market makers get hosed due to real life, and traders (me) can profit at their expense. It's a big part of why prediction market traders encouraged Polymarket to develop orderbooks. And if crypto is viewed as disruptive, then it's likely inducing greater volatility.
A lot of these things are lucrative until they're not. If they are inherently lucrative then that profit will diminish as people catch on.
Every market has a use case, and AMMs are not solving event markets, event markets tried to use AMMs and successfully pivoted to order books. I think Polymarket's implementation still has liquidity challenges, as they still have to centrally bribe people to participate. Honestly I don't like Polymarket's contract at all, but it is fast and low cost. Bribes in the solidly AMM model I think were more efficient at attracting liquidity. Slight tangent, the oracle in Polymarket is a bigger issue, people need to convince them to lower the weight of UMA.
back to what I'm a fan of: CLMMs (Concentrated Liquidity Market Maker) is a very competitive field. The level of profits depends solely on volume and amount of capital participating. You are counting on other capital getting bored and moving away, as well as volume rising. Thats the game, it will always be the game. Its already "lucrative until its not" so its not really a gotcha or that insightful for those passing by. I'm glad you have some experience with it.
> people are either still too afraid of looking like they don’t understand, still too deferential to Silicon Valley’s supposed technological expertise, or still too busy doing other things, to voice any skepticism about blockchain-based solutions
I'm not afraid of looking like I don't understand - I simply don't understand. I've tried reading a few "yellow papers" for crypto projects and they are so abstract and full of jargon that I never come away knowing more than when I started reading.
If anyone has a good resource for getting into the technical details of crypto please let me know. I would like to gain a full enough understanding that I can finally decide for myself if it's revolutionary or overhyped.
> I've tried reading a few "yellow papers" for crypto projects and they are so abstract and full of jargon that I never come away knowing more than when I started reading.
In some cases, this is by design. The project is nonsensical and/or a scam, and the white paper is an obfuscatory smokescreen to provide an illusion of sophistication.
I feel like this describes so much of the tech industry.
A lot of what we do might be sophisticated in some far corners, but at the end of the day the end results can be trivially explained.
"Taxi ordered from a phone app, "Sleep in other people's homes", "Restaurant delivery service with GPS tracking", "Exercise bike with a screen showing workout videos", "Someone else shops for you", etc.
Unfortunately with crypto, a lot of it is trivially explained as "obfuscated scam"
> "Taxi ordered from a phone app, "Sleep in other people's homes", "Restaurant delivery service with GPS tracking", "Exercise bike with a screen showing workout videos", "Someone else shops for you", etc.
I don't think anyone ever claimed these were complicated or sophisticated, though? They're straightforward user-facing apps. A more comparable example might be cloud services or a good chunk of security products.
"crypto" is a very wide word, there are a lot of technologies participating in the game, and a lot of technical details in them. Most are completely irrelevant to most regular people.
Blockchain is pretty simple. There's a database, organized in a way that you can add records to it but you can not edit past records - or if you try to, everybody would know you did. There's a network of people maintaining this shared database, as a payment ledger - basically, this database for them says "X has $Y amount of database-money". People participating in maintaining this database get paid in the same database-money. They have incentive to do it properly, otherwise their database-money aren't worth shit. They also have incentive to steal if they could, but since they can't edit the database without other people noticing (who aren't interested in having db-money stolen from them) it's hard. That's the basic level of cryptocurrency systems, very shallowly and simplified, of course. If you want to know the math and protocols, there are full college degree programs dedicated to it (I am not kidding at all, there are). There's even free courses on Coursera and such which deal with the basics.
The second level is allowing to do other, more complicated stuff with the same database. Like keep ownership records for other things (that's basically NFT). The next level is turning it from passive database into a computation engine, so you can make computations that will be reproducible over the database. That's ethereum contracts and such. There also side aspects - like privacy chains, where the information who owns the money is encrypted, so you can prove you own the money but somebody else would have hard time seeing how much you got and where it came from (it's usually very easy in most chains). Etc. etc.
Whether it's revolutionary or overhyped - I have no idea. That's kinda societal question, certainly all the above (and more) can be useful and you can build useful stuff on top of it. Would some people use it? Probably. Will everybody switch to it from existing ways of doing things? I have no idea, but I suspect no. But I am nobody, so it's worth nothing. A lot of people smarter than me thought there's a use case for certain things, and spend a lot of time and money building stuff, and nobody every used it. Take Meta - the whole "metaverse" thing, nobody even remembers it now. There are many things like that. Is crypto one of them? I dunno. We'll see.
In fact, there's probably less people who understand the old money system than those that understand the crypto math. After all, the latter can be readily learned from books and whitepapers, go figure where do you learn how actually the real monetary system works, in all its complexity, and how would you even get such level of access without being member of the Fed board.
Founding banks, working in banking back office infra (central bank connectivity etc.); there are for sure places where you can get this knowledge. Also there dedicated central banking degrees in lot of countries.
Founding banks has essentially become impossible in Germany and more and more financial services have been moved under the umbrella of the banking license.
It's very disturbing to me that the possibility of grass roots reform is essentially gone. You need a a two digit million amount of equity, proof of both formal academic and real life experience, you need a large team of trained professionals, easily at least 10 core employees who essentially aren't allowed to know anything other than banking and worst of all, you must keep these employees employed for the duration of the application, which may take a year or two and even if you did all of that, you can still get rejected anyway. Oh, and by the way, you're not allowed to earn money (as a bank) before you get your banking license, meaning that you are burning money faster than any other potential startup.
Now you might think this is fair, after all, banking is a high trust business that requires an extreme amount of caution and care or things will go to shit. Except as I already mentioned: More and more things are moving under the banking license umbrella, but applying to a subset of a banking license doesn't lower costs. The costs are the same no matter what you actually do, which favors massive banks that only have to pay for the license once and use their banking license to the fullest to provide all the services permitted by their license, which ironically increases the systemic risk by letting them become a point of single failure since all the services that ought to be separated are now combined in a single entity to minimize regulatory cost.
Most bailouts are the logical consequence of co-mingling the deposit service with the investment banking services in the same bank. The problem here isn't that losses in investment banking causes loss of deposits. It's that if the bank makes a financial loss in one department, it will also have to shut down the other department as well, because they are under the same company. The opposite is also true. If the payment services run at a loss, the bank will feel compelled to try risky investment banking bets to even the losses out. This type of cross subsidy essentially guarantees that the government will have to bail the bank out.
Central banks publish reports on how money works. It's the economists teaching students at universities who refuse to read them. (looking at you Gregory Mankiw)
Tons of books, of course. But if a person reads a good book on, say, Bitcoin chain foundations, I am pretty sure they'd understand how it works. If you read 20 financial books, I am not sure you'd understand how something like US money system really works.
I'm 2/3 of the way through a degree in business admin with a minor in economics at a provincial university in Canada and I'd say I have a decent layman's understanding of the international monetary system.
The place I'd look if I wanted a deeper understanding of how the fed operates would be reading the laws that govern banking.
> But if a person reads a good book on, say, Bitcoin chain foundations, I am pretty sure they'd understand how it works.
On technological level? Yes. On the bullshit scam level with sixteen layers of new invented terminology? Most likely not.
And yes, cryptoworld is easier to understand precisely because it's unbelievably primitive once you pull apart hype, scams, and layers of indirection.
Edit: oh, it's also busy re-inventing most of the concepts that the world has had for centuries, and most people understand without needing to read books and whitepapers
It helped me to start from the problem it tries to solve.
Fundamentally, we've been making digital versions of everything. We have digital phone calls, television, bookkeeping, document writing, drawing, etc.
One thing we didn't have digitally was a currency.
Why would we want a digital currency? For similar reasons to all the other stuff above. It's more convenient. When you "transfer money" from your bank account to another, your bank has to physically move the associated cash from it's vault to the other banks vault, by hiring secure trucks, people, and so on. If the money has to cross a border, that's even more of a hassle, now you have to physically cross a border with a truck full of cash. When a bank "holds onto your money", they need a big vault full of cash, they have to count it, account for every dollar, physically safeguard it, etc.
This is a huge cost, inefficiency, and a big challenge of banking, and it's one reason transaction fees and banking fees are so high.
Now we have an idea of why we might want to make a digital currency. The biggest issue with making one is how do you solve the "double spend problem". That is, if I have 1 unit of a currency and I give it to you, how do we guarantee I no longer have that unit after it was given to you? In a physical world, I'm giving you the actual unit of currency, but in the digital world I'm giving you a copy of it, it would be easy for me to keep my copy as well and have an infinite money glitch.
The solution to that is simple, you have a source of truth that processes the transaction. That source of truth records that I had 10$ and you had 10$, I gave you 1$, and now I have 9$ and you have 11$.
That's easy enough. Here comes the second problem, who would trust owning that source of truth? Would you trust me keeping the official source of truth log of how much money everyone has? I could easily add myself a few 0s to my account, or remove some from yours.
Would you trust the government of your country? Of another country? A big corporation? A US charity?
This is where crypto comes in. Crypto says, nobody would ever trust a single entity, but what if everyone could join a network of nodes that together form the source of truth? Not owned by any single person, but the union of everyone who wants to join the network, and you could join the network, I could join it, anyone is free to join it, and we can all validate and check each other's work to make sure no one else on the network is fudging the numbers.
And now a lot of complex cryptographic math comes in to from this network.
> When you "transfer money" from your bank account to another, your bank has to physically move the associated cash from it's vault to the other banks vault, by hiring secure trucks, people, and so on
That's several centuries out of date, I'm afraid. Even before computers banks didn't actually do that, but now they certainly never do that. They just change records in their books - it has been paper books once, now it's just database files. I mean, banks do move cash (still do) but not when you transfer money from account to account, it has nothing to do with that, unless when you're running a massive cash-based business (which most banks hate btw, for many reasons).
> Why would we want a digital currency? For similar reasons to all the other stuff above. It's more convenient. When you "transfer money" from your bank account to another, your bank has to physically move the associated cash from it's vault to the other banks vault, by hiring secure trucks, people, and so on. If the money has to cross a border, that's even more of a hassle, now you have to physically cross a border with a truck full of cash. When a bank "holds onto your money", they need a big vault full of cash, they have to count it, account for every dollar, physically safeguard it, etc.
>
> This is a huge cost, inefficiency, and a big challenge of banking, and it's one reason transaction fees and banking fees are so high.
That's absolutely not how this works though. Banks perform electronic transfers and most of the money is accounted for in databases. The problems are slow, antiquated, technology, which is made worse by the amount of regulation surrounding it that makes it hard for new contenders to enter and drive down prices via competition.
Cryptocurrency is trustless, but there is an interesting tangent about if you _do not_ want a government to control monetary policy.
GP: this describes the whole crypto world so well I can almost taste it.
Someone completely misunderstands how the real world works, misrepresents that even more when trying to articulate, uses convoluted wording to hide their total lack of understanding of the real world. Then create a "solution" for the problems that do not exist in the real world in the first place, in the process reinventing problems that are solved for centuries already or running head first into ideas that have been proven multiple times in history to just not work.
This whole machinery is then used by criminals to launder money, scammers to scam people out of money and speculants hoping to get rich quick, providing real money liquidity for the previous two.
"When you "transfer money" from your bank account to another, your bank has to physically move the associated cash from it's vault to the other banks vault, by hiring secure trucks, people, and so on."
Payment settlement is a solved problem and very rarely involves physical cash transfer. Most of this is just numbers moved between accounts which commercial banks have with a central bank.
> When you "transfer money" from your bank account to another, your bank has to physically move the associated cash from it's vault to the other banks vault, by hiring secure trucks, people, and so on.
That’s not at all what happens!
Transfers are done digitally, physical cash does not move between vaults or bank branches.
I remember being shocked at some point that my deposits at a bank would actually be a liability on their books not an asset. When you think about it as passing around debt, it makes a bit more sense.
The easier explanation is that your deposits are yours, not the bank’s. In terms of debt, they owe you. They make money by borrowing from you and lending long term debt to get more yield than they pay you on your cash (you may hear this called “borrow short to lend long”).
Since the invention of the computer, sure, but before that, yes they did at some point reconcile. Even today, cash still physically moves from the mint to banks to consumers.
> When you "transfer money" from your bank account to another, your bank has to physically move the associated cash from it's vault to the other banks vault, by hiring secure trucks, people, and so on.
That hasn't been true for, uh, centuries. It's like literally the entire point of banking, to allow financial transactions to take place without having to physically haul around collateral anywhere.
(And if you want a digital version of what banks actually do, it's called SWIFT, and has been around since checks Wikipedia 1973).
Yes and for people who think “centuries” is an exaggeration, the knights templar gained their power and wealth in the middle ages specifically because people could use their promissory notes to exchange for cash so that they didn’t have to physically transport valuables around between Europe and the middle East during the time of the crusades. They allowed people to deposit cash at temple church in London and withdraw it in Jerusalem.
It’s really telling how poor the knowledge of financial history and the existing state of the art in traditional financial tech there is among people in the crypto-boosting space. Many of the “innovations” they claim have been around in traditional finance for hundreds of years.
Hawala is the same principle and existed pretty much since the same times, maybe earlier (nobody really knows when it started). Still exists and causes major headaches to people like FATF.
> When you "transfer money" from your bank account to another, your bank has to physically move the associated cash from it's vault to the other banks vault, by hiring secure trucks, people, and so on. If the money has to cross a border, that's even more of a hassle, now you have to physically cross a border with a truck full of cash. When a bank "holds onto your money", they need a big vault full of cash, they have to count it, account for every dollar, physically safeguard it, etc.
While I'm sure some of this is true for some banks at some point in history, this is the kind of understanding of a given industry that results in TechBros reinventing buses or juicing machines.
> This is a huge cost, inefficiency, and a big challenge of banking, and it's one reason transaction fees and banking fees are so high.
The reason banking fees are so high is because they charge what the market will bear, and most of the banks customers are a captive audience. It doesn't cost $2 to perform a transaction at an ATM; it costs pennies, if that. Banks should be paying you for holding, and putting to use, your money.
To steelman the crypto side: I think the stuff that is most interesting is found _around_ crypto and not necessarily within most cryptocurrency projects.
For example, there have been a lot of novel or interesting projects centered around cryptography, consensus, decentralization, anonyimity. On a sociological level, there are a lot of interesting social/economic experiments unfolding in the DeFi world as we speak.
But I think that is where the truly interesting or valuable contributions to humanity as a whole end, and the vast, vast majority of it otherwise is just speculation or scams. It is hard to find that signal in the noise, but it is there, if you look.
I had a great time using drugs friends bought on the silk road back in the day and I'd say that particular economic activity being facilitated by crypto while completely hedonistic was a net positive for humanity.
Try asking an LLM about it. They're good for that kind of introduction, because they can respond appropriately to your level of knowledge. Just ask it to provide references so you can verify what it's saying. But in general, hallucinations aren't a big issue with those kinds of prompts.
The article I'm commenting on is pretty clearly heavily biased against the entire field, possibly for good reason. I'd like to get my foundational understanding from a more neutral source so I can better consider the arguments put forth in TFA.
It's a revolutionary technology for the trustless, public exchange of data. It's overhyped as a financial instrument. Anybody who desires a completely public, completely trustless infrastructure for money or property is stupid.
> Actually improving people’s financial wellbeing, for example, will require us to pursue real, slow, piecemeal, democratic solutions.
Democratic solutions are, imho, doomed to failure. In order for them to work a significant portion of "take back control" and "make my country great" brigade will need to have some kind of revelation about the direction of society as a whole. Given the amount of resources pumped into keeping people separate and fighting one-another, this seems like naive optimism.
I consider this to be a woefully inadequate response to a vast, complex and thoroughly embedded set of interconnected issues. Appropriate solutions will require a deep appreciation of complexity science, radically better system design and, frankly, a level of imagination, determination and competence that simply doesn't exist as a social norm, and will not emerge for at least a generation (or three), given that educational and political institutions are so deeply rooted in the current mode.
I don't think Bitcoin is revolutionary - it's just algorithmic scarcity - but I do think that distributed ledgers are an important piece of a future puzzle, as they provide transparency where previously it didn't exist. That said, there are no silver-bullets and not everything should necessarily be held on one.
My position is that, until we actually address the misconception of infinite growth within economic system design (i.e. not by external constraints, such as taxation), we haven't even started. Some may say that Bitcoin already does this, but its capture by the financial sector demonstrates that it is, at best, another asset class.
My anticipation is that this won't happen, so I am fully expecting a kind of looney tunes moment as we race off the side of the cliff. I am interested, not in preventing that from happening, since I think it is inevitable, but rather on planting bushes on the side of the cliff that might give us things to grab as we fall. Feel free to accuse me of either pessimism or optimism.
I think you got it in one. Eventually there will have to be a sudden "falling off the cliff", but the main question is what will happen after that. If the right ideas are in the air, it's possible that the opportunity that the crisis presents could be seized for something good, similar to the way the Great Depression created the opening for the New Deal. The progressivism movement of the 1920s laid the ideological groundwork and ensured that the right ideas were in the air when the crisis hit. The best we can do is the same - make sure that the right ideas are in the air and be ready to pounce when the crisis hits and everyone is suddenly asking "how could something like this happen?"
The funniest thing is why crypto bros talk about the Venezuelan taxi driver who has to pay Western Union $10 to send money home, and that is most of the justification for minting trillions of dollars of riches. Yeah OK Visa/MC have a monopoly but even they are worth less than most bros think.
Doesn't that exist already? Mobile payment gateways are available in many countries already. India's UPI, for example,had 18+ billion transactions in June 2025, and is entirely free. Yes, the government, and probably financial institutions, do track the transactions
> Doesn't that exist already? Mobile payment gateways are available in many countries already.
None of them work cross-border. And one suspects the US Government is working very hard to make sure they never do (look at the money laundering accusations against the Brazilian system for a recent example).
G20 Targets for Enhancing Cross-border Payments[1]:
“Reaffirm UN SDG: Global average cost of sending $200 remittance to be no more than 3% by 2030, with no corridors with costs higher than 5%”
“75% of cross-border remittance payments in every corridor to provide availability of funds for the recipient within one hour of payment initiation and for the remainder of the market to be within one business day, by end-2027”
“More than 90% of individuals (including those without bank accounts) who wish to send or receive a remittance payment to have access to a means of cross-border electronic remittance payment by end-2027”
I was in relatively early in the web as a developer, I was in early on the crypto movement, also as a developer.
These technologies didn't fix the problems. There is too much regulation, you can't do anything without a license. The only solutions are political, not technological.
Everything feels like a scam within a scam. I feel dizzy just thinking about it. I'm completely demoralised. Everything related to career feels pointless, sisyphean because of the bureaucracy and monopolization. Any work that pays well is useless at best, harmful at worst.
It's either illegal or impossible to do anything which might provide value to people. Even if all the hurdles could be removed, I'm not even sure I want to contribute... For whose benefit? And I feel totally disconnected from the broader society around me.
I basically completely checked out career-wise. I'm good at faking though so I just fake it. I just started bullshitting my way through life. I hate it but everyone is just eating it up and loving it. What can I do? Just give the people more of what they want I guess. Value creation doesn't pay, bullshitting pays... People are living a lie and they love it when you build on top of it. If you just say the right words, they will deny their own eyes; this is what COVID taught me and I can see this in my day-to-day life. It's depressing, they are good people, that's why they assume good faith. I was just like them before, living in a bubble, I understand, I'm no better than them, just less fortunate. If they saw what I saw, they would probably do what I do. Many would do worse.
I feel like I need therapy from being this way. I have bills to pay though. I think I did everything approximately right but I've been ridiculously unlucky. I was operating on limited info and incorrect assumptions. Now, I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place.
It's illegal to be homeless in my country. It's illegal to live in a tent on 'your own' property, you are not allowed to build your own house without some expensive license and approvals... You can't do shit within your means. All the things which seemed unimportant to me before are now the centre of my life and on that plane of existence, I see scams all around.
a bunch of people quite recently had their money zapped away when their fintech wildcat bank accounts disappeared so clearly there is still some room to dodge rules
> Bradley Lott-Tillery, 24, from Arizona also entrusted Yotta with his savings, thinking his money would be protected by the federal government. “I emailed [Yotta], made sure it was FDIC insured. Of course, they emailed me back and told me, yes, it’s FDIC insured, which we now know is not true,” Lott-Tillery said.
> While the banks with which fintech companies like Yotta and Juno partner are FDIC insured, this only kicks in when a bank is found to have failed. Since the intermediary Synapse filed for bankruptcy, but not any of the banks, the money is not covered by the regulatory agency.
(their money was "insured" in the same way depositing money in a random guy's bank account is insured: it's not insured against the guy! these bank-shaped companies managed to convince a bunch of people that they were close enough to banks and about as safe, and then it turned out they all handed the money over to the same fintech company to interface with the actual banks, and that company went messily bust)
It is truly baffling to look at the issues in tech, your alienation with your own work and point at regulations. This field has been almost completely unrestrained and egged on by every opportunist and schemer holding political office.
You blame regulations and then mention that everything is pointless because everything is: "sisyphean because of the bureaucracy and monopolization".
The tech industry is lousy with scams, hell the entire model of the global economy is exit scamming everyone. No one builds anything because it is meant to last, everyone is fighting for the next IPO or buyout. You have pointed your ire in the wrong direction... because you were unable to scam first? Confusing...
> These technologies didn't fix the problems. There is too much regulation, you can't do anything without a license. The only solutions are political, not technological.
> Everything feels like a scam within a scam. I feel dizzy just thinking about it. I'm completely demoralised. Everything related to career feels pointless, sisyphean because of the bureaucracy. Any work that pays well is useless at best, harmful at worst. It's either illegal or impossible to do anything which might provide value to people. Even if all the hurdles could be removed, I'm not even sure I want to contribute... For whose benefit?
None of this is because of regulation. It's all because of greed and unchecked grift and profit capture. Technology is making the world worse because of greed and capturing profit, not because of regulations. The work most of us are doing is harmful because of greed and capturing profit, not because of regulations. Everyone is living a lie because of greed and capturing profit, not because of regulations. These uncountable scams are all because of unregulated greed and profit. People on HN are mad, but they're acting out against an imagined "regulation boogieman," not what's actually causing all of the shit.
Disagree. Zoning law and regulation-driven credentialism are the closest thing to a root cause you can find for most of the problems with modern society; sure you can say "greed" but that's a permanent part of human nature, and most societies find a way to live with it. Today's world where for a family to succeed both parents have to be putting 40+ hours into bullshit fake work in a circular economy of bullshit fake solutions to bullshit fake problems so that they can afford to get their kids the right bullshit fake qualifications is a distinctly regulation-based phenomenon.
> These uncountable scams are all because of unregulated greed and profit.
Sure. But are they actually any worse than the regulated scams? Often the licensed and regulated stuff hurts the end victim more than the direct scams.
Sure, I agree that greed is the root of all problems. Regulations are a symptom of greed; people want to protect their interests and are willing to incrementally corrupt the system to achieve it; that's what a lot of regulations are.
But it's hard to fix greed. The solution to fix greed is way more radical, it's violent. The greedy will defend their interests with violence when confronted. The only non-violent solution I can think of is to let the system collapse, under their own direction. That's the only way the greedy would relinquish enough control to allow people the freedom to get things going again. There was a bit of this after COVID but it wasn't enough.
I just hope people can maintain their sanity through this. I hope it's not going to be an endless cycle of society repeatedly rebounding off from rock bottom... Never actually lifting itself out of the muck but basically always scraping rock bottom with only short temporary breaks.
As a developer, the system and code complexity we have to work with is increasing to the level that it should be considered mental assault. You need to develop a kind of apathy to get through life.
Not all regulation is a symptom of greed. Regulation can be written and passed with the intention of protecting the public good, promoting public health, preserving fair competition... That it sometimes works counter to those goals is a function of greed, a lack of accountability and and a lack of transparency. We write these laws with consistent check on accountability and transparency, but we keep electing sociopaths that want to game the system and sometimes go as far as screaming "deep-state" or "fraud, waste and abuse"... when they want to completely remove those checks and people keep falling for that bullshit.
> That it sometimes works counter to those goals is a function of greed, a lack of accountability and and a lack of transparency.
The whole purpose of regulations is to reduce accountability (because instead of taking responsibility for their actions, entities instead just follow the regulations). It's not an accidental bug, it's a fundamental design flaw in the system.
True as well but personally I prefer people to regulate themselves though for that to happen, there needs to be very strong punishment for violations. Harm mitigation should be at the forefront of everyone's minds. Not quite compatible with the 'limited liability' legal construct. People won't regulate themselves unless they are afraid of consequences.
The regulation + limited liability combo takes away fear. The big companies doing harm love regulations, they breathe a sigh of relief when regulations are introduced. 'Regulatory clarity' they call it. They barely even know what harms the regulation is trying to prevent. They are disconnected from that.
I have personal experience with companies that consistently violate environmental regulations with very little understanding of the regulations they are violating beyond their effect on profit margins. They pay the fines or pay environmental engineers to help them pass an inspection that could potentially disrupt operations and are violating the same statutes 6 months later. The only regulatory clarity they care about is knowing which regulations can impact production and which can be gamed or paid off.
The third paragraph hits too close to home for me.
You want to be a good person doing good things for other people and getting along peacefully? Sorry, but happy planet is that way. Don't come to earth.
so much japing, so little substance and to make a point LETS JUST SWITCH TO CAPS and round it off with a reddit comment - this is capitalism baby!
Also, what is this headline even about? Why the bashing on fintech? I worked for 4 fintechs and communicated with many more, not a single one was blockchain related.
Why is this even on hn?
If you want to read proper criticism of blockchain, read Molly White's essays instead
From a brief skim, this series seems too much "let me tell you my opinions" and not enough "let me tell you a story." I recommend reading Matt Levine and Patrick McKenzie instead.
The use case for crypto (eth) and stables (dai) at least for me is clear as day 1) to be able to save money
2) to be able to freely take it with me anywhere (on a vacation for example)
Having no other way to do these simple things, from my point of view, it is not a problem of hundred thousand people in Venezuela, it's a valid problem of tens (if not hundreds) of million people around the world.
IMO The author significantly underestimates how limited and inaccessible the current financial system in the world is.
I think people here on HN keep underestimating the relevance of crypto for four reasons:
What crypto is already useful for is not to replace the cash in your pocket and your savings account. It is useful to replace SWIFT and Fort Knox.
What crypto will be useful for in the future is uncertain. But uncertainty does not mean pie in the sky. How the internet would be used was uncertain in the 70s.
Yes, nerds were already excited about the internet in the 70s. Have a look ath the "Mother of all demos": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
It takes decades to iron out the details of how to use fundamentally new technology.
Fear of change. Is there any new technology that HN is in favour of?
This ignores that the internet exists now, and ideas spread millions of times faster. No other tech has needed that much time to mature and find use since.
No, because in the '80s there were already real use cases. Business was being done over email, thousands of home users were paying to get access to chatrooms...
How are there not real use cases for crypto already?
Surely more business is being done with crypto today than was done using the internet in the 80's.
I've been paid my salary in crypto for the last 8 years. The company I work for pays nearly all their expenses in crypto. I pay for my rent and most major purchases with crypto. A significant portion of my savings is in crypto. For fiat purchases, I'll use a reloadable crypto visa card. When I travel to foreign countries that mostly use cash, I'll usually exchange crypto for local currency rather than carry large amounts of USD or deal with sketchy ATMs.
> I've been paid my salary in crypto for the last 8 years. The company I work for pays nearly all their expenses in crypto. I pay for my rent and most major purchases with crypto.
Where's the value creation? At some point value has to be coming into the system, and as far as I can see that side still all bottoms out in crime or scams.
> For fiat purchases, I'll use a reloadable crypto visa card.
I've always felt those were an admission of failure of the whole crypto enterprise. All of the downsides and none of the upside.
Have a look at the "Mother of all demos". It dates from 1968.
Some of its use cases such as having a "smart" personal/digital assistant on the computer helping organize your day are only popping up now thanks to the combination of LLM tech, model self hosting and MCP protocols.
Yeah, there's a line early in the article about use, the gist of which is "[unlike cryptocurrency] the utility of the internet was obvious from the start".
But it seemed pretty obvious to me more than a decade ago what cryptocurrency would be useful for. I remember the ideas flying around in the early days.
It's been a bumpy road...but then, I also remember through the late 90s (and especially after the dotcom crash) when there were countless takes on how the Internet (and PCs in general) had been vastly overhyped. "Computers were supposed to eliminate paper, but we're using more paper than ever! We were supposed to do all our shopping and get our news from the internet, but Sears is thriving and I still get my daily newspaper every morning!"
Somebody could absolutely have made a book out of all the overpromises of the "Internet Superhighway" era.
The path to general use for cryptocurrency has been, and will continue to be, rocky. Moreso than the net. It inherently involves money--lots of money--and so it's been rife with scams. "Nigerian Princes" on steroids.
But I can tell you guys: before the rush of investors and crazy bubbles, before the scams and collapses, long before hucksters like Trump got involved, there was a group of people to whom the potential of cryptocurrency seemed obvious.
I don't see anything obvious about the utility of cryptocurrencies.
Money is not that difficult of a concept, you use it to store value or transact. As a store of value it has no intrinsic advantage compared to any other alternative we have now, and same goes to transactions, it doesn't bring anything to the table than current systems already don't do.
All the features people keep mentioning like the immutable ledger are simply not something we actually need or government have asked for.
The only utility is making money for the people that work on it, there's no societal value in crypto at all.
Why is crypto better at replacing SWIFT and Fort Knox rather than, say, SEPA or fiat currency (which replaced Fort Knox shortly after the invention of ARPANET)?
I would love it if the whole world signed on to SEPA, but I'm not holding my breath. And even if it worked worldwide, I don't want to rely on a payment system that can be used to censor even legal artistic expression (see the recent Steam removals) or political protest (remember the Canadian truckers?).
I don't buy it, crypto doesn't bring anything to the table that improve either SWIFT or the gold reserve that we actually need, but I understand crypto product developers see an advantage in switching from something they don't make any money on to something they do. As a consumer, or in this case as a citizen, crypto presents no advantage.
I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m really sick of the “ok, crypto doesn’t have any uses now, but they’re coming eventually” defense. For one thing, it’s unfalsifiable, and I suspect this is why it’s so popular, since unfalsifiable claims are pretty much the only ones that crypto boosters have left. It’s also just pathetic: Bitcoin is coming up on 20 years old; how many technologies had no compelling use cases after 20 years? And this hasn’t been a neglected 20 years, it’s been 20 years of massive hype and tens of billions in investment and R&D, with nothing to show for it.
As I pointed out last time, Bitcoin was released at roughly the same time as the iPhone. Nobody needed to wait for use cases for the iPhone: the global economy immediately reoriented itself around the smartphone, because it delivered massive amounts of obvious value to customers. If this isn’t happening around cryptocurrency, at some point you have to face facts that it’s because the value isn’t there.
Surely it depends on the problem. NFTs are poised to unlock the sharing of items between video games, for example. The author seems to have conveniently ignored that use case.
All of the games that feature this mechanic are bad, empty, fintech husks. Often they feature same neon vaporwave artstyle, maybe with apes, and usually are transparently asset flips designed more to to feature on cryptocurrencies landing page then to be played.
No good games include this ridiculous use case that I cannot imagine anyone who plays games even a little bit to want.
> NFTs are poised to unlock the sharing of items between video games, for example.
Of all of the supposed use cases for NFTs, this is one of the silliest. If you've ever looked into video game modding, one of the things you tend to realize is there is nothing close to a standard model format for art assets, so it's an insane amount of work to get an item in game A imported into game B, and that's only considering the work in mapping the visual design--the work that goes into mapping item properties is in some cases just "there's nothing you can do." (And this is despite there existing just three software packages that gets used in practice to make this stuff!)
> it's an insane amount of work to get an item in game A imported into game B
I understand why that would have been a road block in the last, but my hunch is that this type of problem (mapping visuals and item properties) is something AI would make quick work of.
As a videogame developer, I've always thought this take was just silly. I couldn't even imagine spending the time and effort into integrating someone else's assets into my game and keeping things balanced. The closest thing that we will get to this is something like Fortnite or Roblox, which will limit the type of games and creative choices that can be made.
NFTs are ownership (by some definition of "ownership") of assets on the blockchain. The blockchain is a database that's good for trustless transactions between a sufficient number of competing parties. Video game item transfer's problems have nothing to do with the problems blockchains purport to solve. The problems faced by developers wanting to allow transferring items between different games are primarily IP licensing agreements so that developers of one game have a license to use the assets from the other game, followed by actually finding a use for items in two different games. Since the two developers need to have agreements already in place, that obviates the need for a trustless database. The most likely scenario for one item to be useful across two different games is that both games are the same genre (ie, shooter, RTS game, etc), which reduces the likelihood of developers being open to licensing agreements because their games would be competitors. NFT item transfer has never made sense for these reasons
> Home ownership and the rest of the American dream seem out of reach for many people, and there’s very little safety net available when it comes to healthcare expenses, retirement, or just bad luck.
I empathize with the author, I really do, but you can't care about someone more than they care about themselves. If anyone has had the supremely unpleasant experience of trying to get loved ones to work out, they know. The last time someone (democrats) tried to tackle healthcare, they lost scores of seats all down the ballot.
> but you can't care about someone more than they care about themselves.
I just finished introducing Avatar the Last Air Bender to my partner. I'm pretty sure you have a lot to learn from Iroh.
Human history tells us that we don't make it through alone. We thrive on social structures and forming coalitions. Sometimes we get down and our friends and family put in work to pull us back. Your claim is the mental equivalent of "I can't lift someone up more than they can lift themselves up." Sorry, but if all they've got is bootstraps then you bet I can lift them up high into the sky while they can only lift themselves as high as they can jump. I'm pretty sure most people can't jump onto my shoulders and I'm confident none could jump that high and stay without support. Stop asking people to fly and look down at who's shoulders you're standing on
I don't understand how this relates to the material. Because people can't get their spouses to exercise, anyone who cares about themselves should have to pay a premium to a private insurance company so they don't lose everything if they get cancer?
Why do you think these two things are connected? Working out is a personal choice that should have zero barring on how we care for and help one another. For example, someone shouldn't have less access to healthcare because they don't or didn't work out.
Democrats losing support can be explained by several reasons that have nothing to do with tackling healthcare. It can be the fact that it ended up being a weak half measure in comparison to the strong desire for a universal healthcare system. Or completely unrelated to healthcare altogether, like the Hilary Clinton scandal fiascos.
The lack of critical thinking skills on the internet never ceases to amaze me, like you having the gall to think Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama are anywhere close to having similar controversy surrounding their political careers.
> For example, someone shouldn't have less access to healthcare because they don't or didn't work out.
One problem with this argument is that insurance companies disagree and nobody with any power in the US seems to want to move away from the "insurance provider" model.
They're saying that convincing other people to do what's in their own interests is very difficult if they don't care. Working out is given as an example: it's obviously a beneficial activity, but that's not enough to convince many people to do it regularly.
The claim then is that people don't care enough about having public healthcare (or are actively against it) for it to be a politically popular goal.
This is a really fun well-written and on point set of articles. Thank you for sharing.
I feel like at this point there isn't anybody defending stablecoins who isn't using them primarily speculative investment/trading. There has yet to be a usecase for distributed ledger that isn't solved better by a centralised ledger other than niche counter-culture solutions whose users are typically blinkered to the fact that they are already a self-selected techno-elite who can't bring their utopia to the commons. That ended a bit more nasty sounding that I intended, apologies.
The other legit use for stablecoins is allowing people in Venezuela, Argentina, etc. to hold US dollars while the US government pretends they don't know this is happening. (Officially the US does not encourage dollarization of other economies against their will.) I agree that a centralized US dollar CBDC that isn't run by scammers would be a simpler way to do this.
This is basically the valid use case, yes. It turns the bitcoin goldbug inflation paranoia on its head: the stable currency is defined to be the US dollar, and an elaborate proxy system allows people to access that stability when their local government doesn't want them to. Circumventing exchange controls and so on.
Although the current government is having a good go at reducing the value of the currency, it's barely budged on the chart.
> Circumventing exchange controls and so on.
This is the only new thing. Maybe.
Also it takes on the mobile phone money providers with direct 'dollars', which means it basically becomes a currency denominated bank.
You think the same system that chose to bail out the banks in 08 should be fully responsible for our financial future? I believe a more distributed financial system would provide more stability for all of us. The GENIUS Act establishes some very strong standards that I believe will strengthen the economy, the dollar, and enable more people to enter the financial services industry in a competitively healthy way. A scammer would have a hard time 1:1 backing their stablecoins with bonds and equivalently stable assets.
Despite its "mismanagement", people in shithole countries seem to prefer USD not EUR/CNY/RUB/XAU.
I do hope regulation drives Tether out of business.
That's thanks to the legacy of Bretton Woods and other things like the petrodollar. It's not a result of our monetary policy or output. The US is good at war and has the benefit of convenient geography. Those are the things that hold up the hegemony we see today.
That system is still deciding your financial future
i use one of the largest credit unions in the usa (grown through m&a over the last twenty years). their ability to follow instructions is at best at tech-intern level. their fees are incredibly fat and their people exhibit serious cya and complacency in almost every interaction. my confidence is at an all-time low in their competence.
It's not just places with hyperinflation. It's any country. Why should anyone be restricted from holding USD or have to pay crazy fees to buy dollars?
> I agree that a centralized US dollar CBDC that isn't run by scammers would be a simpler way to do this.
I don't think it's a stretch to imagine that the government would ban all other stable coins and strictly control what "valid commerce" is allowed to be done with the centralized coin (see Operation Choke Point)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
If a country does not allow their citizens to exchange currency, then this is as good as a black market and comes with the same risks as obtaining currency through any other black market means.
Carrying around or storing piles of foreign currency is much riskier than having a USDT wallet. You also cannot fly to another country with cash.
crypto off-ramps & on-ramps are expensive though.
check binance & other markets - e.g convert USD 10 to USDC
Expensive relative to what? When people are rescuing their hard-earned savings of 200k USD out of a third-world country, they would be happy to pay even double-digit per cent commissions, and crypto is much, much cheaper, faster and safer than all other available options.
Of course, if you're a US citizen transferring 200k USD from Chase to Bank of America, crypto doesn't make any sense.
Who are these people in 3rd world countries that have 200k USD cash? You make it sound like they've scrounged to make it happen... But its far far more likely to be people either trying to wash the money or they were from less than legitimate sources.
Definitely not lower class people like you seem to imply (or perhaps I'm just reading into it?)
I only know the situation which touched dozens of my friends and acquaintances. Say, you’re a relatively successful software professional in Russia, who has a small apartment and a car in a big city. Then the war with Ukraine starts, and all Russians are automatically sanctioned and blacklisted from the international financial system. You don’t want to make drone software or facilitate black-market oil trading, so you decide to sell everything and leave the country with your wife and kids to work elsewhere.
What, in your opinion, are your options for transferring abroad the cash you got from selling your hard-earned assets?
His entire point is that Russia is not a third world country.
He didn't imply he was referring to "lower class people." He's referring to people who have savings in countries with volatile currencies. Even for $100, having a stablecoin reserve can be a saving grace. Especially when trying to find asylum elsewhere.
In Argentina, the money changes pay more pesos for 100 dollar bills than 20 dollar bills, and won't accept money that is too beat up. Definitionally it's not the poorer people who can buy dollars in large denominations.
The reason they don’t want a CBDC is to be able to collect interest on behalf of the people holding the currency. If the state launches a blockchain CBDC, the state will profit. It’s too much money not to corrupt the most powerful people on the planet.
> There has yet to be a usecase for distributed ledger that isn't solved better by a centralised ledger
what about situations where centralized ledgers won't serve you? e.g. someone who wants to buy drugs, or sex workers want to get paid. And you mention "niche counter-culture solutions" but I don't think it's so niche - in 2002, the government of Argentina stole 2/3rds of everyone's savings by forcibly converting their dollar-denominated bank accounts into pesos at a terrible exchange rate. Not having to worry about this because you have a trustworthy government is nice, but it puts you into an elite class of your own.
What you're talking about, resistance to government meddling, is more of a function of the currency than the ledger. Cryptocurrencies only work because of people silly enough to buy them in exchange for actual "valuable" or official currencies (which can be imposed on some people in the world at gunpoint). If a cryptocurrency was forced on you at gunpoint, it most certainly would not be one that provided any anonymity.
Do cryptocurrencies provide value to people living in third-rate hellhole countries? Perhaps, because they are connected to the outside world. Ideally you could just have a foreign bank account that your country cannot touch. If the big governments gang up on crypto exchanges, then crypto will be worthless. The only reason they don't gang up on the exchanges seems to be that they (the people in government) use crypto for nefarious activities and money laundering.
The technological innovations of cryptocurrencies make for good thought experiments or puzzles, but serve as a distraction from their inevitable uselessness.
> Ideally you could just have a foreign bank account that your country cannot touch.
Doesn’t solve the problem as these assets can still be seized by foreign governments.
I can’t really think of a better, more concise pitch for cryptocurrencies than “ideally you could just have a foreign bank account that your country cannot touch.”
I'm sure you forgot that your country can send a uniformed guy to seize said foreign bank account on a whim. Or you think you'd keep it for long, while being roughed (or simply stored) in a dark cellar?
You are misinterpreting his comment. He is saying that the idea that you need to store your money in a foreign bank account to keep it safe is an argument in favor of cryptocurrency, because that way you don’t need to rely on a foreign bank at all.
This is a great pitch for digital privacy as a global standard as well.
> you could just have a foreign bank account that your country cannot touch
How easy is it from most people in the world to "just" open a bank account in another country?
> serve as a distraction from their inevitable uselessness
I don’t understand your point. You said that crypto is only useful as long as governments use it for nefarious purposes and money laundering — so basically it’s a guaranteed relevancy in the future, no? How is that inevitable uselessness?
This seems to misunderstand stablecoins since it is useless for investing/speculation as the value is just $1 if it's successful in its goal.
I'd argue crypto casinos (pump.fun comes to mind) would not work without stablecoins because no one would back them with real dollars.
But stablecoins are backed by real dollars.
People hold dollar-backed stablecoins because they believe the US dollar to be the most durable unit of account on the planet.
All the proof you really need for that is that most crypto users outside the US still consider the value of their crypto tokens in terms of how many US dollars it’s worth.
The author of this article talks about this being a “parasite” to the US monetary system, but it’s hard to think of a better thing that could’ve happened for the US. Not only has it reinforced that dominance… it’s also driven hundreds of billions of dollars of US treasury bills purchases from providers like Tether and USDC.
https://tether.to/en/transparency/?tab=reports
Stable coins are mostly backed by Treasuries, so it’s engineering instability: a run on coin redemption triggers treasury sales which raises interest rates which triggers a run on any asset backed by treasuries like coins, and so on.
It’s like the 2008 crash: people speculating because they think housing never goes down, except a market-scale drop can trigger an uncontrollable rush for the exit. With banks and companies permitted to hold coins as assets, the impact is broad but impossible to regulate ex ante, and difficult to model monetarily.
It’s what I would do if I were Putin and Xi, frustrated with the western controls on the banking system (that have mostly enabled us not to have to go to war).
This is an awful case of preconceived notions!
Stablecoins are not speculative or investments at all - their price stays the same. That's where stable in stablecoin comes from.
You see crypto and think day trading
> their price stays the same.
TerraUSD enters the chat
You're right that they aren't speculative in the financial sense of "hopefully gaining value over time", but you do speculate (in the more general sense) on the fiat-pegging mechanism(s) to work to preserve the value you are storing in them...
There are different flavors of stablecoins though. There's the ponzi scheme flavor that is propped up based on hand waving alchemy, and there's the boring (and now regulated) flavor that's actually backed by real money.
Sure, in the same way that holding USD is speculating that the government won't halve its value tomorrow. There's speculation, and then there's speculation.
Would you consider Stripe and PayPal also interested in speculative investment/trading? They seem responsible to me. Also, stablecoins aren’t speculative. Cryptocurrencies absolutely are. But stablecoins are pegged to USD, hence “stable.”
I think you’re right to criticize crypto as a techno-elite project. However I think stablecoins have a legitimate use case for billions of people who don’t have access to good banks, or a stable currency, and can’t afford traditional fees. IMO it’s one of the best things to come out of crypto.
> There has yet to be a usecase for distributed ledger that isn't solved better by a centralised ledger
As I understand it, many countries in the European Union use distributed ledgers for elections. Essentially it lets you cross reference votes and store that database across servers in multiple countries. It also prevents post-election data tampering by the state holding the election.
My understanding is this this system is not an open to every random Joe who wants to have a server (like bitcoin is). I think you still need to be a state actor to be part of the distributed database (so it's not a zero trust environment).
(Unfortunately, I don't have any good links to back this claim up)
I agree with the premise that on a tech basis, a centralized ledger is just as good, if not better, than a decentralized one.
The problem stablecoins are solving are self-inflicted: KYC to open a bank account, restricted nationalities, account freezes, capital controls, taxation over-reach, etc.
At some point someone figured out that if they start over, there is a lot of “value” to be unlocked out there; and paid/lobbied/sponsored the right person to execute on that.
I agree, I see very few (none) use cases for crypto that aren’t human misery trafficking. This article seems to explain that well.
Buying NSFW things.
I think the further down the supply chain of "NSFW things" you go the more closely it resembles "human misery trafficking".
I don't think they were referring to live-action "NSFW things" which is traditionally called "pornography."
Exactly
This is a very American-centric post.
E.g."Stablecoins won’t bank the unbanked, because people get stablecoins by purchasing them on a crypto exchange, and no crypto exchange will open an account for a customer unless they have a bank account."
Well, I understand that US has dystopia level of financial surveillance, but in many places in the world you can change cash in person to crypto without many issues. And you don't need to use any major exchange for that, that defeats the whole point.
And yes, Russians, Iranians, Palestinians are known to use crypto, for example. And the majority of them don't have US bank accounts.
One of the core features of crypto that it's not an American (or anyone else) thing, like paypal, stripe, or any other system and American laws can be easily ignored if both parties are outside of the US. That's already a very liberating feature for at least a billion of people of nations hostile to the US and potentially to 8+ billions of people more.
I don't think any first world country makes it possible to do banking, if you decide to simply not comply with AML/KYC regulations. You very much become unbanked, if you simply don't want to or can't comply with those things. (European here)
Oh well, there are some shady brokers in Cyprus which are using EU passporting regulation but which are "not really good" with KYC ;-)
Do they offer high yield savings accounts with reasonable min-balance requirements?
Not only that, they also offer you instruments which are not useful for you - on top of the "risk-free high yield" account :) LOL
and in what fantasy world would a system primarily used by questionable countries/organisations/individuals ever become a global standard?
First of all, who says that it has to be a global standard?
It's not an 'all-or-nothing' thing.
Those are instruments which already help many people (those you define as questionable for some reason). I'm actually pretty happy to see that the world has a tool to help millions of people with "questionable" religious, cultural, political, ideological views or sexual orientations. That reduces the pressure and advantage of people who want to make their lives harder.
If you don't need it, don't use it. That's totally cool. It doesn't have to be global. To be honest, I don't think anything needs to be global. That gives too much leverage to a single group at the expense of everyone else. The world is better off having many options for everyone.
In any world where the standard is convergent, not explicitly agreed upon, and there's no natural boundary between shady users and non-shady users. An x% shadiness user joining the network grants justification to the next x-0.001% shadiness user.
In the world where the non-questionable financial organizations decide who can access them or not, based on the place they were born at. I.e., the current world.
Gold became a global standard.
Questionable individual here. My bank accounts are all blocked now just for the reason of my nationality, nothing else. Crypto is currently my lifeline.
How do you find work, or business perhaps, that pays you in crypto to begin with? I've been paid in crypto on multiple occasions but it can be tricky to find a party that's willing, so I'm curious.
I learned to write some useful code for crypto trading firms (portfolio management, automated market making, risk screening), so that part is covered. Looking for customers is still tricky though. Even crypto firms are now increasingly about compliance and sometimes refuse to work except by hiring me, and then reject my application because of my passport (why we even invented crypto then...)
i’m curious what counts as
“dystopia level of financial surveillance,”
these days…
recently i made a cash withdrawal from my personal account ahead of a trip abroad (they asked me why) and within days received a FinCEN notice in the mail warning me about “ structured transactions”… having made no other cash transactions days or even check cashing or writing days before or days after.
But how does crypto police the sexual morals of others?
They'll find a way to police the sexual morals of the Other, no matter the technology.
Introducing - the bhurka-bitcoin. Should you try to buy sexual services, like OF-subscriptions or similar filth, the coin will automatically buy a bhurka for all content, hiding those models behind decency textile filters. Halal and wholesome! Bhurka-bitcoin! Now with the first bodymounted organic cellphonestand for loyal customers!
question of time, where there is power the political pressure and corruption will try to find its ways
At the end of the day, most crypto has a built in way to turn fossil fuels into significantly less money than you paid for them, so it doesn't even apply to the US unless they've started requiring KYC for ASICs and GPUs.
I am not convinced this carbon-intensive form of money laundering is a good thing, but it certainly exists.
Would it be ok if it all ran on wind or solar?
EDIT: went looking for data and it's estimated that ~63% [1] of power used in bitcoin proof-of-work operations. I honestly thought this figure would be higher, but with the insane campaign the American government is doing to invest and expand on drill operations this could go up in the short term. Long term though it's unlikely that this will keep up and we should see renewable sources gaining space more and more, just because it's the smart thing to do.
[1] https://batcoinz.com/bitcoin-by-energy-source/
Outdated view since 99.9% of transactions happen on proof of stake systems which have a very low carbon footprint - not much more than Visa or Mastercard.
Okay; so what? Go mine one of the POW coins and buy what you actually want on an unregulated exchange. You're still burning fossil fuels to get it.
My general point is that you can exchange money for energy and energy for crypto, and nobody can really stop you if you're doing it at a small enough scale. Siphon the fuel from your car and run a generator, pretend you're charging your EV, whatever.
well no since btc is pow
Most stablecoin volume isn't cleared in the Bitcoin network.
> And yes, Russians, Iranians, Palestinians are known to use crypto, for example
Yes and mostly (as in 99% by amount of crypto moved) it's their governments
For example Russia it is not legal to pay with crypto, and to cash it out allowed crypto exchanges must submit your transactions to the government etc otherwise they get blocked.
But the bandit state is free of course to use it to trade with its friends like NK (which basically runs its nuclear program on ransomwared crypto) or Hamas;)
> For example Russia it is not legal to pay with crypto, and to cash it out allowed crypto exchanges must submit your transactions to the government etc otherwise they get blocked.
Sorry, but it's very naive to think that Russian people use only "allowed" crypto exchanges and comply with the laws. That would be an impossible country to live in.
Direct connections with people and being street-smart are important kinds of skills in such societies. And even without connections, you can easily go to some popular Russian exchange aggregators and find no-KYC options with cash delivery, as far as I know.
EDIT: I've actually just checked for you: starting from 10,000 USDT, you can cash out anonymously with cash delivery for 1% in Moscow right at this moment from a publicly accessible resource with reviews.
He "just checked for me" online and he thinks I'm the one naive
I'm from Russia. People who get paid tether travel out to cash in anonymously. I know because I know them. Believe me you don't want to gamble on this
> That would be an impossible country to live in.
Really? I have no words. Not being able to use crypto and it's now an impossible country to live in? How about this, people just use cash. 99.9999% of people cashing in loads of tether are criminals or connected to the government or both. Who do you think is so rich they just casually throw around tens thousands tether? On average a good salary is like 1k at best
Impossible to live in complying with all the Russian laws, not particularly a crypto one. Well, possible, but quite miserable experience.
So are you saying that people get paid in tether after the sentence that it's used 99.9% by the government only?
Yes, I say government (or let's just say criminals) is at least 99.9% of all crypto moved. The war machine needs feeding. Sanctions. Think about it will other countries use worthless ruble that is pretty much not convertible? Will russia use winnie pooh money (also not convertible)? People who move tether because maybe they found some real work abroad or because they are helping a family or something is rounding error
> Sanctions
They also affect businesses, not only the government.
International businesses which is also small minority and if they do stuff legally anyway I don't see why they would use crypto and if they do stuff illegally I don't see why they would trust randos in Moscow to give them cash and possibly get burned...
Well, hello from a rounding error. I am Russian, I live in another country, and my bank accounts are closed because of "sanctions" even though I support Ukraine and will be immediately sent to prison were I to return to Russia. So I am sorry, don't touch my crypto.
As someone working with African companies (legitimate businesses, mid-sized transactions), the key use case is payments in stablecoins—their banking infrastructure doesn’t allow for reliable and consistent foreign remittances. These deals would be practically impossible without stablecoins.
(And to be clear, I’m someone who has never been particularly enthusiastic about crypto or blockchain.)
Do you know why people would choose to use stablecoins, rather than trade shares in an ETF that held government bonds, or something like that? That's what stablecoins are, effectively just a share in the holding company's bank account.
I think for the same reason that most people hold cash in a bank account rather than putting all of their money in ETFs/bonds. Convenience, stability, and security.
Consider living in a country with an unstable and fiscally irresponsible government. And having a net worth <$10k. Suddenly being able to hold your money in USD, on an account that cannot be seized, and can be used globally, becomes incredibly attractive.
You don’t need financial literacy, there is no min-buy in like ETFs/bonds, and there is minimal KYC or other identity restrictions. I think this is an incredible boon for the billions of people living in such conditions.
How do you transfer those shares to another company to pay them?
As someone who tried to figure this out. The answer is essentially you must actively seek out a broker that lets you do this in the first place and let me tell you, in my country there are only a handful of them that make it easy and even those will still require you to fill out a signed form on paper and mail it to them.
Or a CD, or maybe just a bank account. I think of stablecoin issuers as banks because why not: they keep your cash, pay you some yield and promise to give it back to you when you ask them. Walks like a bank, quacks like a bank…
> keep your cash, pay you some yield
The GENUIS act and I think MICA both disallow that part, exactly for this reason... traditional banks were seeing the writings on the wall and lobbied for such yield distributions to remain their own privilege only. For now.
But you can pretty easily find similar/better yield using DeFi and stake/bond some of your crypto assets in various strategies.
The difference is that there are virtually no minimum and usually no KYC... but there are also not many guardrails/gatekeeping, which leave the place to many scams/traps. It's best to stick to the largest platforms/communities and not fall for insane APY claims.
Does holding stablecoins require any sort of KYC? Or do I just need to maintain the security of a private key?
If the latter, I think that explains why stablecoins are popular in countries with weak institutions.
In a country with strong laws, and strong rule-of-law, "Code is Law" is a solution in search of a problem. But in a country with weak laws, it can be a lifesaver.
I'd consider this more of an export of US law than 'Code is Law' TBH.
Coins discourage if not undermine rule of law and weaken strong institutions. It’s the cat chasing it’s tail.
Can you give more details on this? Why is it that the existing banking system cannot do this kind of foreign remittance? E.g. correspondent banking via Swift?
Is it high fees, is it overly burdensome sanctions/AML checks, something else?
Not OP, but we have contractors in Nigeria, and paying them via regular bank transfer is nearly impossible. For example many banks will outright refuse to make SWIFT transactions to Nigerian accounts.
This is just one example of a few factors that lead to a sort of isolation from international banking.
>many banks will outright refuse to make SWIFT transactions to Nigerian accounts
The flipside of this is crypto turbocharging online scammers.
"The industry in Cambodia now generates more than $12.5 billion annually – half of the country's GDP, according to the United States Institute for Peace."
"The criminal gangs entice trafficking victims with fake job offers posted on social media and then force them to financially exploit people online including through fake romances or “pig-butchering” schemes in which the scammer builds trust with a victim before stealing their money, Amnesty said."
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/amnest...
The scammers will make friends with someone online, persuade them to deposit increasingly large amounts into a "crypto trading platform", then finally run with the money.
Crypto has created an alternative financial system with many fewer rules. This can either be good or bad depending on the circumstances.
I think it has the potential to be a good thing in the long run. In the short run, however, people need to learn to instinctively distrust crypto as a scam. Especially if the situation involves a friendly attractive lady you've been chatting with online who's really good at trading cryptocurrency and wants to share her secrets with you.
This is why banks often block you from buying crypto in the first place.
It's high fees, burdensome sanctions/AML checks (especially if the said country has been recently or is still on a GAFI list), plus the suboptimization of the core banking systems regarding international transfers, that make the whole things happen in weeks (or sometimes never happen if the end beneficiary doesn't start pinging, emailing or phoning its bank every now and then). The whole unreliability/unpredictability of the thing makes it undesirable for regular operations.
because their central bank is sucks, simple
Why can they not just use America's banking infrastructure directly instead of using America's banking infrastructure indirectly through meaningless overengineered abstractions like stablecoins?
I am not an expert but I don’t believe most countries would allow their citizens to use American banking infrastructure, nor would most American banks accept a foreign account. Stablecoins get around these limitations, while also providing lower fees and higher availability.
How do they open the bank account? Looks like a foreigner opening a bank account in the US would need proof that they have a US address. (Or at least, the major banks I checked did.)
> They aren’t as stable as they claim to be, and the stability they do have arises from free-riding on the US banking system and monetary policy – and as we’ll come back to, if stablecoins are able to keep gaining market share, these parasites might eventually endanger their hosts.
Strong statement, where is the evidence? The GENIUS Act is quite brilliant in my opinion. It strengthens the dollar by simultaneously creating demand for USD and US Treasuries.
I was merely quoting the author, in Chapter 3, in the paragraph just before > Stablecoins around the world
https://fintechdystopia.com/chapters/chapter3.html
And I was merely refuting the premise of that quote.
I looked at crypto a little for a startup - the thing that isn't usually mentioned is the huge downside of custody. Not your keys, not your coin - and holding those keys securely, think fire, theft, hacks, backdoored hardware wallets, etc - is really really hard to get correct. And if you mess up once anywhere - poof - all your money is gone and there's nothing you can do to get it back.
Yeah who in this world has never had to reset a password? That’s what this means. That laser inscribed metal fob with you keys on it may as well be made of platinum.
And I’ve never felt clear on how people trust wallet, hot or cold — at some point they connect to the internet for transactions, and all the vendors seem suspect. I really doubt most users are building their wallet from code reviewed cryptographically signed source… but maybe I’m wrong?
I think most users have no clue how any of it works - there are so many footguns doing it yourself that probably an exchange like Coinbase is the best bet, but again, not your keys, not your coin...
[dead]
> That laser inscribed metal fob with you keys on it
Unless you manually inscribe it with a laser (good luck), that wouldn't really be a great idea unless the computer assisting you in the inscriptions is completely air-gapped.
Stamping/manually engraving your seed on fire resistant stainless steel (308 is my preference) is still one of the most "air-gapped" way to do this.
> at some point they connect to the internet for transactions,
Some don't, for example ColdCard. It is possible to use it without ever connecting it to a computer. Using a power source and a USB cable, they even offer a way to avoid using power adapters (using common batteries) as these tend to become "smarter" these days and could one day be the source of an exploit.
I guess with QR codes the ColdCard is fairly airgapped. Nifty. Is it a trustworthy company? Is the intermediate PSBT human readable — can you confirm contents before submitting to network?
I almost feel like crypto bros are all into HODL because spending coins is just too much effort!
Best you can do is to split your crypto among many different hardware wallets and some metal cold storage wallets. Maybe even try to memorize at least one wallet password. It just seems so stressful.
Exactly. Crypto is like having all of your money as cash that thieves can teleport out of your safe. It must be incredibly stressful to have most of your wealth in crypto knowing this.
[dead]
I think the biggest problem with fintech is that the financial system is already decentralized, and full of tech. It really just seems like it involves using unregulated technology, which allows the skipping of restrictive regulations. This might actually be a good thing, but once a path has been proven to be non destructive the banks can just take over the market by begging the government for deregulation.
> It really just seems like it involves using unregulated technology, which allows the skipping of restrictive regulations. This might actually be a good thing
Yeah, it's basically Uber for finance/banking/etc. Reap the free real estate created by rules and regulation by..skirting the rules and regulations.
It also adds indirection, which in turn allows all the parties involved to point fingers at each other Spiderman-style. "Oh I thought $X was responsible for $COMPLIANCE." Eventually, y'all get audited and shape up but that's a years-long process. And in that time you've grown and grown and finance/banking/etc is pretty sticky. Kaching :)
Except that stablecoins are strictly regulated thanks to the GENIUS Act and hopefully the CLARITY Act will provide the same guidelines for crypto as a whole. Gary Gensler did nothing to create regulation. David Sacks is out there doing God’s work.
> PayPal never did seek a banking license, arguing that it wasn’t actually accepting any deposits [...]
That worked in the U.S.
European banking regulators saw through this ploy and forced them to seek a banking license.
A lot of tech is very weird, as the author suggests. It often seems like there's good ideas but everything must go through a hype wave. Unfortunately, the hype wave makes it difficult to distinguish good actors from bad ones. Consequently the bad ones win because it's easier. It's like we've designed everything to be a lemon market. It's like we're not trying to build tech to make life better and make money along the way but to find the most exciting looking or sounding thing and figuring out how much money we can make with it.
I mean look at something like the Rabbit R1. I'm an AI researcher and I saw my peers get fucking excited about it because it was a leap ahead of all the state of the art research we knew. Sorry, but what? It takes time for research to get into a product, sometimes years, even in tech, even in the fast pace AI world. Like you think they put what normally takes at least one $10k GPU and put that into a $200 device? That they could leverage GPT and not have a subscription fee? You're not going to beat ChatGPT by using ChatGPT lol.
Somehow stuff like this keeps happening and we never learn our lesson. Author is right, they're just chasing. And the irony is that that chase is actually preventing us from getting what we're really chasing
I agree on most points with the author, but stablecoins have fundamental value to countries that are not US whose currency gets devalued faster than US dollar, or want to do cross border transaction.
USD has its own woes with inflation and trade wars so fundamentally isn't stable, compared to say gold. Other currencies have runaway inflation or much higher friction to transact.
However the promise of stablecoin is that it can be exchanged 1:1 with USD with transaction fees much lower than CC fees (on exchanges like Solana e.t.c).
Unlike fraud from FTX, USDC stablecoin buys US treasuries dollar for dollar. This generates demand for USD as well as Circle makes profit from treasury yields.
Elegant idea in a way. Fast, cross-border low fee transactions in USD.
Bitcoin now has proven itself as inflation-hedged store of value. USDC is proving itself as a way to transact on goods and services.
Obviously trust is earned as droplets but leaves in buckets.
Crypto is ripe with scams and shady exchanges.
Beside Cryptocurrency and GNU Taler have there been anyother attempts at p2p digital currency?
There were a bunch of attempts before Bitcoin but they weren't compelling enough to get any users.
There was E-gold in 1996 and then there was Paypal and PayPal's doing their own cryptocurrency PyUSD these days.
How do you define “cryptocurrency” and “P2P digital currency”?
US dollar derivative that will lower government tax collection in long term with all negative consequences... Despite all talks around - financial blow up in next up to 3-6 months is inevitable so brace for impact
Financial blow-up of what kind, in your opinion? The stock market? Loans? Real estate? Crypto? Thanks.
IMO US is heavily exporting its inflation by leveraging its world reserve currency status as other countries have to buy it's treasuries (petrodollar system legacy). No other country would be able to run 30+% budget deficits and sell long duration government bonds under 5%.
This will break, sooner or later.
When external buyers stop buying treasuries US will have to massively inflate its money supply, taking bondholders and a bunch of other groups to the cleaners. Such events have a lot of collateral damage, which may fit the definition of financial blow up. But I would place us much further away than 6-12 months, likely at 5-10 years. If there is a viable alternative to US treasuries, potentially sooner, but still not in 12 months. My 2c.
Interesting, almost inevitable (I think) and scary in more ways than one; but I agree, this is probably not going to happen tomorrow, nor in 2026.
In the shorter term...
NVIDIA is 8% of the US stock market.
88% of NVIDIA’s revenue comes from enterprise-scale GPUs primarily used for generative AI, and half of that is purchased by only 4 companies, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta.
By the end of 2025, these 4 companies will have spent over $560 billion in capital expenditures on AI in the last two years. Their AI revenues? Around $35 billion.
And then there's Tesla, which is 'worth' more than Ford, GM, VW and Toyota combined.
So, 6 out of the 7 largest companies in the US are in a strange position.
Only Apple, the laggard in AI, seems relatively safe to me.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/
This is already happening if you know where to look and it isn’t esoteric data. The share of retail in treasury buyers has been increasing for years. If the administration doesn’t reduce spending (it won’t since it can’t) yields will blow out, we had a taste of this a couple times in the past years. Watch 5.5% on the 10. Expect YCC. Possibly buy gold if you think of buying treasuries…
> This is already happening
Yes. When I said 5-10 years it wasn't to say that the effects would start then. That was my WAG at the time when normal, mild methods like localized YCC stop working and we should expect significant system-level problems.
For investments, I think now "buying index" will stop working well and buying chosen quality, profitable companies will work much better. My 2c.
> For investments, I think now "buying index" will stop working well and buying chosen quality, profitable companies will work much better. My 2c.
Eh, that's what the index should be comprised of anyway, with some lags.
Or, to put it differently, nothing new: it was always much better, if you knew which companies will exceed expectations. After they do so consistently, they get included in the index eventually.
Gold was also inversely correlated to long term US interest rates, which no longer holds true. So, nations and large institutions already hold the opinion that inflation will be higher (>2%) for longer in the future. Maybe the target should be moved to ~3%, which is defacto the case.
Like GNU Taler, who born out of eCash, born out of an idea of David Chaum in 1982 (see https://youtu.be/DDsQCcuST6c for a nice introduction) there was
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondex (Mastercard)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Cash
And there is ongoing from the BIS https://www.bis.org/about/bisih/topics/cbdc/tourbillon.htm beside that there are many CBDC projects designed for inter-banks usages or some for wide public usage.
I would like to see aidystopia.com that breaks down all the GPTs and LLMs like this
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/
The other half of technology is the people using it. If that other half is stupid, the technology side will have to overcompensate or will maliciously abuse them. Neither is good.
And I am talking about myself here. My only excuse is that I simply don't use my money. Which is not necessarily a good thing either.
>If that other half is stupid, the technology side will have to overcompensate or will maliciously abuse them.
Repeat after me. Do not use technology to try to solve people problems.
> Repeat after me. Do not use technology to try to solve people problems.
I am saying the solution to make people smarter or empower the people. Buy now pay later, credit cards, and all these bespoke algorithms is just an illusion to make people feel better when they get ripped off.
Indeed!
When I was growing up, I didn’t understand check cashing places, payday loans, the layaway counter in the stores, home equity loans, reverse mortgages, auto leasing, and such.
And looking back, I’m amazed how much nonsense is out there. These are more traps than tools.
>If that other half is stupid, the technology side will have to overcompensate or will maliciously abuse them.
And what I am saying is that this sentiment, right here? Is exactly what leads to your later observation below, because the only ones willing to pay someone to implement a technical system, are inevitably the greedy ones looking to extract value from the suckers, and pay a techie to o make the little blinkenlights do their thing. You can't look at the technical side as the "hero" in this encounter, because the technical is what is propping up the fintech dystopia in the first place.
>I am saying the solution to make people smarter or empower the people. Buy now pay later, credit cards, and all these bespoke algorithms is just an illusion to make people feel better when they get ripped of.
You are dead on with this observation, but again, the answer to this is not something the technical world can solve. It's a people problem. We have to start talking about how whether these practices around are fundamentally exploitive or not, and whether they have a place in our society. Whether we should even be trying the money lenders offering them. That set of questions is firmly in the realm of people problems (problems that are fundamentally questions of human interaction, and whether something should or should not happen), rather than the technical, to which most systems in the fintech basically boil down to being a CRM, a set of ledgers/accounts, an invoicing/bill payment system, and some email/login/account viewing screen.
As someone with over a decade having been wasted trying to find a way to genuinely help people through the financial/insurtech sector (I know, what an idiot, right?), you cannot use technology on the service provider side, without it morphing into a more efficient value extractor, and often the other side of the transaction, the ones being fleeced, are in the worst place to say no in the face of a tech enabled lender.
Hence, I know it sounded sort of glib, but I'll say it again. No using tech to solve people problems.
This reminds me of something I read here the other day. There was an exchange about social implications of technology, and the idea of designing software based around our understanding of these matters more in the future.
Someone responded like "lol, sure, we can find some sociologists to start programming our apps", and I thought Damn. That's really missing the point. And it seems so arrogant. Like, not only do we laugh at the idea of people doing our jobs, we also need to laugh at the idea of the relevance of their fields.
Yet we really should depend on their insights to further our field, in my opinion. No profession truly stands alone, just like no person does.
I think we'll get better about this over time. Right now we've definitely got some growing pains.
Well put! Turns out “tech bros” aren’t that good at sociology either!
Even in computing, a profession dominated by scientists and engineers, has a lot of failing. Even the damn SPEC benchmarks don’t know to average numbers correctly.
That should be some kind of daily reminder for everyone here
I love automated market making and the varying research there
I think this is successful in its goals
Liquidity providing on concentrated liquidity pools is something I would like to see in the high volume US equities market
But will realistically only exist on tokenized platforms that trade their surrogates
It’s extremely lucrative and was only in the domain of market making firms before this technology
One problem with this is crypto AMM (automated market making) works best with stability and low volatility. For example, it's terrible in the context of prediction markets. Market makers get hosed due to real life, and traders (me) can profit at their expense. It's a big part of why prediction market traders encouraged Polymarket to develop orderbooks. And if crypto is viewed as disruptive, then it's likely inducing greater volatility.
A lot of these things are lucrative until they're not. If they are inherently lucrative then that profit will diminish as people catch on.
Every market has a use case, and AMMs are not solving event markets, event markets tried to use AMMs and successfully pivoted to order books. I think Polymarket's implementation still has liquidity challenges, as they still have to centrally bribe people to participate. Honestly I don't like Polymarket's contract at all, but it is fast and low cost. Bribes in the solidly AMM model I think were more efficient at attracting liquidity. Slight tangent, the oracle in Polymarket is a bigger issue, people need to convince them to lower the weight of UMA.
back to what I'm a fan of: CLMMs (Concentrated Liquidity Market Maker) is a very competitive field. The level of profits depends solely on volume and amount of capital participating. You are counting on other capital getting bored and moving away, as well as volume rising. Thats the game, it will always be the game. Its already "lucrative until its not" so its not really a gotcha or that insightful for those passing by. I'm glad you have some experience with it.
> people are either still too afraid of looking like they don’t understand, still too deferential to Silicon Valley’s supposed technological expertise, or still too busy doing other things, to voice any skepticism about blockchain-based solutions
I'm not afraid of looking like I don't understand - I simply don't understand. I've tried reading a few "yellow papers" for crypto projects and they are so abstract and full of jargon that I never come away knowing more than when I started reading.
If anyone has a good resource for getting into the technical details of crypto please let me know. I would like to gain a full enough understanding that I can finally decide for myself if it's revolutionary or overhyped.
> I've tried reading a few "yellow papers" for crypto projects and they are so abstract and full of jargon that I never come away knowing more than when I started reading.
In some cases, this is by design. The project is nonsensical and/or a scam, and the white paper is an obfuscatory smokescreen to provide an illusion of sophistication.
I feel like this describes so much of the tech industry.
A lot of what we do might be sophisticated in some far corners, but at the end of the day the end results can be trivially explained.
"Taxi ordered from a phone app, "Sleep in other people's homes", "Restaurant delivery service with GPS tracking", "Exercise bike with a screen showing workout videos", "Someone else shops for you", etc.
Unfortunately with crypto, a lot of it is trivially explained as "obfuscated scam"
> "Taxi ordered from a phone app, "Sleep in other people's homes", "Restaurant delivery service with GPS tracking", "Exercise bike with a screen showing workout videos", "Someone else shops for you", etc.
I don't think anyone ever claimed these were complicated or sophisticated, though? They're straightforward user-facing apps. A more comparable example might be cloud services or a good chunk of security products.
"crypto" is a very wide word, there are a lot of technologies participating in the game, and a lot of technical details in them. Most are completely irrelevant to most regular people.
Blockchain is pretty simple. There's a database, organized in a way that you can add records to it but you can not edit past records - or if you try to, everybody would know you did. There's a network of people maintaining this shared database, as a payment ledger - basically, this database for them says "X has $Y amount of database-money". People participating in maintaining this database get paid in the same database-money. They have incentive to do it properly, otherwise their database-money aren't worth shit. They also have incentive to steal if they could, but since they can't edit the database without other people noticing (who aren't interested in having db-money stolen from them) it's hard. That's the basic level of cryptocurrency systems, very shallowly and simplified, of course. If you want to know the math and protocols, there are full college degree programs dedicated to it (I am not kidding at all, there are). There's even free courses on Coursera and such which deal with the basics.
The second level is allowing to do other, more complicated stuff with the same database. Like keep ownership records for other things (that's basically NFT). The next level is turning it from passive database into a computation engine, so you can make computations that will be reproducible over the database. That's ethereum contracts and such. There also side aspects - like privacy chains, where the information who owns the money is encrypted, so you can prove you own the money but somebody else would have hard time seeing how much you got and where it came from (it's usually very easy in most chains). Etc. etc.
Whether it's revolutionary or overhyped - I have no idea. That's kinda societal question, certainly all the above (and more) can be useful and you can build useful stuff on top of it. Would some people use it? Probably. Will everybody switch to it from existing ways of doing things? I have no idea, but I suspect no. But I am nobody, so it's worth nothing. A lot of people smarter than me thought there's a use case for certain things, and spend a lot of time and money building stuff, and nobody every used it. Take Meta - the whole "metaverse" thing, nobody even remembers it now. There are many things like that. Is crypto one of them? I dunno. We'll see.
To be fair, a lot of people don't understand the old money system either
In fact, there's probably less people who understand the old money system than those that understand the crypto math. After all, the latter can be readily learned from books and whitepapers, go figure where do you learn how actually the real monetary system works, in all its complexity, and how would you even get such level of access without being member of the Fed board.
Founding banks, working in banking back office infra (central bank connectivity etc.); there are for sure places where you can get this knowledge. Also there dedicated central banking degrees in lot of countries.
Founding banks has essentially become impossible in Germany and more and more financial services have been moved under the umbrella of the banking license.
It's very disturbing to me that the possibility of grass roots reform is essentially gone. You need a a two digit million amount of equity, proof of both formal academic and real life experience, you need a large team of trained professionals, easily at least 10 core employees who essentially aren't allowed to know anything other than banking and worst of all, you must keep these employees employed for the duration of the application, which may take a year or two and even if you did all of that, you can still get rejected anyway. Oh, and by the way, you're not allowed to earn money (as a bank) before you get your banking license, meaning that you are burning money faster than any other potential startup.
Now you might think this is fair, after all, banking is a high trust business that requires an extreme amount of caution and care or things will go to shit. Except as I already mentioned: More and more things are moving under the banking license umbrella, but applying to a subset of a banking license doesn't lower costs. The costs are the same no matter what you actually do, which favors massive banks that only have to pay for the license once and use their banking license to the fullest to provide all the services permitted by their license, which ironically increases the systemic risk by letting them become a point of single failure since all the services that ought to be separated are now combined in a single entity to minimize regulatory cost.
Most bailouts are the logical consequence of co-mingling the deposit service with the investment banking services in the same bank. The problem here isn't that losses in investment banking causes loss of deposits. It's that if the bank makes a financial loss in one department, it will also have to shut down the other department as well, because they are under the same company. The opposite is also true. If the payment services run at a loss, the bank will feel compelled to try risky investment banking bets to even the losses out. This type of cross subsidy essentially guarantees that the government will have to bail the bank out.
Source: I did that in the last 5y so I know what I'm talking about :)
edit: An the process what you describe as complex etc., is actually good and robust
Central banks publish reports on how money works. It's the economists teaching students at universities who refuse to read them. (looking at you Gregory Mankiw)
Yes. Because no one has ever written any readily available books and white papers on old money.
Tons of books, of course. But if a person reads a good book on, say, Bitcoin chain foundations, I am pretty sure they'd understand how it works. If you read 20 financial books, I am not sure you'd understand how something like US money system really works.
I'm 2/3 of the way through a degree in business admin with a minor in economics at a provincial university in Canada and I'd say I have a decent layman's understanding of the international monetary system.
The place I'd look if I wanted a deeper understanding of how the fed operates would be reading the laws that govern banking.
> But if a person reads a good book on, say, Bitcoin chain foundations, I am pretty sure they'd understand how it works.
On technological level? Yes. On the bullshit scam level with sixteen layers of new invented terminology? Most likely not.
And yes, cryptoworld is easier to understand precisely because it's unbelievably primitive once you pull apart hype, scams, and layers of indirection.
Edit: oh, it's also busy re-inventing most of the concepts that the world has had for centuries, and most people understand without needing to read books and whitepapers
It helped me to start from the problem it tries to solve.
Fundamentally, we've been making digital versions of everything. We have digital phone calls, television, bookkeeping, document writing, drawing, etc.
One thing we didn't have digitally was a currency.
Why would we want a digital currency? For similar reasons to all the other stuff above. It's more convenient. When you "transfer money" from your bank account to another, your bank has to physically move the associated cash from it's vault to the other banks vault, by hiring secure trucks, people, and so on. If the money has to cross a border, that's even more of a hassle, now you have to physically cross a border with a truck full of cash. When a bank "holds onto your money", they need a big vault full of cash, they have to count it, account for every dollar, physically safeguard it, etc.
This is a huge cost, inefficiency, and a big challenge of banking, and it's one reason transaction fees and banking fees are so high.
Now we have an idea of why we might want to make a digital currency. The biggest issue with making one is how do you solve the "double spend problem". That is, if I have 1 unit of a currency and I give it to you, how do we guarantee I no longer have that unit after it was given to you? In a physical world, I'm giving you the actual unit of currency, but in the digital world I'm giving you a copy of it, it would be easy for me to keep my copy as well and have an infinite money glitch.
The solution to that is simple, you have a source of truth that processes the transaction. That source of truth records that I had 10$ and you had 10$, I gave you 1$, and now I have 9$ and you have 11$.
That's easy enough. Here comes the second problem, who would trust owning that source of truth? Would you trust me keeping the official source of truth log of how much money everyone has? I could easily add myself a few 0s to my account, or remove some from yours.
Would you trust the government of your country? Of another country? A big corporation? A US charity?
This is where crypto comes in. Crypto says, nobody would ever trust a single entity, but what if everyone could join a network of nodes that together form the source of truth? Not owned by any single person, but the union of everyone who wants to join the network, and you could join the network, I could join it, anyone is free to join it, and we can all validate and check each other's work to make sure no one else on the network is fudging the numbers.
And now a lot of complex cryptographic math comes in to from this network.
> When you "transfer money" from your bank account to another, your bank has to physically move the associated cash from it's vault to the other banks vault, by hiring secure trucks, people, and so on
That's several centuries out of date, I'm afraid. Even before computers banks didn't actually do that, but now they certainly never do that. They just change records in their books - it has been paper books once, now it's just database files. I mean, banks do move cash (still do) but not when you transfer money from account to account, it has nothing to do with that, unless when you're running a massive cash-based business (which most banks hate btw, for many reasons).
thanks for clarifying, I'm still laughing my ass of because the sentence you quoted :-D
> Why would we want a digital currency? For similar reasons to all the other stuff above. It's more convenient. When you "transfer money" from your bank account to another, your bank has to physically move the associated cash from it's vault to the other banks vault, by hiring secure trucks, people, and so on. If the money has to cross a border, that's even more of a hassle, now you have to physically cross a border with a truck full of cash. When a bank "holds onto your money", they need a big vault full of cash, they have to count it, account for every dollar, physically safeguard it, etc.
>
> This is a huge cost, inefficiency, and a big challenge of banking, and it's one reason transaction fees and banking fees are so high.
That's absolutely not how this works though. Banks perform electronic transfers and most of the money is accounted for in databases. The problems are slow, antiquated, technology, which is made worse by the amount of regulation surrounding it that makes it hard for new contenders to enter and drive down prices via competition.
Cryptocurrency is trustless, but there is an interesting tangent about if you _do not_ want a government to control monetary policy.
GP: this describes the whole crypto world so well I can almost taste it.
Someone completely misunderstands how the real world works, misrepresents that even more when trying to articulate, uses convoluted wording to hide their total lack of understanding of the real world. Then create a "solution" for the problems that do not exist in the real world in the first place, in the process reinventing problems that are solved for centuries already or running head first into ideas that have been proven multiple times in history to just not work.
This whole machinery is then used by criminals to launder money, scammers to scam people out of money and speculants hoping to get rich quick, providing real money liquidity for the previous two.
Yup. Exactly right.
In the meantime we can make some money off it legitimately, so why not.
"When you "transfer money" from your bank account to another, your bank has to physically move the associated cash from it's vault to the other banks vault, by hiring secure trucks, people, and so on."
Payment settlement is a solved problem and very rarely involves physical cash transfer. Most of this is just numbers moved between accounts which commercial banks have with a central bank.
> When you "transfer money" from your bank account to another, your bank has to physically move the associated cash from it's vault to the other banks vault, by hiring secure trucks, people, and so on.
That’s not at all what happens!
Transfers are done digitally, physical cash does not move between vaults or bank branches.
I remember being shocked at some point that my deposits at a bank would actually be a liability on their books not an asset. When you think about it as passing around debt, it makes a bit more sense.
The easier explanation is that your deposits are yours, not the bank’s. In terms of debt, they owe you. They make money by borrowing from you and lending long term debt to get more yield than they pay you on your cash (you may hear this called “borrow short to lend long”).
Since the invention of the computer, sure, but before that, yes they did at some point reconcile. Even today, cash still physically moves from the mint to banks to consumers.
In the US, fewer than 18% of consumer transactions are made with cash, and it is declining.
> When you "transfer money" from your bank account to another, your bank has to physically move the associated cash from it's vault to the other banks vault, by hiring secure trucks, people, and so on.
That hasn't been true for, uh, centuries. It's like literally the entire point of banking, to allow financial transactions to take place without having to physically haul around collateral anywhere.
(And if you want a digital version of what banks actually do, it's called SWIFT, and has been around since checks Wikipedia 1973).
Yes and for people who think “centuries” is an exaggeration, the knights templar gained their power and wealth in the middle ages specifically because people could use their promissory notes to exchange for cash so that they didn’t have to physically transport valuables around between Europe and the middle East during the time of the crusades. They allowed people to deposit cash at temple church in London and withdraw it in Jerusalem.
See https://www.bbc.com/news/business-38499883 and elsewhere.
It’s really telling how poor the knowledge of financial history and the existing state of the art in traditional financial tech there is among people in the crypto-boosting space. Many of the “innovations” they claim have been around in traditional finance for hundreds of years.
Hawala is the same principle and existed pretty much since the same times, maybe earlier (nobody really knows when it started). Still exists and causes major headaches to people like FATF.
knights templar mentioned in a thread about fintechs and banking. Nice.
They were the fintech of their times, so perhaps it’d be more surprising if they weren’t.
> When you "transfer money" from your bank account to another, your bank has to physically move the associated cash from it's vault to the other banks vault, by hiring secure trucks, people, and so on. If the money has to cross a border, that's even more of a hassle, now you have to physically cross a border with a truck full of cash. When a bank "holds onto your money", they need a big vault full of cash, they have to count it, account for every dollar, physically safeguard it, etc.
While I'm sure some of this is true for some banks at some point in history, this is the kind of understanding of a given industry that results in TechBros reinventing buses or juicing machines.
> This is a huge cost, inefficiency, and a big challenge of banking, and it's one reason transaction fees and banking fees are so high.
The reason banking fees are so high is because they charge what the market will bear, and most of the banks customers are a captive audience. It doesn't cost $2 to perform a transaction at an ATM; it costs pennies, if that. Banks should be paying you for holding, and putting to use, your money.
To steelman the crypto side: I think the stuff that is most interesting is found _around_ crypto and not necessarily within most cryptocurrency projects.
For example, there have been a lot of novel or interesting projects centered around cryptography, consensus, decentralization, anonyimity. On a sociological level, there are a lot of interesting social/economic experiments unfolding in the DeFi world as we speak.
But I think that is where the truly interesting or valuable contributions to humanity as a whole end, and the vast, vast majority of it otherwise is just speculation or scams. It is hard to find that signal in the noise, but it is there, if you look.
I had a great time using drugs friends bought on the silk road back in the day and I'd say that particular economic activity being facilitated by crypto while completely hedonistic was a net positive for humanity.
Try asking an LLM about it. They're good for that kind of introduction, because they can respond appropriately to your level of knowledge. Just ask it to provide references so you can verify what it's saying. But in general, hallucinations aren't a big issue with those kinds of prompts.
Mastering Bitcoin by Andreas A. is the best book you can read on the subject.
The article you're commenting on will tell you everything you need to know.
The article I'm commenting on is pretty clearly heavily biased against the entire field, possibly for good reason. I'd like to get my foundational understanding from a more neutral source so I can better consider the arguments put forth in TFA.
It's a revolutionary technology for the trustless, public exchange of data. It's overhyped as a financial instrument. Anybody who desires a completely public, completely trustless infrastructure for money or property is stupid.
> Actually improving people’s financial wellbeing, for example, will require us to pursue real, slow, piecemeal, democratic solutions.
Democratic solutions are, imho, doomed to failure. In order for them to work a significant portion of "take back control" and "make my country great" brigade will need to have some kind of revelation about the direction of society as a whole. Given the amount of resources pumped into keeping people separate and fighting one-another, this seems like naive optimism.
I consider this to be a woefully inadequate response to a vast, complex and thoroughly embedded set of interconnected issues. Appropriate solutions will require a deep appreciation of complexity science, radically better system design and, frankly, a level of imagination, determination and competence that simply doesn't exist as a social norm, and will not emerge for at least a generation (or three), given that educational and political institutions are so deeply rooted in the current mode.
I don't think Bitcoin is revolutionary - it's just algorithmic scarcity - but I do think that distributed ledgers are an important piece of a future puzzle, as they provide transparency where previously it didn't exist. That said, there are no silver-bullets and not everything should necessarily be held on one.
My position is that, until we actually address the misconception of infinite growth within economic system design (i.e. not by external constraints, such as taxation), we haven't even started. Some may say that Bitcoin already does this, but its capture by the financial sector demonstrates that it is, at best, another asset class.
My anticipation is that this won't happen, so I am fully expecting a kind of looney tunes moment as we race off the side of the cliff. I am interested, not in preventing that from happening, since I think it is inevitable, but rather on planting bushes on the side of the cliff that might give us things to grab as we fall. Feel free to accuse me of either pessimism or optimism.
I think you got it in one. Eventually there will have to be a sudden "falling off the cliff", but the main question is what will happen after that. If the right ideas are in the air, it's possible that the opportunity that the crisis presents could be seized for something good, similar to the way the Great Depression created the opening for the New Deal. The progressivism movement of the 1920s laid the ideological groundwork and ensured that the right ideas were in the air when the crisis hit. The best we can do is the same - make sure that the right ideas are in the air and be ready to pounce when the crisis hits and everyone is suddenly asking "how could something like this happen?"
The funniest thing is why crypto bros talk about the Venezuelan taxi driver who has to pay Western Union $10 to send money home, and that is most of the justification for minting trillions of dollars of riches. Yeah OK Visa/MC have a monopoly but even they are worth less than most bros think.
Doesn't that exist already? Mobile payment gateways are available in many countries already. India's UPI, for example,had 18+ billion transactions in June 2025, and is entirely free. Yes, the government, and probably financial institutions, do track the transactions
> Doesn't that exist already? Mobile payment gateways are available in many countries already.
None of them work cross-border. And one suspects the US Government is working very hard to make sure they never do (look at the money laundering accusations against the Brazilian system for a recent example).
G20 Targets for Enhancing Cross-border Payments[1]:
“Reaffirm UN SDG: Global average cost of sending $200 remittance to be no more than 3% by 2030, with no corridors with costs higher than 5%” “75% of cross-border remittance payments in every corridor to provide availability of funds for the recipient within one hour of payment initiation and for the remainder of the market to be within one business day, by end-2027” “More than 90% of individuals (including those without bank accounts) who wish to send or receive a remittance payment to have access to a means of cross-border electronic remittance payment by end-2027”
[1] https://www.fsb.org/work-of-the-fsb/financial-innovation-and...
Fine words, now let's see if they live up to them.
Sounds like most of American "Fintech" is more about dodging regional laws and restrictions than anything else.
Why limit yourself to American…
Because Fintech in a many places outside of America has been downright awesome and has opened up entire new economies. India is the biggest example.
I was in relatively early in the web as a developer, I was in early on the crypto movement, also as a developer.
These technologies didn't fix the problems. There is too much regulation, you can't do anything without a license. The only solutions are political, not technological.
Everything feels like a scam within a scam. I feel dizzy just thinking about it. I'm completely demoralised. Everything related to career feels pointless, sisyphean because of the bureaucracy and monopolization. Any work that pays well is useless at best, harmful at worst. It's either illegal or impossible to do anything which might provide value to people. Even if all the hurdles could be removed, I'm not even sure I want to contribute... For whose benefit? And I feel totally disconnected from the broader society around me.
I basically completely checked out career-wise. I'm good at faking though so I just fake it. I just started bullshitting my way through life. I hate it but everyone is just eating it up and loving it. What can I do? Just give the people more of what they want I guess. Value creation doesn't pay, bullshitting pays... People are living a lie and they love it when you build on top of it. If you just say the right words, they will deny their own eyes; this is what COVID taught me and I can see this in my day-to-day life. It's depressing, they are good people, that's why they assume good faith. I was just like them before, living in a bubble, I understand, I'm no better than them, just less fortunate. If they saw what I saw, they would probably do what I do. Many would do worse.
I feel like I need therapy from being this way. I have bills to pay though. I think I did everything approximately right but I've been ridiculously unlucky. I was operating on limited info and incorrect assumptions. Now, I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place.
It's illegal to be homeless in my country. It's illegal to live in a tent on 'your own' property, you are not allowed to build your own house without some expensive license and approvals... You can't do shit within your means. All the things which seemed unimportant to me before are now the centre of my life and on that plane of existence, I see scams all around.
a bunch of people quite recently had their money zapped away when their fintech wildcat bank accounts disappeared so clearly there is still some room to dodge rules
> Bradley Lott-Tillery, 24, from Arizona also entrusted Yotta with his savings, thinking his money would be protected by the federal government. “I emailed [Yotta], made sure it was FDIC insured. Of course, they emailed me back and told me, yes, it’s FDIC insured, which we now know is not true,” Lott-Tillery said.
> While the banks with which fintech companies like Yotta and Juno partner are FDIC insured, this only kicks in when a bank is found to have failed. Since the intermediary Synapse filed for bankruptcy, but not any of the banks, the money is not covered by the regulatory agency.
https://businessjournalism.org/2025/03/synapse-collapse/
(their money was "insured" in the same way depositing money in a random guy's bank account is insured: it's not insured against the guy! these bank-shaped companies managed to convince a bunch of people that they were close enough to banks and about as safe, and then it turned out they all handed the money over to the same fintech company to interface with the actual banks, and that company went messily bust)
It is truly baffling to look at the issues in tech, your alienation with your own work and point at regulations. This field has been almost completely unrestrained and egged on by every opportunist and schemer holding political office.
You blame regulations and then mention that everything is pointless because everything is: "sisyphean because of the bureaucracy and monopolization".
The tech industry is lousy with scams, hell the entire model of the global economy is exit scamming everyone. No one builds anything because it is meant to last, everyone is fighting for the next IPO or buyout. You have pointed your ire in the wrong direction... because you were unable to scam first? Confusing...
> These technologies didn't fix the problems. There is too much regulation, you can't do anything without a license.
The regulation is there to reduce the amount of scamming and con artists. It's the same reason we have Blue Sky Laws.
> These technologies didn't fix the problems. There is too much regulation, you can't do anything without a license. The only solutions are political, not technological.
> Everything feels like a scam within a scam. I feel dizzy just thinking about it. I'm completely demoralised. Everything related to career feels pointless, sisyphean because of the bureaucracy. Any work that pays well is useless at best, harmful at worst. It's either illegal or impossible to do anything which might provide value to people. Even if all the hurdles could be removed, I'm not even sure I want to contribute... For whose benefit?
None of this is because of regulation. It's all because of greed and unchecked grift and profit capture. Technology is making the world worse because of greed and capturing profit, not because of regulations. The work most of us are doing is harmful because of greed and capturing profit, not because of regulations. Everyone is living a lie because of greed and capturing profit, not because of regulations. These uncountable scams are all because of unregulated greed and profit. People on HN are mad, but they're acting out against an imagined "regulation boogieman," not what's actually causing all of the shit.
> None of this is because of regulation.
Disagree. Zoning law and regulation-driven credentialism are the closest thing to a root cause you can find for most of the problems with modern society; sure you can say "greed" but that's a permanent part of human nature, and most societies find a way to live with it. Today's world where for a family to succeed both parents have to be putting 40+ hours into bullshit fake work in a circular economy of bullshit fake solutions to bullshit fake problems so that they can afford to get their kids the right bullshit fake qualifications is a distinctly regulation-based phenomenon.
> These uncountable scams are all because of unregulated greed and profit.
Sure. But are they actually any worse than the regulated scams? Often the licensed and regulated stuff hurts the end victim more than the direct scams.
Sure, I agree that greed is the root of all problems. Regulations are a symptom of greed; people want to protect their interests and are willing to incrementally corrupt the system to achieve it; that's what a lot of regulations are.
But it's hard to fix greed. The solution to fix greed is way more radical, it's violent. The greedy will defend their interests with violence when confronted. The only non-violent solution I can think of is to let the system collapse, under their own direction. That's the only way the greedy would relinquish enough control to allow people the freedom to get things going again. There was a bit of this after COVID but it wasn't enough.
I just hope people can maintain their sanity through this. I hope it's not going to be an endless cycle of society repeatedly rebounding off from rock bottom... Never actually lifting itself out of the muck but basically always scraping rock bottom with only short temporary breaks.
As a developer, the system and code complexity we have to work with is increasing to the level that it should be considered mental assault. You need to develop a kind of apathy to get through life.
Not all regulation is a symptom of greed. Regulation can be written and passed with the intention of protecting the public good, promoting public health, preserving fair competition... That it sometimes works counter to those goals is a function of greed, a lack of accountability and and a lack of transparency. We write these laws with consistent check on accountability and transparency, but we keep electing sociopaths that want to game the system and sometimes go as far as screaming "deep-state" or "fraud, waste and abuse"... when they want to completely remove those checks and people keep falling for that bullshit.
> That it sometimes works counter to those goals is a function of greed, a lack of accountability and and a lack of transparency.
The whole purpose of regulations is to reduce accountability (because instead of taking responsibility for their actions, entities instead just follow the regulations). It's not an accidental bug, it's a fundamental design flaw in the system.
True as well but personally I prefer people to regulate themselves though for that to happen, there needs to be very strong punishment for violations. Harm mitigation should be at the forefront of everyone's minds. Not quite compatible with the 'limited liability' legal construct. People won't regulate themselves unless they are afraid of consequences.
The regulation + limited liability combo takes away fear. The big companies doing harm love regulations, they breathe a sigh of relief when regulations are introduced. 'Regulatory clarity' they call it. They barely even know what harms the regulation is trying to prevent. They are disconnected from that.
I have personal experience with companies that consistently violate environmental regulations with very little understanding of the regulations they are violating beyond their effect on profit margins. They pay the fines or pay environmental engineers to help them pass an inspection that could potentially disrupt operations and are violating the same statutes 6 months later. The only regulatory clarity they care about is knowing which regulations can impact production and which can be gamed or paid off.
>>It's illegal to live in a tent on 'your own' property,
want to elaborate which country this is?
The third paragraph hits too close to home for me.
You want to be a good person doing good things for other people and getting along peacefully? Sorry, but happy planet is that way. Don't come to earth.
so much japing, so little substance and to make a point LETS JUST SWITCH TO CAPS and round it off with a reddit comment - this is capitalism baby!
Also, what is this headline even about? Why the bashing on fintech? I worked for 4 fintechs and communicated with many more, not a single one was blockchain related.
Why is this even on hn?
If you want to read proper criticism of blockchain, read Molly White's essays instead
https://blog.mollywhite.net/blockchain/
From a brief skim, this series seems too much "let me tell you my opinions" and not enough "let me tell you a story." I recommend reading Matt Levine and Patrick McKenzie instead.
The use case for crypto (eth) and stables (dai) at least for me is clear as day 1) to be able to save money 2) to be able to freely take it with me anywhere (on a vacation for example)
Having no other way to do these simple things, from my point of view, it is not a problem of hundred thousand people in Venezuela, it's a valid problem of tens (if not hundreds) of million people around the world.
IMO The author significantly underestimates how limited and inaccessible the current financial system in the world is.
I think people here on HN keep underestimating the relevance of crypto for four reasons:
What crypto is already useful for is not to replace the cash in your pocket and your savings account. It is useful to replace SWIFT and Fort Knox.
What crypto will be useful for in the future is uncertain. But uncertainty does not mean pie in the sky. How the internet would be used was uncertain in the 70s.
Yes, nerds were already excited about the internet in the 70s. Have a look ath the "Mother of all demos": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos It takes decades to iron out the details of how to use fundamentally new technology.
Fear of change. Is there any new technology that HN is in favour of?
Bitcoin was created 17 years ago. The "the use cases are coming" argument doesn't work anymore.
That means you would have given up on the internet in the 80s.
That is what I mean by point 3 in my comment.
This ignores that the internet exists now, and ideas spread millions of times faster. No other tech has needed that much time to mature and find use since.
No, because in the '80s there were already real use cases. Business was being done over email, thousands of home users were paying to get access to chatrooms...
How are there not real use cases for crypto already?
Surely more business is being done with crypto today than was done using the internet in the 80's.
I've been paid my salary in crypto for the last 8 years. The company I work for pays nearly all their expenses in crypto. I pay for my rent and most major purchases with crypto. A significant portion of my savings is in crypto. For fiat purchases, I'll use a reloadable crypto visa card. When I travel to foreign countries that mostly use cash, I'll usually exchange crypto for local currency rather than carry large amounts of USD or deal with sketchy ATMs.
> I've been paid my salary in crypto for the last 8 years. The company I work for pays nearly all their expenses in crypto. I pay for my rent and most major purchases with crypto.
Where's the value creation? At some point value has to be coming into the system, and as far as I can see that side still all bottoms out in crime or scams.
> For fiat purchases, I'll use a reloadable crypto visa card.
I've always felt those were an admission of failure of the whole crypto enterprise. All of the downsides and none of the upside.
They grow up so fast
Have a look at the "Mother of all demos". It dates from 1968.
Some of its use cases such as having a "smart" personal/digital assistant on the computer helping organize your day are only popping up now thanks to the combination of LLM tech, model self hosting and MCP protocols.
Only took 50+ years, right?
It has to have better use cases than fraud and gambling for the first ten years of exploration for me to buy this argument.
Yeah, there's a line early in the article about use, the gist of which is "[unlike cryptocurrency] the utility of the internet was obvious from the start".
But it seemed pretty obvious to me more than a decade ago what cryptocurrency would be useful for. I remember the ideas flying around in the early days.
It's been a bumpy road...but then, I also remember through the late 90s (and especially after the dotcom crash) when there were countless takes on how the Internet (and PCs in general) had been vastly overhyped. "Computers were supposed to eliminate paper, but we're using more paper than ever! We were supposed to do all our shopping and get our news from the internet, but Sears is thriving and I still get my daily newspaper every morning!"
Somebody could absolutely have made a book out of all the overpromises of the "Internet Superhighway" era.
The path to general use for cryptocurrency has been, and will continue to be, rocky. Moreso than the net. It inherently involves money--lots of money--and so it's been rife with scams. "Nigerian Princes" on steroids.
But I can tell you guys: before the rush of investors and crazy bubbles, before the scams and collapses, long before hucksters like Trump got involved, there was a group of people to whom the potential of cryptocurrency seemed obvious.
I don't see anything obvious about the utility of cryptocurrencies.
Money is not that difficult of a concept, you use it to store value or transact. As a store of value it has no intrinsic advantage compared to any other alternative we have now, and same goes to transactions, it doesn't bring anything to the table than current systems already don't do.
All the features people keep mentioning like the immutable ledger are simply not something we actually need or government have asked for.
The only utility is making money for the people that work on it, there's no societal value in crypto at all.
Why is crypto better at replacing SWIFT and Fort Knox rather than, say, SEPA or fiat currency (which replaced Fort Knox shortly after the invention of ARPANET)?
SEPA is not a cross-border payment system for interbank payments.
Fort Knox still exists. US gold reserves are still increasing:
https://www.statista.com/graphic/1/188843/united-states-offi...
I would love it if the whole world signed on to SEPA, but I'm not holding my breath. And even if it worked worldwide, I don't want to rely on a payment system that can be used to censor even legal artistic expression (see the recent Steam removals) or political protest (remember the Canadian truckers?).
that's not a technology problem, it's a political problem. You're trying to solve a political problem with technology?
I don't buy it, crypto doesn't bring anything to the table that improve either SWIFT or the gold reserve that we actually need, but I understand crypto product developers see an advantage in switching from something they don't make any money on to something they do. As a consumer, or in this case as a citizen, crypto presents no advantage.
I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m really sick of the “ok, crypto doesn’t have any uses now, but they’re coming eventually” defense. For one thing, it’s unfalsifiable, and I suspect this is why it’s so popular, since unfalsifiable claims are pretty much the only ones that crypto boosters have left. It’s also just pathetic: Bitcoin is coming up on 20 years old; how many technologies had no compelling use cases after 20 years? And this hasn’t been a neglected 20 years, it’s been 20 years of massive hype and tens of billions in investment and R&D, with nothing to show for it.
As I pointed out last time, Bitcoin was released at roughly the same time as the iPhone. Nobody needed to wait for use cases for the iPhone: the global economy immediately reoriented itself around the smartphone, because it delivered massive amounts of obvious value to customers. If this isn’t happening around cryptocurrency, at some point you have to face facts that it’s because the value isn’t there.
The compelling use case is grift.
Surely it depends on the problem. NFTs are poised to unlock the sharing of items between video games, for example. The author seems to have conveniently ignored that use case.
All of the games that feature this mechanic are bad, empty, fintech husks. Often they feature same neon vaporwave artstyle, maybe with apes, and usually are transparently asset flips designed more to to feature on cryptocurrencies landing page then to be played. No good games include this ridiculous use case that I cannot imagine anyone who plays games even a little bit to want.
> NFTs are poised to unlock the sharing of items between video games, for example.
Of all of the supposed use cases for NFTs, this is one of the silliest. If you've ever looked into video game modding, one of the things you tend to realize is there is nothing close to a standard model format for art assets, so it's an insane amount of work to get an item in game A imported into game B, and that's only considering the work in mapping the visual design--the work that goes into mapping item properties is in some cases just "there's nothing you can do." (And this is despite there existing just three software packages that gets used in practice to make this stuff!)
> it's an insane amount of work to get an item in game A imported into game B
I understand why that would have been a road block in the last, but my hunch is that this type of problem (mapping visuals and item properties) is something AI would make quick work of.
> something AI would make quick work of.
The easier it is for AI to do the lower its actual value. So the more you're right about this, the more you're wrong.
As a videogame developer, I've always thought this take was just silly. I couldn't even imagine spending the time and effort into integrating someone else's assets into my game and keeping things balanced. The closest thing that we will get to this is something like Fortnite or Roblox, which will limit the type of games and creative choices that can be made.
> I couldn't even imagine spending the time and effort into integrating someone else's assets into my game and keeping things balanced
Isn't this something that AI could take care of? I feel like if you gave Claude those same instructions you'd probably be pretty amazed.
but why?
NFTs are ownership (by some definition of "ownership") of assets on the blockchain. The blockchain is a database that's good for trustless transactions between a sufficient number of competing parties. Video game item transfer's problems have nothing to do with the problems blockchains purport to solve. The problems faced by developers wanting to allow transferring items between different games are primarily IP licensing agreements so that developers of one game have a license to use the assets from the other game, followed by actually finding a use for items in two different games. Since the two developers need to have agreements already in place, that obviates the need for a trustless database. The most likely scenario for one item to be useful across two different games is that both games are the same genre (ie, shooter, RTS game, etc), which reduces the likelihood of developers being open to licensing agreements because their games would be competitors. NFT item transfer has never made sense for these reasons
and who wants that exactly?
There is absolutely nothing NFTs do that isn't already being done better by existing systems.
imbecile, stop repeating this scam...
> Home ownership and the rest of the American dream seem out of reach for many people, and there’s very little safety net available when it comes to healthcare expenses, retirement, or just bad luck.
I empathize with the author, I really do, but you can't care about someone more than they care about themselves. If anyone has had the supremely unpleasant experience of trying to get loved ones to work out, they know. The last time someone (democrats) tried to tackle healthcare, they lost scores of seats all down the ballot.
https://www.quorum.us/data-driven-insights/under-obama-democ...
Human history tells us that we don't make it through alone. We thrive on social structures and forming coalitions. Sometimes we get down and our friends and family put in work to pull us back. Your claim is the mental equivalent of "I can't lift someone up more than they can lift themselves up." Sorry, but if all they've got is bootstraps then you bet I can lift them up high into the sky while they can only lift themselves as high as they can jump. I'm pretty sure most people can't jump onto my shoulders and I'm confident none could jump that high and stay without support. Stop asking people to fly and look down at who's shoulders you're standing on
I don't understand how this relates to the material. Because people can't get their spouses to exercise, anyone who cares about themselves should have to pay a premium to a private insurance company so they don't lose everything if they get cancer?
You can't get your spouse to exercise, and if you try too hard they might divorce you.
You can't get most Americans to care about anything they consider "socialism", and if you try too hard you'll get Trump.
I don't think Democrats lost those seats because of Obamacare, at least not primarily so.
Why do you think these two things are connected? Working out is a personal choice that should have zero barring on how we care for and help one another. For example, someone shouldn't have less access to healthcare because they don't or didn't work out.
Democrats losing support can be explained by several reasons that have nothing to do with tackling healthcare. It can be the fact that it ended up being a weak half measure in comparison to the strong desire for a universal healthcare system. Or completely unrelated to healthcare altogether, like the Hilary Clinton scandal fiascos.
> "the Hilary Clinton scandal fiascos"
"Why do you see the speck in your neighbour's eye, but do not notice the plank in your own eye?"
The lack of critical thinking skills on the internet never ceases to amaze me, like you having the gall to think Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama are anywhere close to having similar controversy surrounding their political careers.
It's not a factual statement. It's like saying "your mom's a whore". Showing her tax returns won't help.
The correct response is to just ignore/abandon them, which actually pisses off narcissists more than you know.
> For example, someone shouldn't have less access to healthcare because they don't or didn't work out.
One problem with this argument is that insurance companies disagree and nobody with any power in the US seems to want to move away from the "insurance provider" model.
They're saying that convincing other people to do what's in their own interests is very difficult if they don't care. Working out is given as an example: it's obviously a beneficial activity, but that's not enough to convince many people to do it regularly.
The claim then is that people don't care enough about having public healthcare (or are actively against it) for it to be a politically popular goal.
Had this been the default attitude of people, humanity wouldn't have progressed past the hunter-gatherer stage.