<a href="https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/01/31/end.html#section-34:~:text=4" rel="nofollow">https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/01/31/end.html#section...</a><p>Vitalik touched upon this briefly in an other-wise long and wide-reaching essay. I think its a good treatment of the topic that the author is talking about.
He categorizes the ecosystem broadly into 4 cohorts- [token holders] (which includes investors, speculators, etc.), [pragmatic users] (actual end-users who spend crypto to buy stuff), [intellectuals] (who give the vision and ideology), [builders] (of blockchains, apps, etc.) - These 4 groups come together but with different motivations and there is a gap in understanding between them. Indeed, there is even resistance against trying to reach an understanding - one which plays out in the comments section of every crypto-related post on hn. The author of this twitter-post clearly falls under [intellectual, builder] and has been disillusioned by the speculators from [token-holders]. Yet the [token-holders] are a vital component (as are the other groups) as they fund most of the development and adoption. Ultimately these 4 groups have more in common than not. The challenge going forward is to balance the occasionally conflicting needs of all the 4 groups, which includes checking the excesses of each group, while try to achieve a consensus. (Vitalik provides a nice diagram that maps out what that would look like). Crypto is an experiment in economics and economics is a science as well as a social-science. Anyone looking for a good solution must seek to understand and address the psychology of all the actors involved.
I've never understood the initial arguments about Bitcoin, no matter how many times they've been explained to me.<p>The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database. How anyone, especially many intelligent people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top of such a unwieldy piece of technology is beyond me. Maybe it goes to show how few people understand economics and anthropology and how dunning-krueger can happen to anyone.<p>Now the uninformed gambling on futuristic sounding hokum? THAT is easy to understand.<p>That being said, I'm sorry the author had to go through this experience, the road of life is often filled with unexpected twists and turns.
It's an ingenious solution to achieve a "trustless" currency that prevents double-spending without a central authority. Unfortunately, this solves the wrong problem. Spending money usually involves getting a good or service in return, which inherently requires "trust" (as does any human interaction). Your fancy blockchain is not going to help you if you order something with Bitcoin and no package arrives.
> Unfortunately, this solves the wrong problem. Spending money usually involves getting a good or service in return, which inherently requires "trust" (as does any human interaction). Your fancy blockchain is not going to help you if you order something with Bitcoin and no package arrives.<p>That problem already has solutions. The problems cryptocurrency is supposed to solve are, I want to buy subversive literature from someone I already trust not to rip me off, or for an amount I'm not worried about losing, without anyone requiring me to give them a government ID. Or I want to sell it to people without requiring them to give anyone an ID. I want to donate money to Wikileaks. I want to commission art or software from someone in South America who doesn't have access to US banks. I have the same name as someone on a list and I want a way to move money without the government ruining my life. I live in an oppressive country and I want to finance the rebellion, or buy contraception or some other thing which is banned by the baddies when it ought not to be.<p>It's for doing the things where the existing system fails you, not the things where it works. But it can do those things too. Cash works the same way. You're not worried about a restaurant stealing your money because by the time you pay them you've already eaten. You're not worried about Newegg sending you a brick with "lol" written on it instead of a GPU because they're a well-known company and if they did that it would cost them more in damage to their reputation than they'd gain from the theft and people would sue them independent of payment method.<p>You don't always need your trust in other people to come from the payment system when it can come from a dozen other things instead.
> I want to buy subversive literature from someone I already trust not to rip me off<p>Subversive literature printed on blotter paper.<p>Outside of buying sex and drugs the only uses for cryptocoins are, and always has been, ransoms, scams and gambling.
The issue isn't that it solves the wrong problem.<p>The issue is that crypto boosters (including a few already here) claim it solves a whole host of other problems without thinking things through, kind of like some communists. Then if you argue enough they'll point out that things can be fixed ... but bitcoin is now indistinguishable from any other currency, other than its payment system that will no longer be widely used.<p>Like, you can make it easy to use if there are banks. And those banks will be subject to regulations. Boom, now you have banks and regulations.<p>You can get a loan from those banks. Now there's fractional reserve banking, with something like a virtual gold standard.<p>If it ever gets big enough, the fed can write bitcoin denominated bonds, and it's now prerty much a fiat currency, not even virtual gold.<p>Yes you still have a shadow sector where you can use bitcoin to buy drugs or dodge the taxman. But all the other supposed benefits have gone.
Why should the method of payment solve that problem? A reputation system for sellers and service providers makes more sense to be entirely separate.
Neither will cash. Thats what a third party escrow is for. You get that as part of what you pay for a credit card. Not trying to come down on either side of this i personally hold near zero crypto, your statement was just wrong.
Indeed, most societies ended up inventing a mandatory trusted third party escrow called a "legal system" as part of a "state". They usually issue hard-to-copy tokens, solving the double spending problem.
They also confiscate those hard-to-copy tokens if you acquire a sufficiently large quantity and attempt to leave the country with them.
I see a lot of hand wringing about this; but for 99.99% of people the banking layer and bureaucracy of modern monetary systems is a feature that protects them from fraudulent transactions, people stealing their credit card number, and businesses charging them and not delivering goods. These are generally good things.<p>Yes it is possible for the state to inflict violence on you, and if the state wants to, it probably will do so. Putting your money into internet tokens instead of state backed money will probably just get you tortured more until you give up the keys, or die. Crypto isn't some "one weird trick" to prevent the state from taking your property and possessions.
> for 99.99% of people the banking layer and bureaucracy of modern monetary systems is a feature that protects them from fraudulent transactions, people stealing their credit card number, and businesses charging them and not delivering goods. These are generally good things.<p>Let's go through these. To begin with, "fraudulent transactions" is redundant because that's either someone stealing your credit card number or someone you paid not doing what they said. So let's consider those two:<p>> people stealing their credit card number<p>This is the problem caused <i>by</i> the existing system, which is designed with such poor security that breaching a merchant allows the attackers to make charges to their innocent customers' cards at a different merchant. They get zero credit for providing a mitigation to the problem they created themselves.<p>> businesses charging them and not delivering goods<p>This gets sold as a benefit, but it's also a cost, because then it becomes a mechanism to <i>commit</i> fraud. People go to a business that does deliver the goods and issue a fraudulent chargeback. The merchants then have to pass the cost of that onto everyone else, which means that it's also a fraud against every other customer.<p>Meanwhile we have other solutions to that problem that don't do that. Established businesses don't want to ruin their reputation. If someone rips you off you can sue them. Sometimes you're just paying someone for something they're already delivered.<p>And most importantly, there instances when you would trust someone to deliver the goods independent of the payment system, and other instances when you wouldn't. Which is why you want <i>both</i> payment systems to be available instead of just the second one, so you don't have to pay for the chargeback fraud when you don't need to buy your trust from the payment system.
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And put people in jail they catch making and using fake ones.
Putting absolute trust and surrendering too much agency to the state has been proven a mistake many times throughout history. Citizens need fallbacks when the state fails them. Concrete example where crypto achieves this: many trans people in places with an inadequate medical system or hostile government turn to buying gray-market DIY hormones online, facilitated by crypto.
I also use crypto to bypass government prohibition on unprescribed self-medication. Is it still noble if I'm buying cocaine?
Is it <i>necessarily</i> the case that it isn't? Suppose you can't afford health insurance and you have a condition for which a controlled substance would be prescribed, if you had access to the healthcare system, but you don't. If you then buy it over the internet, is the system being wronged by you or are you being wronged by the system?
Sure, but approximately zero of the actual crypto space/hype was built around facilitating this kind of thing. In fact for that use case, it would’ve been better if Bitcoin never got nearly as big as it has (since that lead to much more government scrutiny, all over the world). Ideally it would’ve gotten large enough that there were enough reputable-ish exchanges that you could move fiat in and out, and then stopped there. Like some sort of digital Hawala.
Most states still haven't created digital versions of these hard-to-copy tokens meaning that there needs to be an alternate provided by a 3rd party which is where cryptocurrency comes in.
The Fed has had a wire service (Fedwire) for banks, allowing them to transfer their balances on the Fed’s balance sheet to another bank during settlement, since before the dollar moved off the gold standard. It was initially done with literal telegraphs - not sure at what point it became digital.<p>It obviously has no pseudo anonymity, is literally the least democratized banking system in existence, and is subject to the government’s whims in a whole host of ways. But it is a digital ledger of massive sums of real dollars (the banks can ask for it in cash if need be), and you couldn’t really steal the money even if you managed to create an unauthorized transfer on some bank’s master account.
So why don't any businesses let me Fedwire them money? It turns out unlike the physical version of cash, this "digital version" has hefty transaction fees and a poor UI meaning no business will take it, unlike how almost all physical businesses will take cash.
> the banks can ask for it in cash if need be<p>Ehhh, can they? I suspect any bank that tried would pretty soon find that it actually couldn't.
They couldn’t get their whole balance in cash I’m sure. But the Fed is the one that handles retiring old paper currency and giving banks fresh currency to give to ATMs and tellers, and I doubt the inflows and outflows are perfectly even for each bank.
The Fed manages printed currency - they’d be irritated, but they literally do provide the physical dollars people need now, and if they felt it was appropriate, they’d produce them as needed.<p>Just like those airplanes of bills shipped to Iraq, etc. in the past.
Most states have in fact invented bank transfers for that purpose.
The states (or rather the national banks of said states) are usually the ones running the central clearing system. That's the place where all the different banks report their net change in relation to all the other banks, and settle that change on their account with the central bank.<p>Believe it or not, banks don't ferry around cash to each other. It's all just numbers in a computer.
I love watching the HN comment hivemind speedrun the history of blockchain innovation every time this comes up. You just reinvented smart contracts on Ethereum, keep going :-)
No amount of smart contracts can solve the situation where one party says "I shipped you the widgets you ordered; pay me" and the other says "I received a box with a brick in it" -- you need some trusted third party to decide based on reasonable heuristics who is trying to commit fraud, based on e.g. is this the first or the tenth time this has happened.
I love watching cryptobros speedrun the history of finance :-)
Smart contracts can only enforce things which happen on the chain.<p>No smart contract can prove you were not actually delivered your goods without trusting someone else.
smart contracts need some link to reality that has to be.... trusted.
> Not trying to come down on either side of this i personally hold near zero crypto, your statement was just wrong.<p>Umm, you are agreeing with the person you are responding to.
I always thought it was actually an ingenious solution to elections. There's absolutely no reason that a driver's license can't derive a hash that can only be proven and not reversed (for identity); and provides a one-time contribution to a blockchain that contains your vote - which you then receive your block's information when you finish voting.<p>ANYONE can calculate the sums, anyone can verify and proof hashes, identity is kept secret, trust is installed with hash checks for each and every voter - etc etc etc.<p>It's certainly more airtight than the solution we have today - where trust and efficiency can both be compromised fairly easy.
Others have shown why most of your other points are wrong or don't need blockchain, but this is also important:<p>> ANYONE can calculate the sums, anyone can verify and proof hashes<p>This is completely false. In fact, at the scale of a country, almost no one can actually do this. 95+% of the population doesn't have the knowledge required to do something like this and understand why it works. And while in principle they could learn to do it, they don't have the time and energy and other resources to spend on this.<p>And this is a deal breaker, as having the population believe and easily able to convince themselves that their elections are free is an extremely important part of democracy, especially when things are not that rosy.
>"Others have shown why most of your other points are wrong or don't need blockchain"<p>Answered them. Introducing 0 knowledge proofs was a good point but blockchain can still be a medium to utilize these possibilities. I don't believe a conventional database or transparency log can meaningfully substitute the decentralized nature of blockchain for such an operation, though; and I said as much in my replies.<p>>"This is completely false. In fact, at the scale of a country, almost no one can actually do this. 95+% of the population doesn't have the knowledge required to do something like this and understand why it works."<p>Why can't I apply this logic to current election systems? You can memorize and regurgitate a usa.gov or National Archives article to articulate it - but 95% of the populace doesn't actually know about those ballot counts, ballot transportation, result tallying, transmission and communication of said results, implications of Independent State Legislature Theory and how challenging it - at least on originalist grounds - can cause 50 different processes for each of the 50 different states, etc etc etc.<p>There is no more wasted time, energy, or blind trust than in the current system, and at least introducing zero knowledge proofs, blockchain (or another system) and cryptography to the electoral system can be rooted in the pragmatic AND be abstracted to a layman from any given savvy person, of which there's many. Even in the long term. As it its, it's not like independent researchers or cryptography nerds haven't called out institutional-wide folly; it's what happened with Dual_EC_DRBG, and was promptly laughed out the door for any serious cryptographer and highly publicized.<p>As for the rest, it's well known that the data is collected and retained on voter information as it is. We're seeing states like Colorado, just this past week, deny giving the current federal administration voter data from the previous election. You can reasonably predict roughly half of America's voting anyway; when their timeline of party affiliation AND the knowledge of whether they voted or not is already public information.
> cryptography to the electoral system can be rooted in the pragmatic AND be abstracted to a layman<p>what you're arguing for is a system that <i>you</i> understand and can verify, but not other people.<p>You're also missing the bigger issue which is that voting systems vary by state, which means to do what you need to do would require federal/constitutional change.<p>Plus how do you verify and guarantee the terminals are not tampered with (especially as they are all going to be digital, and securing hardware in remote locations is fucking hard. )<p>Much as its not fun, paper votes with local counting stations are harder to corrupt universally (unless you have government collusion)
If you want that just use zero knowledge proofs and cryptographic accumulators. No block chain needed.<p>Typically one of the properties people want from elections is the inability to prove to soneone how you voted, e.g. to stop someone from going, prove you voted for my candidate or i beat you up (or dont give you the bribe). Your scheme wouldn't support that.
>"If you want that just use zero knowledge proofs and cryptographic accumulators. No block chain needed."<p>Sure, I suppose. You'd need zero knowledge proofs for the reversals anyway.<p>>"one of the properties people want from elections is the inability to prove to soneone how you voted"<p>Your political party affiliations AND the fact on whether you voted is already public knowledge in our current electoral system; so 2/3 aren't supported now anyway. That said, my scheme DOES support all of those; it wouldn't tell you the identity of the person that voted for "Person A", so bribery or extortion is NOT in the cards.<p>If you somehow get access to someone's license, their hash won't tell you how they voted - just that they have already voted. And like I said to another commenter, if they beat you to a vote by using your ID (or whatever form of government ID is decided for the hash, they're all numbers anyway - we can just as well do social security), then in the current system that's bad - but id.me and real are already doing early-stage multi-factor authentication use cases for otherwise deterministic identification methods. Which is long overdue anyway, and I'm not sure too many people who would morally oppose such election reform if a byproduct of it being passed and enforced is an additional reform on deterministic identification.<p>If you give someone your block ID that says how you voted, then yeah ok - but you can do that today by taking a picture of your ballot. People brag all the time with photos of their ballot on election time - that's your choice.
> Your political party affiliations AND the fact on whether you voted is already public knowledge in our current electoral system<p>Neither of these are how you actual voted so they don't really matter.<p>That said, as a non-american, the party affiliation thing is super weird.<p>---<p>> If you give someone your block ID that says how you voted, then yeah ok - but you can do that today by taking a picture of your ballot.<p>And in many countries this would be a crime and have legal consequences.
Who validates the driver's license?<p>How do you stop inauthentic licenses?<p>Perhaps some sort of central authority?<p>This is the main problem with most of the blockchain/crypto issues is that its all fine until a dispute, and then we all fall back to the state to sort it out (ie the legal system)
You're describing a transparency log, which doesn't require a blockchain.
What if one doesn't have a car and a driver's license?<p>> identity is kept secret,<p>Except to anyone who sees your driver license.
I said this in a response to someone else:<p>>"If you somehow get access to someone's license plate, their hash won't tell you how they voted - just that they have already voted."<p>If they beat you to your drivers license information (or whatever form of government ID is decided for the hash, they're all numbers anyway - we can just as well do social security), then in the current system that's bad, but id.me and real are already doing early-stage multi-factor authentication use cases for otherwise deterministic identification mediums. Which is long overdue anyway, and I'm not sure too many people who would morally oppose such election reform if a byproduct of it being passed and enforced is an additional reform on deterministic identification.
There are schemes for this, but it requires much more than just a hash. You need not only asymmetric cryptography, but some sort of Zero Knowledge Proof if you don’t want to be able to identify the person who voted.
you can also juststore hashes in a normal database.
Blockchain is a very inconvenient database, for sure, but there is a good reason Bitcoin uses it. It had to solve to double spend problem and create a trustless p2p digital cash, while being censorship resistant and having no central authority.<p>Some people around a decade ago started using blockchain for everything where a SQLite db would have been better, because blockchain was the buzzword around that time, and they were charlatans who wanted funding and hype, or signal how cutting edge they are (kind of how the last two years everybody became an AI company).<p>It doesn’t mean that Bitcoin using blockchain is stupid.
It may be money, but it is definitely not cash. Cash is completely anonymous, BTC is not.
Cash is not completely anonymous, but hard enough and not enough parties track it. Bills are serialized and you could take photos of coins and likely identify them based on scratch patterns.<p>Still, whole thing is saved by not enough people actually tracking it to that level.<p>And on other side, BTC tracks every single transaction ever. Which is also detriment, that is we keep everything stored forever in lot of places... Which kind seems massive waste.
Point taken about anonymity. However, its design (that of cash) is theoretically anonymous, it is reality which gets in the way. BTC, on the other hand, is "just" a huge ledger of transactions with giver and receiver perfectly "identified" (in a unique way, albeit just pseudonymous) and preserved forever.<p>Also, as you point out, BTC is a massive waste of resources and storage space.
> giver and receiver perfectly "identified" (in a unique way, albeit just pseudonymous)<p>Not perfectly. A lot of heuristics are needed to link a unique owner to multiple transactions. With bitcoin, it's recommended to use a new address for every transaction so, for example, in a basic transaction, it's not so easy to identify which output is the recipient and which is the change.<p>And there's Monero that tries to hide these links a lot more.
> and they were charlatans who wanted funding and hype, or signal how cutting edge they are<p>Interesting that those same hucksters and shysters who spread the gospel of the blockchain immediately jumped on th AI bandwaggon when this was the shiny new thing.<p>Or, maybe, 40 years working in IT turned me slightly cynical.
Skipped the metaverse, slotted between the two
LLM has more tangible benefits for companies and consumers.<p>If you mentioned NFTs though you’d be spot on
> According to new projections published by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in December, by 2028 more than half of the electricity going to data centers will be used for AI. At that point, AI alone could consume as much electricity annually as 22% of all US households.<p><a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/" rel="nofollow">https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energ...</a><p>We're currently all subsidizing the AI industry. When we solve the energy problem then we can talk about potential benefits of LLMs
It's stupid because blockchains don't scale. In most other respects they're quite clever.
Crypto makes perfect sense if you just understand it's for doing illegal stuff.<p>No moral judgement, but the only viable use case for the blockchain is doing things with money that the authorities don't want you to do.<p>Other than that, no, there is no use for a distributed database because doing financial transactions with people you can't even trust to abide by the law is generally a bad idea.
I am a dual citizen. I wanted to buy a condo near my parents where I spend my summers with my family. I have <i>never in my entire life felt like a criminal</i> more than trying to buy something, with the money I made with my wife, going through regular financial system. after weeks of feeling like a criminal over coffee with my cousin who owns the company that was selling me the condo I was like “can I just fucking give you two bitcoins on a thumbdrive…”<p>I would never own a crypto but working with the current financial system can make you feel like a criminal more than crypto at times… :)
If your funds are clean there is zero reason for the (unfounded) anxiety. Just follow through the motion.<p>A local agent on a flat fee will probably make things easier.
What made you feel like a criminal? Buying a home is fairly straightforward and has almost no state verification of any piece of it, at least in the US.<p>Was it something the state enforced, or something being done by the agents of the transaction (ie the mortgage company)?
> after weeks of feeling like a criminal over coffee with my cousin who owns the company that was selling me the condo I was like “can I just fucking give you two bitcoins on a thumbdrive…”<p>and he said no, because you also can't do this. Bitcoin has not solved any problem there.
This utility is what helps stabilise its value, but the side effect of that is that it is a good store of wealth. These two facts make BTC go up. People say Bitcoin isn’t used for anything when in reality it’s being used every day to store and move wealth between big financial players (many of them being organised crime). Why wouldn’t they continue using this useful technology and therefore why won’t its value hold/increase? Is it moral to piggy back off this? That’s for you to decide. It’s worth considering that many major banks have been involved with organised crime since forever…
> Crypto makes perfect sense if you just understand it's for doing illegal stuff.<p>What happens when a country's banking system fails?
The anonymity aspect of it always confused me. If anything, bitcoin and almost all other cryptos are the ultimate surveillance state currency. Every single bitcoin, no matter how many fractions it is broken into, is traceable through every single transaction it has ever participated in, all the way back to when the coin was first mined.
It isn't anonymous. Anybody who says bitcoin is anonymous either doesn't understand bitcoin or doesn't understand anonymity. It's pseudonymous.
That visibility could be considered a feature for some use cases. We could use more transparency in many areas, particularly government.
Technically there is no such thing as a bitcoin. Just unspent transaction outputs. Those get spent as an input of a transaction and then are gone forever. There is no concept of the output of a transaction being the same "bitcoin" as what comes from the input of the transaction. This means if you had 2 inputs and 2 outputs of the same amount there is no way to trace which input became which output. At best you can find which outputs potentially came from an input.
When you start transacting on Bitcoin Lightning network (which is essentially sending pre-signed bitcoin transactions in a smart way, without submitting them on the main chain), then you no longer see each transaction. Lightning introduces decent privacy, not perfect, but decent.
But you (theoretically) cannot know who mined the coin, or who is actually the holder of the coin, thus the anonymity. Though currently this is getting restricted as governments require more ID verification from businesses dealing with crypto, which links up your coin to a real person.
The correct term here is pseudonimity - you know the immutable, stable wallet id of who mined the coin, which is a pseudonym for a real person. Anonymous systems are ones in which it's impossible to associate an identity with the work item.<p>For example, if I send cash through the post office, and I don't sign the envelope, that is a form of anonymous payment - it's impossible to tell who sent the payment (assuming there is no footage of the post box where I deposited the envelope, and I left no DNA on it, etc). If you receive a second payment, it's impossible to tell whether it came from the same person or someone else.
To understand why crypto became popular requires understanding that there was a massive anti-America (and by extension, anti-USD) sentiment in the 00s and 10s, mostly on the heels of America's various wars in the Middle East. For some brief period of time, America was the evil imperialist global enemy number one, <i>even in the eyes of many American people</i>. There was practically a patriotism crisis in America around when Trump first came to power.<p>Russia's invasion of Ukraine completely hard-flipped this overnight. America once again became the good guys of the world, and with it died any serious movements to disrupt the USD and greater financial status quo. More critically it also started the narrative that China might do to Taiwan what Russia is doing to Ukraine. It basically brought the world back into the late-20th-century good guys in the West versus bad guys in the East bipolarity.
I think a lot more important for understanding crypto is learning the first bitcoin was minted in January 2009, months off of the heel of the Lehman Brothers filing for bankruptcy, and more notably the "start" of the 2008 financial crisis
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I think block chains are inherently fine. The issue with bitcoin is that it isn't inflationary. Yes, yes, the supply increases over time, but that's also true for gold, and I've yet to hear anyone call gold inflationary. If a declining unit value is not guaranteed over time then it cannot be used as a currency and just becomes a savings vehicle / speculative asset. This is why all central banks aim for inflation. Try telling the true believers this and they'll reply with something about "sound money", seemingly nostalgic for the gold standard or something. It's rather disheartening.
Yeah and even more crazy: all other applications of blockchains are even more stupid. Haven't seen another application that wouldn't have been better, faster, cheaper implemented in a "classical" way.
Gambling.
Git
Am I misinterpreting you or are you saying Bitcoin would make a better, faster, cheaper Git?<p>If you are, I am already laughing.
Yeah, and I always say git with commit signing is a cryptographic block chain in the loosest sense. But in this context I was of course referring to the proof of work/stake BS. In git the proof of work is the work you put into writing the source code. There is <i>actual</i> value in it, not just fictional speculative value.
At least for me, the big selling point was being able to send money fast and relatively cheap. Back then you either had PayPal, or wire transfer. PP could easily freeze and hold your money over whatever issues, while bank transfer was slow.<p>And, mind you, I only purchased/sold legal stuff.
This is only a selling point in places like USA. Even before moving to the USA 13 years ago I was able to send money via wire transfer domestically for free, and it settled within 1 business day (to me that's fast enough). IIUC nowadays intra-EU wire transfers also are free (but I kinda view them as "domestic"), however I'm not sure how quickly they settle. The way how banking worked in the US was definitely one of the biggest culture shocks I've experienced when moving (and not in a positive way).
Yep, that's what I thought nano had done:<p><a href="https://nano.org/en" rel="nofollow">https://nano.org/en</a><p>instant, fee's a fraction of a cent, I thought this was it, international payments that don't rely on visa/mastercard!<p>and then it just went no where :\
Turns out nobody is actually interested in transacting with crypto otherwise Nano would have been a winner. I also love Banano, a Nano fork where you mine by folding proteins. Work that has actual value.
Because in practice services like TransferWise solved this problem using fiat currencies with fees low enough not to make it worth bothering with crypto.
I duno, I still can't make a payment on the net without Visa or Mastercard, still a problem to be solved to me<p>Looks like other people still trying to solve as well:<p>> Earlier this year, Coinbase changed online payments forever with a new protocol called x402. But could this technology really usher in a new age of 'machine to machine' payments? Let's run it...<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6wc6yvoZLY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6wc6yvoZLY</a>
For larger amounts it makes sense to use the bitcoin rails for international transfers. I'm doing bank to bank international transfers and using bitcoin saves around 3% compared to Wise and you get the money immediately (or within 1hr, depending on what you use).
Nano is pretty amazing, but, yeah, the interest is in profit not the technology, so it's fading into the background. Pity.
Ideology can be blinding. It was never about the technology.
Apparently, some fraction of the population is willing to believe whatever makes them rich.
well actually, you <i>could</i> build a network on top of that (expensive) database... hmm... it's kind of starting to sound like SWIFT.<p>but you have: no rollbacks, no refunds, no governance to stop bad actors
you do gain: immunity from government decisions, theft by state and independence<p>as unpopular as it might sound like, bitcoin is great for criminals, yes you could say "who decides what is a criminal", well let's make this simple: people who murder and steal.<p>edit: by "murder and steal" I generally mean something that is "lawfully and/or morally disallowed"
> bitcoin is great for criminals<p>Never understood this soundbite, and I used to be a criminal. Bitcoin is horrible because literally everything is tracked, with minor benefits compared to just dealing with cash or still the best, using the banks you know who look to the side when you need to clean your cash.<p>The tricky part remains to wash the money, and bitcoin doesn't make that easier, it makes that part harder. But "Bitcoin is great for criminals" is a nice little signal that the person echoing that soundbite probably don't actually know what they're talking about.
1) I mean, also great for anyone who sells stuff on places like Craigslist, where the recommendation is to take cash? Taking the standpoint "the consumer is always always correct and refunds should be trivial" sort of works for larger companies that can amortize scams, but you <i>enable</i> a different form of crime (fraud) by adding that feature to small-scale transactions. Hell: many of the modern payment rails you now have to use to buy stuff from vendors at fairs don't have user-accessible refund mechanisms, including Zelle.<p>2) To the extent to which you really want those features, they are no different than any other in their ability to be built on top of a decentralized database, but now can be done in a way where the rules can be open and anyone can experiment: as an example, you could put your funds into a smart contract that only can transfer money to other people through an escrow mechanism which holds onto the funds for a net-30 period and pays a small fee to the protocol; you then could have the people who own the protocol governance token (and would receive the fees) vote on members to sit on a refund arbitration council (which needs to be somewhat fair or people will stop using the network, crashing the fees they are paid, aligning the incentives in a similar manner to a centralized business doing the same).
> let's make this simple: people who murder and steal.<p>So many Western governments and their elected officials? The US? Israel?<p>What about the people in international waters Trump keeps bombing and calling drug criminals? I'm so confused about how you're able to make the delineation of those who "murder and steal" to mean criminals, given that such a distinction puts the government square in the spotlight, and many of the people whom they spend relatively insane amount of resources to target target: drug users/pushers, political activists, immigrants, etc.<p>Distributed ledgers are good for... targeted activists, people who don't want the government to have the power to arbitrarily weaken their buying power, people seeking safe drugs and medicines, just about anyone needing to be anonymous, and <i>regular people who don't need to justify their economic transactions or risk their wealth being diluted</i>. This "criminals" angle is just farcical, ignorant, and also very tired... you're not the first to suggest it.
you could call them criminals, many do, activists are also criminals from the view of politicans I generally just used "who murder and steal" as a basic notion of "it's good for people who are in trouble with the law"
> Now the uninformed gambling on futuristic sounding hokum? THAT is easy to understand.<p>Yes... During a hype rush, sell memes.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusion...</a>
read the original Satoshi paper<p>all the 3rd party summaries/interpretations of this paper are problematic. Read the original.
The whitepaper has some problems. Satoshi isn't automatically right and virtually no one uses Bitcoin/crypto the way Satoshi envisioned. Arguably if you judge Bitcoin based on the whitepaper it is a complete failure.
I’m not sure the paper or the character Satoshi himself matter anymore. Once you have a preeminent coin with fiat power behind it, the details of a paper and the wherewithal to reinvent that coin more purely are irrelevant. Once a particular political family signaled that control starting in Sept 2024, keeping close to that family reassured you of a bailout or pardon.
I can send a billion dollars to someone in Uganda with no intermediary or oversight. This was not only impossible before but most likely would never have been a possibility. Being able to hold massive amounts of value in the ether and control it from anywhere, you don’t find that impressive? Sure, this is mostly used for nefarious activities, but let’s not pretend it’s solving no problems. It’s incredibly difficult to transfer money into a third world country without incurring massive fees, unless you use crypto.
How exactly can you send a billion dollars to someone in Uganda using Bitcoin?<p>Purchase and sale of bitcoin is highly regulated and obviously tracked - and the blockchain itself provides little privacy - I’m guessing state-level actors have already attached identities to most of the wallet addresses out there.<p>So if I hand you access to $1 billion dollars - cash or in a bank account - how could I practically get $1 billion dollars to an individual in Uganda so that they could spend the dollars?
There are people that hold billions in Bitcoin and they could send it to someone in Uganda without friction, do you dispute this? You’re being pedantic, stick to the hypothetical. Change the example to $1,000 and yes it’s trivial to do and will be cheaper and quicker than using traditional systems.
Okay, let's image that I've sent you 100 BTC. Now, can you tell me how exactly you would convert the "money" I've sent you into bread and milk?<p>Because, most of the time people say that just in the context of the blockchain. In that sense I can also say that you can control vast majority of money by just having knife and glove skins in Steam (for the game Counter Strike). You also can trade/send/receive. But the moment you decide that you want to convert to "food" all sorts of problems arise that are worse than what banks offer.<p>I'm telling you as a person who received salary in crypto while living under sanctioned country
A lot of countries don't have access to bank-accounts, by not having valid id's for example. But they do have cellphones so they can download crypto apps to accept payment for jobs etc. And then there is the money receiving from relatives in other countries, yes.
> I've never understood the initial arguments about Bitcoin, no matter how many times they've been explained to me.<p>This may not help much, but it's really a (self-)governance thing. That's why they start their article like so:<p>> I donated to Gary Johnson as a starry-eyed libertarian. On top of being a staunch Randian, I was into computer programming, so crypto was a natural fit for me. The cypherpunk ethos attracted me. (...) Being able to walk across the border with a billion dollars in your head is and always will be a powerful idea to me.<p>It is also why you keep hearing about crypto transactions being primarily used for illegal stuff. Just like with the uber-free-speech p2p platforms, it primaily benefits those who'd be otherwise hampered. Who, contrary to the usual talking points, are usually not actually so innocent or respectable.<p>But then we do keep sliding back, so maybe it's only a matter of time the proportions shift, and the claims of these technologies' justness stop being so false and hollow. And maybe these events and processes are further not actually uncorrelated. Trust is at an all time low and dwindling, after all.
I agree with the article and I hold 0 crypto right now. But I still think it's amazing that I can hold something limited, something I can exchange for real money, in my head, just based on math. Sure it is extremely inefficient database, and pretty much all the real value needs to be linked with real world banking, but it does have some really unique features that makes me sad that it (predictably) turned to just scams and speculation.<p>Edit: and the other feature I like is that I could just attach my code to the raw banking backend. People say that anyways everybody just uses exchanges, and that's true, but if you'd ever want to connect to banking backend, you'd get buried in paperwork. With crypto, you'd just run or connect to a node.
> just scams and speculation<p>The "currency" part is actually the only one that is not a scam, as long as you understand what it is and the trade-offs it makes.<p>If you do actually have a legitimate reason to use it (because conventional payment rails are not available, or you're doing crime, or need pseudonymity), it is a perfectly fine tool.
> I've never understood the initial arguments about Bitcoin, no matter how many times they've been explained to me.<p>Bitcoin has a great mythology associated with it. People over emphasize the technical aspects, i think its the "story" that made it succeed. Its about taking back "control" from the man. People love an underdog story, people love a rebellion story. Lots of people in the tech space are anti-establishment or libertarian. Bitcoin is the perfect fulfillment of the dream of that ideology.<p>When people try to sell bitcoin, they aren't selling merkle-trees, they are selling "freedom".<p>I think if it was actually just about digital currency, then chaumian ecash would have taken off. It technically has a central party but not in a way that matters. It makes so much more sense than bit coin. But it doesnt have the total freedom story.<p>> How anyone, especially many intelligent people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top of such a unwieldy piece of technology is beyond me.<p>I mean, it did work. It is a shitty currency no doubt, but you can buy and sell stuff with it. There are bitcoin atms in my neighbourhood. I think the bigger mystery is not how anyone thought it could be a currency, but how the hell something so silly actually sort of became one (albeit bad one)
I think the sort of libertarian mythos of crypto is very appealing to a lot of people. Escape the big bad man and so on.<p>The crypto ecosystem though is totally disconnected tho...
TLDR: to understand bitcoin you have to see the problem it's solving - most people are blind to it even though it affects their lives terribly.<p><a href="https://x.com/saylor/status/1878154748353818932" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/saylor/status/1878154748353818932</a><p>> "The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database. How anyone, especially many intelligent people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top of such a unwieldy piece of technology is beyond me."<p>The answer to your question is humans' inability to resist printing money out of thin air if it's possible to, and the disastrous effects it has on the world. Bitcoin is money that can't be printed out of thin air by anybody. The only way to obtain it is by providing work of equal economic value.<p>Look up the M2 money supply over the decades and realise that each time it doubles, the value of your wages, savings and pension are halved. Worse still, that value is stolen, sucked out into the hands of the people above you in the fiat pyramid scheme (see the Cantillon Effect).<p>It's one of the most important inventions in the history of mankind. This is because it shuts down the biggest scam in the history of mankind - central banking. Bitcoin's positive effect on the world is to restore power to the people and end their monetary-based enslavement - the changes will be profound.
Your comment assumes that the purpose of an economic system is to preserve a financial status quo. It isn't, and shouldn't be. Inflation incentivizes people to put their money to productive uses in the economy (capital formation) rather than hoarding resources.
Alas, any comments trying to talk about the problem are getting buried. They don't understand the solution because they stick their fingers in their ears when someone tries to show the problem. Of course a solution doesn't make sense if there is no problem.<p>We have to remember 2008 was 17 years ago. People who were <i>born</i> during the crisis are now adults. The tragedy is there might not necessarily be another huge crisis. We blew it 17 years ago. We didn't fix anything. People stopped talking about financial reform about a decade ago. So now we might just have to live with a system where a few elites are creaming the top of the money supply. A system where the brightest and most talented people go and work for something like Jane Street, spending their days playing games and trading bits of paper with each other, causing real effects for people doing actual work, but adding nothing of value themselves but taking loads.<p>This Douglas Adams quote explains a lot:<p>> I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
The thing is - the world young people are accustomed to is just a carefully managed matrix. There are glitches.<p>"Why do house prices endlessly rise?"<p>"Why am I working so hard in such a technologically advanced world yet can't even afford to raise a family?"<p>Once you see the reason, you can't unsee it.<p>We also have Gresham's and Thier's Laws on our side.
So the bitcoin market cap is currently at $1.8 trillion.<p>You can compare that to USD M0 which is $5 trillion or EUR M0 which is around €4 trillion.<p>Not bad for an "extremely inconvenient database".
Market cap is pretty hypothetical though - if somebody actually tried to liquidate $50bn of bitcoin into fiat money you'd probably send the BTC price to about zero...
Slippage yo. Market cap means jack shit if the true order book is thin like a slice of carpaccio.
South Sea Company at its height was worth almost 3x British GDP. Not bad for a company "with negligible business activities"!
Truer words have never been spoken.
What do you mean? Technically it works, no?<p>it is an incovenient database, for sure, but the fact that people can trust it enough that they put billions of dollars in it is remarkable.<p>I wouldn’t put my house in an S3 bucket…
I guarantee you that blockchain tech can solve a real, extremely important problem, though it's only a problem for some people. If you're connected to the money printers, then it's useless to you. Just like if you worked for a company like Enron which was cooking the books, 'honest accounting' would not be a solution for you; 'honest accounting' would be a problem for a company like Enron and everyone who works for Enron.<p>Proof of Work is highly inefficient and inconvenient. I agree to this.<p>Cryptocurrency sector is mostly a scam; or at the very least, a kind of casino. I Agree to this; though my understanding is that it has been corrupted by mainstream financial interests; just like Africa is kept corrupt and poor by some of those same interests. Then the plebs basically blame African people for 'choosing this'.<p>I've worked for some very successful crypto founders who became corrupt. I saw the change happening. The desire to improve things turned into self-sabotage. It was unlike any other company I ever worked for; nothing made sense. Yet I know for a fact that government regulators gave their approval. I witnessed the EU commission give grants to scam projects with nothing behind it, then these same founders got funding again and again after failed projects. It was all announced publicly though it took some time to understand that the projects were scams from the beginning... But like they got money from a government entity and they didn't build anything AT ALL. Then they got more funding on their next project... Weird right?<p>Proof of Stake is actually highly efficient; it's basically a ledger with dynamic runtime replication ability.<p>Unless you fully understand the current mechanism of how money is created globally; including the Eurodollar system and how stablecoins, derivatives and other financial constructs could be used for legal counterfeiting, you should not speak about the utility of blockchain.
> you should not speak about the utility of blockchain.<p>But most of the engineering around blockchain was to improve throughput (ie off chain transactions)<p>Its not like you can really do fractional reserve banking on the blockchain, well not practically. this means that you can't treat it like "money" ie the ever increasing supply of non-central bank controlled cash (ie your eurodollar, yen etc.)<p>There is no utility in stablecoins. They are basically joint stock company, but without an income, or case law to help you when it goes pop. Of course they are popular because they have no regulation and can basically do what banks do, but without any of the oversight need for stability/fraud prevention. "we are going to act like an investment bank, and create money, oh no, not by securities, but by word of mouth, that word being pyramid."
I never got the whole larger "crypto" economy. The number of meaningless alt coins. That come and go most of the time, build on zero any type but speculative value. Worse than any fiat.<p>And then stable coins. Fancy IOUs of fiat. Which might or might not have actual assets backing them. Which you might or might not be able to redeem. Say if Russian government had a billion in whatever stable coin. Could they redeem them and get real dollars transferred to some account they own?
I think the second line is touching on something. The implication is that there may be a kind of legal cross-nation counterfeiting happening. Stablecoins likely play a part. When I worked in crypto back in 2017, all the successful people would tell me that they thought there was something really wrong with Tether and they all believed it was propping up Bitcoin. They expected it to collapse any day... But here we are 8 years later.<p>Ideally, countries should only be allowed to issue their own currency. It's not hard to see why a country being able to print another country's currency would pose a problem... With all money being digital and stored on thousands of distinct bank ledgers which basically don't have consensus, it would be very difficult to track with manual audits and with the current incentives in place. It would be trivial to hide these transactions under legitimate names as various forms of international payments.
regardless, they found a way for two parties to exchange wealth without trusting each other. the failures were letting it diverge from being a currency into a speculation instrument. It failed in being a low-cost wallet that we can pay our restaurant tab with.
Someone called J.Powell decides the price of US dollar. Bitcoin fixes this by inserting an algorithmic monetary policy, never seen in human history before.
If by “price of the US dollar” you mean “direction of financial sentiment”, then yes.<p>But that’s a big mistake.
How does Jerome Powell decide the price of a dollar? How does an algorithm fix that? What is being fixed?
Maybe in their head it's still back before 1976 where we have the Bretton Woods system, there's no foreign exchange market and policymakers set the price of dollars against gold?
Dude, you might not belong to our civilization. Sorry.
The blockchain is an excellent distributed storage system for anything that should be immutable, such as contract hashes like notarial deeds, vehicle sales, and digital identities, which are not controlled by any central authority (if the blockchain is truly distributed) and are verifiable and tamper-proof. NFTs are the toy experiment that demonstrates this path.<p>It is therefore also usable as a currency, with fungible tokens, where the transactions per second (TPS) are sufficiently high, not for Bitcoin, therefore, but for example, Solana is already adequate; its performance and economic model are sufficient to pay for your local café.<p>That, without widespread acceptance, they have limited use, initially for crime, then for speculation, is another matter, but it is not a technical issue. The technical issues are quite different: <a href="https://blog.dshr.org/2025/09/the-gaslit-asset-class.html" rel="nofollow">https://blog.dshr.org/2025/09/the-gaslit-asset-class.html</a>
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To understand Bitcoin you need to forget the technology and first understand the problem. You need to understand what caused the 2008 financial crisis and how it resulted in us collectively funnelling more value into the hands of useless bankers. You need to understand that there are people who are literally spending their days playing games with each other, trading bits of paper and making silly deals and bets. If you don't understand the word "literally" or don't believe it, read more, study harder. If you don't understand a zero sum game or how this nonsense fucks up the lives of regular people, read more.<p>Read <i>The Big Short</i> by Michael Lewis. You could even start with the film by Adam McKay who also gets it. Then read <i>Other People's Money</i> by John Kay.<p>Only once you understand the problem can you begin to understand why a trustless digital cash would be good for us. Bitcoin is simply the first viable solution to the problem. If you can come up with a better one you'll change the world.
OK, suppose the whole world used a trustless digital cash. Now you cannot do monetary policy. Now booms are booms and busts are busts and we are back to the early 1900s. Great.<p>Actually what would likely happen is that people would be incentivized to opt-in a digital currency with a monetary policy knob, and this would again become the de facto currency that everyone uses.<p>The problem with 2008 was corruption not monetary policy.
No solution is perfect. Come up with a better one. More regulation, however, is not what we need. We need to decide what we want the financial sector to actually do, and that probably doesn't involve a bunch of children playing games.
That you don't understand something doesn't mean everyone else is wrong.
The Emperor was very pleased that everyone was admiring his new clothes, even if he couldn’t see them himself!
No, but it doesn’t mean they’re correct either.
It's funny that you think of crypto bros as "everyone", when in reality they are very much the few.
>How anyone, especially many "intelligent" people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top...<p>However a currency was grafted on, is used by millions and has a $1.7tn market cap. Seems real.
The <i>currency</i> is absolutely not used by anyone serious as <i>currency</i>. Market caps are, quite obviously, representative of nothing, given the current state of the S&P. Let’s be serious.
My question is, which real-world problem is actually solved by crypto? All I know is transferring money over the border gets much easier than pre-bitcoin era.
In practice is sorta allows reasonably quick bank transfers.<p>Something that outside of the US is solved by SWIFT, or the state equivalent of instant bank transfer. Most of the rest of the world has instant, or near instant bank transfers. The US doesn't, it has venmo or similar.
I only refer to bitcoin (and lightning as Layer2), not crypto. Real-world problems will become more relevant if you live in a 2nd or 3rd world country:<p>- private (as in privacy) store of value without necesity to build a vault (or trust a 3rd party for storing)<p>- Transfer of money by immigrants "back home". Good luck sending money to Cuba or Venezuela right now<p>- Micropayments / Webpayments via Lightning (TradFi failed on this) - you can literally send 10cent right now to someone at the other end of the world - or pay for a news article.<p>- Decentralized / Ad-free social media like Nostr. Pay with micropayments for everything (hosting, forwarding, micro-donation for content). If you look at how damaging the ad-based social media economy is fighting for engagement and attention, it is obvious society is better of without Instagram/Facebook/Youtube/Tiktok trying to get you to watch more, to get more ad revenue<p>- Insurance against dictatorships taking over free democracies. If monetary policy is not done my the government, they can't use it to control the people. In Bitcoin, the people are deciding and voting on monetary policy independent of the government (miners, node runners/validators, acceptance of transfers etc.)<p>- Insurance about fiat devaluation (governments printing money)
The only real world problem is probably solved by low chain fees where I can hold usdc or gold coins and then pay or recieve payments without too much hassle<p>But that again, is such a low niche and something that includes exchanges fees too<p>Recently I wanted to get a domain name on black friday so I went to namecheap and paid them 10 $ in crypto, I had to pay 80 cents to an exchange to convert my usdc polygon to btc to then + some btc fees because namecheap just accepted that<p>I am a teenager so technically buying this domain pseudo-anonymously (yes I know I can do things with monero too so thus anonymously too) is the only real use case<p>I think stablecoins have potential to atleast remove this stripe/paypal/visa/mastercard etc.'s monopoly and allow cheap payments<p>Honestly I wish UPI from India or Pix from brazil were implemented at a global scale, they are so good.<p>My thoughts are nuanced but since I am a teen and yes I have a bank account but it cant be operated fully until I turn 18 by me, its all just complicated and crypto kinda solves some aspect of it<p>But this whole field is niche too and most people who build on these primitives basically build gambling as the author said<p>Here are my thoughts on crypto that one time I was on HackerNews on a similar thread and wanted to give a proper space to my thoguhts: <a href="https://justforhn.mataroa.blog/blog/most-crypto-is-doomed-to-fall-the-tech-is-cool-though/" rel="nofollow">https://justforhn.mataroa.blog/blog/most-crypto-is-doomed-to...</a>
The problem of not being able to conduct transactions (globally or not) due to state-level censorship. Also called "censorship resistance".
Allows scammers to avoid money being returned by having no centralized platform.
Purchasing drugs
Does it really?
I got into crypto back in 2011/2012. I used PayPal and bank wire transfer extensively back then, as I bought and sold a lot of stuff internationally - so to me bitcoin seemed like the natural next step, and a godsend to people like me. At my height, I had 100 BTC.<p>Eventually big events in my life happened, and I sold my coins out of necessity. I found myself unemployed, separated, and broke - so I sold everything I owned. I cashed in around $40k or so from the coins, which helped me pay off my debts and get a down payment for my house. To be honest, I personally don't know anyone from way back then that became filthy rich off crypto, most sold off their stuff when every boom cycle started again, afraid that it would be the last one...the people I know that became rich, were those that went all-in on crypto around 2017/2018. They dumped everything they had, and managed to 10x-100x their investments.<p>Of course, had I held onto those, I'd be set for life now. But hindsight is 20/20<p>But with that said, I remember around 2017/2018 when the first "real" boom occurred - that's when everyone pretty much abandoned ideals, and went into it for the money. Lots of people made life-changing money back then, and the idealistic dream was pretty much dead. <i>"Store of value"</i> won the war, and soon after <i>"moon lambo"</i>.<p>At least for me, the writing on the wall was clearly that crypto would evolve into just another financial instrument that big finance would pump and dump periodically. Though I could not foresee a crypto-friendly US gov. entering the picture.
The most interesting insight here isn’t “crypto bad,” but how years in a speculation-first ecosystem warp your intuition for what real value looks like.<p>When incentives reward casinos over products, even talented builders end up optimizing for the wrong game. That lesson applies far beyond crypto.
They optimized for the right game: making themselves as much money as possible.<p>There are builders and there are opportunists. The builder's goal is to build something useful. Often the most useful things that you can build are not going to earn you a single dollar, but a builder will still go ahead and build it.<p>The opportunist is just trying to make personal wealth, which could come from the pockets of end customers, or investors, or other speculators (the "greater fools").<p>A lot of people made a lot of money from crypto and blockchain, even if ultimately almost everything built in this ecosystem is inconsequential trash.
I was thinking of how this mirrors the actions of people currently pushing AI. Or the dotcom bubble. Or "big data". The examples just keeps going...
Crytocurrency was the initial use case for blockchain, but blockchain is not limited to cryptocurrency.
> your bank account would just hold USDC or Bitcoin, and you could send a billion dollars to anyone in the world in a few seconds. That belief is powerful and I still ascribe to it.<p>These statements still surprise me to this day. If you're a good person engineer, why does sending money in seconds need blockchain? There's parts of the world where this is commonplace and free as well.<p>I don't believe cross border was there in 2010 or so but why not implement that feature in an existing system instead of building out a parallel universe
The cross border not about technical capacity but legal control. For example if you are a refugee you might not be able to pull your bank savings and liquid stock with you from your home country to another without it being seized or taxed, but your crypto is always yours as long as you are the only holder of the keys. This scenario is one of the rare real world utilities I see with crypto.
You are questioning the method when people just see the need.<p>If you're an engineer, no matter what you say about the method, you know a country at war will make you lose all your savings. Or if you're a foreign citizen in a country that will seize your assets, even "by accident".
It is not an engineering problem, it is a geopolitical and legacy banking problem. Yes sending an encrypted message somewhere in the world in under a second is solved.
I think the key difference is the inability to be (easily) deplatformed / locked out which can happen in traditional banking
> If you're a good person engineer, why does sending money in seconds need blockchain? There's parts of the world where this is commonplace and free as well.<p>The promise was to make this available for everyone, to send money everywhere.<p>For example for me in Sweden it's really, really hard to send money directly to people in Ukraine since the Swedish banks simply refuse to send money there.
Because you don't trust or don't believe in the legitimacy of governments.
GNU Taler is a working implementation of "digital cash" in the spirit of Ecash. Since it doesn't come with its own currency, it cannot be used for gambling. It is quite telling that it has seen essentially zero adoption in the "crypto" scene.
I heard some people were talking about using crypto to build a full State on it, this is doomed to fail.<p>Let's say you loose your wallet. What do you do next? You call your bank to block your credit card and to take an appointment with the administration to make a new ID, driving license etc. The cash in your wallet is gone but everything else isn't. The process is annoying but at the end of the day you'll be fine.<p>Now if all this is based on a private key and you loose it, you're completely done, you're just not part of society anymore.<p>No one will ever embrace this because humans are messy and make mistakes all the time. Crypto and blockchain are so resistant to mistakes that for this specific case it's just not good at all.
Is it really a waste if you made enough money to retire?
Right, OP writes up crypto as being this terrible disease with no meaning. But outside of crypto there aren't many jobs that have real meaning either. I worked for the UN at one point, and that was actually one of the worse.<p>At the end of the day you are always just working to make someone else rich or to give them the promotion they want. If you get rich yourself along the way, take that as a win.
I respectfully disagree. Even if you told me that you felt like working at the UN was a waste of time, I’d still tell you that at least you contributed to a historically unique global institution which at least strives to bring people across the world together.<p>Bitcoin was just a waste of talent and resources.
Make your own startup. I also hate working for people whom I consider less smart and/or capable or experienced than I am.
Glad to hear the change of heart here and the guts it took to write it up. I know that's not an easy thing to do, and it likely burned some bridges.<p>The point about it being gambling, and therefore, taking advantage of idiots, yeah that rings true. The mass proliferation of gambling and the true compulsive addiction and ruin of mostly young men, it's hard to look at oneself and state that they caused that pain for other and their loved ones.<p>The next step is, of course, to do the very hard part: use the money gained for good. The author mentions that they are a hypocrite for only speaking out after making their money. They need not be so. Finding legitimate ways to use the ill gotten gains for good is a bit of what they built their skills in, after all.<p>I hope to someday see the next post of theirs detailing how many people they helped and how many lives saved, families reunited and made sound again, based on how they used this new wealth for good.<p>They are very far from the end of their story, but the midpoint, so to speak, has been passed.
> "I was a politically motivated person when I was a teenager. Of all the books that radicalized me, it was the Aynd Rand books (Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged) that did."<p>A heartfelt "Thank you!" to Ken on account of having at least the courtesy of saving cool people's time by putting the <i>Origin Story</i> into the first sentences.
That John Rogers' quote hits the mark again: “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
Is Atlas Shrugged really that bad? Heh, I started reading the fountainhead in my mid 30ies. The natural way you get introduced to new characters is great, but man I got so angry with the unrealistic robotic personalities I kept putting the book away and after 200 pages I really just could not continue. So Atlas Shrugged is similar? What a disappointment!<p>Anybody here that loved the books and would care to elaborate it speak to them so much?
As a teenager who went through quite a similar journey back in the day, it wasn't as much the books (which are quite badly written, I still have PTSD from that monologue) and more about the story very plainly supporting the view of the world I had back then... Champions of industry, unshackled by free enterprise, freed from the stagnation of governance etc.
One correction. Crypto is not zero sum. It is a potential minus 100% sum for all the players involved. Maybe with exceptions of the folks making cash from the transaction fees.
For more enjoyable snippets like this, I recommend <a href="https://x.com/coinfessions/" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/coinfessions/</a>
I’d hesitate to say it’s wasted. Aren’t these some of the most complex, electronic, decentralized systems in human history? That skillset is going to be more and more important the more and more computers there are.
> Aren’t these some of the most complex, electronic, decentralized systems in human history?<p>There are more phone calls in a day, but orders of magnitude, than Bitcoin transactions. So, no, they aren't even close.
Statements about "I wasted years doing X" are almost always overblown. The more realistic take is "I didn't get the ROI I wanted in specific area X."
What stands out to me is how many smart people spent their best years optimizing around the constraints of a system that was fundamentally misaligned with real-world demand. The tech is fascinating, but incentives turned the whole space into a gravity well for speculation rather than creation.<p>The upside is: once you realize this, you can take all that engineering discipline, resilience and product intuition you built under pressure — and finally apply it somewhere users actually exist.
Okay, so if your time felt wasted, that must mean there were better uses of your 20s.<p>But, how else would you have driven towards your goal of building a new financial system?
They could have worked for Stripe/Ramp/Brex/Mercury for example. They'd still be rich but with non-speculative impact.
Probably by choosing a more realistic goal. Who even thinks they can build a "new financial system?" When governments already control, by law, the current one?<p>It was always a pipe dream.
Indeed, working hard towards a goal is never a waste, it can often be a learning experience regardless of the end result. And that learning is extremely valuable and also takes time.
What a great perspective. I hope the author reads & responds.
By building a system that facilitates the economy rather than being inherently based around fraud and gambling. Crypto is not the only way to build a futuristic financial system.
I know which school I'd count on to not be based on gambling if I had to choose between a distorted view of libertarianism (and Aynd Rand) and the more pragmatic and sound principles of folks like Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett.
It's unhealthy to ascribe religious or ideological ideas to money. It's a tool. Ideology needs to preach, to influence minds.
Wrong. People who use crypto as a casino - that is, "invest" into it or "trade" it - are a numerical majority but they aren't those who make actual money there. Actual money is made by those who use it for:<p>- Tool/facilitation of "brick and mortar" crime, as well as some cybercrime (moving drug money across borders, way to pay ransom in a way difficult to track, etc).<p>- Tool for scams.<p>- Hacks, including (but not limited to), on-chain hacks.<p>I know a lot of people who made 9-digit sums in crypto. None of them invested or traded coins (none were from the 'crime' category either). Most typical kind of people are those who did hard-core (hundreds of thousands of accounts) sybil attacks on ICOs and launchpads in their heyday in 2017-2021. So it was scripting/scraping/cloud deployments using residential proxies/buying passport scans on darknets.<p>Also those who ran Solana nodes from massive sybils too (up to 200 people - it's 1 node per person so one has to have many persons). While that probably qualifies as speculation/"trading" Solana, servers being little but a booster, so in part it was "casino".
Alternative to archive.is<p><a href="https://xcancel.com/kenchangh/status/1994854381267947640" rel="nofollow">https://xcancel.com/kenchangh/status/1994854381267947640</a>
I don't think the author should be sad. He helped push an industry that lets people move value around freely without third parties being able to choke them off. That alone is pretty powerful. The people gambling with it would probably be gambling with something else instead. As for not learning to create something users want, nothing will prevent him from starting now
crypto means cryptography
I always wondered what "clever" people expected from crypto, apart from getting rich quick schemes. Boring.<p>We had such know-it-alls still with their pimples from Frauenhofer and Max Planck giving presentations. Even back then, 99% percent of the audience were skeptical, but sadly too many decision makers are just emperors with no clothing.
There were so many immature, useless loud speakers given a junior professorship because old morons have FOMO too. That must have sucked for the <i>valid academics</i> with proven achievements. I'm glad I'm not one of the ones waiting in queue.
There no single project having any sign of impact, naturally. While that can be said of a lot of academic work, crypto: more buzzwords, even less delivered.
You feel old when you read "crypto" and your first tought is about cryptography.
Crypto is not necessarily just a casino; the tech has value but there is no mass adoption of the currency as of yet.<p>We'll probably see mass adoption of crypto if a crypto can become a store of wealth
There is no value in a currency that isn't mass adopted. That was the whole reason we switched from trading 100 breads for 1 pig etc.<p>In order to be that currency it cannot be volatile. Ask any country with high inflation how useful their actual currency is...
Crypto currency uses up to 1.5% of the world's electricity, makes up 2.5% of the world's money, uses up to 0.1% of the fresh water supply, and perhaps as high as 6-10% of silicon chips produced.<p>And yet, as you say, there's no mass adaption (yet). All it's doing is making tech bros and speculators even richer. It's possible that wider adoption will eventually happen, but as years pass this claim gets harder and harder to make. It's not any easier for "normal" people to use than it was ten years ago, and the main use cases are still "speculation" and "paying for drugs", also just like ten years ago.<p>From someone who also genuinely thinks the underlying crypto tech is fascinating, it's hard not to see the "currency" part of it as a kind of cancerous growth on the world economy.
Considering the transaction time and cost, crypto never made sense. As fast as I can tell, it's been pure speculation since its inception.
Wait until you learn how much of life is gambling + entertainment. Is working for one of the many SV SaaS companies really that much different?
I've always been intrigued by the whole "decentralized and fixed supply" argument around Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies.<p>But the more I look into it, the more I wonder: if one Bitcoin can be split into 0.1, 0.01, 0.001 or even smaller fractions for transactions, doesn't that kind of undermine the whole “fixed total supply” idea?<p>Also, sure, cryptocurrencies are decentralized in theory and the transactions are hard to trace. But at the end of the day, anyone holding crypt is still very much under the control of governments. You can't magically escape regulations or enforcement just because the currency is "decentralized." It's an interesting tension between theory and reality that I don't think enough people talk about.
This is about cryptocurrencies, not actual cryptography.
I'm sorry this guy feels like that, and I agree that there are tons of fraudsters and casino players in the current crypto scene.<p>It also doesn't surprise me to read the reactions in here, as most of HN users are from the US or other first world countries.<p>For people like me who were born and have lived in developing countries or countries were we cannot fully trust our banking/monetary systems, Bitcoin IS a tool to escape possible problems. I'm old enough to have been in 3 monetary crises in my country: 1985, 1994 and 2008. I'm old enough to have seen countries like Argentina, Venezuela, Spain, Lebanon, Greece experience bank runs. And when that happens, only the rich and connected can do something, while individuals like us are left holding the bag and paying for the errors of others (Americans may remember the 1% movement, occupy wall street).<p>So, no. Bitcoin is and still will be a useful thing for me and a lot of people. First word.country citizens may not understand it, until it becomes too late .
I have had some thoughts on crypto but basically trust is required in every system, yes there are trustless ways to do things but that isnt the main issue<p>I think the main issue is that our current credit/debit cards primitives can be stolen/worried about, there are companies which accept your free tier and will auto charge you and hope you forget etc.<p>Another issue is privacy, Crypto provides some privacy by having usdc <->monero <-> usdc <-> pay where you want.<p>Another issue is for teenagers, I am a teen, I can't create a banking account but I have accepted money for 0 fees <i>well technically but exchanges are a mess</i>
and I have used those to buy domain names and similar via crypto.<p>I think that there are stable cryptocurrencies with low or 0 gas fees so it can allow some primitives like just having a public key online -> convert it to respective token's -> send lets say 0.1$ as a token of gesture and then like it can enable a sense of microeconomy but the people who try doing it try to mess it up by having their own coins or whatever whereas I believe stablecoins should be the one doing it<p>Personally I really prefer gold tokens because that is the best way to get "yield" in my opinion because most places like aave etc. kind of work via providing liquidity to traders or this gambling and due to ethics and just in my opinion, gold coins since pegged to gold have an 100x more volume which is genuine.<p>Personally as a teen, I have always loved the tech behind crypto because it can enable somethings impossible but its current implementation with 0 pegged coins,trading/gambling etc. sucks and is scummy. I think stablecoins are genuinely really nice<p>I have shared it in another comment but frankly let me reshare it : <a href="https://justforhn.mataroa.blog/blog/most-crypto-is-doomed-to-fall-the-tech-is-cool-though/" rel="nofollow">https://justforhn.mataroa.blog/blog/most-crypto-is-doomed-to...</a><p>Man, I really wish if there was someone who can work with me accepting crypto usdc <-> bank account as I know people in some industries who want to work with crypto but crypto is regulated with them in their country basically or like personally although I stay away from crypto even though I have built things on top of it (nanotimestamps), I would love working in stablecoins but I think that the market is saturated and it requires a lot of regulations and funding to establish a new stablecoin and for what basically when there are already good enough options?<p>Personally I dont think much of what I said makes sense if you are an adult (90% of the population) 90% of the time, privacy makes only sometimes sense when you are buying something very privacy sensitive and want to fundamentally be unable to link yourself with that identity<p>So mostly crypto would just be for ephemeral things, like I buy some monero right now instantly sell it to someone, like no need to "hold" things imo or only holding a very small amount<p>Or it can be good for teenagers which I wish man, people should do something about it.<p>Also for less transaction fees that visa/mastercard etc. take, I wish if companies can implement UPI transactions/Pix transactions or some system expands soon relating to it but UPI is genuinely so good that most of you do not know what you are missing out on if you aren't Indian. I have heard good things about Pix too
Wasting your 20s sounds like you did nothing in your 20s. Instead you actively made the world worse by building a casino with power hungry technology.
“The gamblification of the economy” is the real story here. Crypto, prediction markets, and omnipresent instant gambling apps are poisoning more and more of our society and draining money from folks in an entirely unproductive way. These things promise a quick path to fortune but the only people making money are the fraudsters or the platform owners (often the same people). Serious regulation of these things is long overdue, and no, forcing them to advertise gambling hotlines is not sufficient.
As someone who spent some time in "crypto land" and much time in the "real world", my surprise was usually that people seeing odd things in crypto land didn't realize that very similar odd things are also present in real world. E.g. the author's frustration at not being able to spot a real business. How many times have we seen an IPO or acquisition at an unfathomable valuation, for example?
don’t view it as a waste<p>you understand how to construct complex & stimulating games that people will play compulsively for money. that’s good.<p>next, craft games for which you can guarantee a house edge. should be small yet assured.<p>you’re already an experienced casino game developer
> I have zero doubt that BTC will hit $1m one day.<p>Well, there's your problem. Here is a potentially interesting math paper that comes to very different conclusions: <a href="https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/BTC-QF.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/BTC-QF.pdf</a>
Believe in what is important and meaningful to you.
Crypto adds no value to an economic system. It's an expensive way to move money in a big pile.<p>I'm glad OP has been enlightened. Growth can be painful.
Eight years ago was 2017.<p>Everything you figured out about crypto was known then. You had to choose to disregard that information and continue on. And you did, and it took you eight years to figure it out. And now that you have money, you think you have special insight others did not.
Sorry, you don’t. There’s going to be a significant portion of people reading this saying, “No shit”.
But congrats on winning at the casino I guess.
This is one of the signs that we are near bottom in the crypto market.
This is good for Bitcoin.
When peoples talks publicly about the signs that we are near the bottom, this is a sign we are not near the bottom. x)
For me bottom seems like 25k usd, next February
> I believe it will lead to the long-term collapse of social mobility<p>I mean, isn't it the goal of US libertarians?
> The reality hit me like a fucking truck. I am NOT building a new financial system. I built a casino.<p>Hey now, you didn't just build a casino. You also built a way for pedophiles and drug dealers to move money around.
Wait, you can write full blogs on Twitter now?
You need to have a Twitter account to view comments
Try:<p><a href="https://nitter.poast.org/kenchangh/status/1994854381267947640" rel="nofollow">https://nitter.poast.org/kenchangh/status/199485438126794764...</a><p>Or<p><a href="https://xcancel.com/kenchangh/status/1994854381267947640" rel="nofollow">https://xcancel.com/kenchangh/status/1994854381267947640</a>
This helps with the comments, but not the actual article(?), which just gives me:<p>> This page is not supported.
> Please visit the author’s profile on the latest version of X to view this content.<p>...I am using the version which their own server just served me.
I am always a little surprised Twitter (and Instagram, and Facebook, etc) are still going, when a link comes across the feeds I so monitor.<p>Once you stop visiting a sure regularly, it's easy to forget it's still "real" to some people.
Instagram is still massive. Twitter was never that big, it just had an outsized cultural influence because the people who used it professionalized being terminally online.<p>Facebook is the one that baffles me because the only people I know that actively use it for anything besides Messenger and Marketplace are over the age of 60. The younger ones have never even had a Facebook account.<p>Threads is the other one; it’s supposedly huge but I only know one person who uses it. I’ve never heard it referenced in any conversation and don’t hear about it on other platforms the way you’ll see a Twitter screenshot on Reddit.
How many with X?
[flagged]
Why not link to the archive.is page in the HN feed? I failed to discover how to open the original article link.
This is a sob story from someone who got wealthy from building an engine to finance crime.<p>There are paths towards redemption - the author could begin by donating every ill-gotten cent to a worthy charity.<p>What's that? Crickets? Thought so.
Theres this pattern where you make your wealth off dubious means, then one day become born again and start a new life where you gain more popularity and influence by speaking out against the reason you have a megaphone at all. These people interestingly never give away that naughty wealth they now regret so much.