As a former crypto proponent, after ~17 years I think we have to have a real discussion about the value crypto does or doesn't bring to the world.<p>Sure, it let's some people keep their savings safe from dictatorial countries. But it also fuels other dictators that are doing pretty nasty stuff to their own people. And crypto is facilitating that.
Don’t want to weigh in on the crypto debate; just your argument.<p>X enables good things but X also enables bad things.
Freedom of speech enables democracies, but it also enables mass manipulation.
By definition any freedom enables any possible action resulting from that freedom.
Note that this is not really the case with everything either. The same argument can’t be made (reasonably) about biological weapons for example.<p>IMO it’s very hard to make a proper argument pro or against crypto in lay terms. It will be a never ending argument. The fundamental is that of centralization vs decentralization and that’s a relevant reasoning despite of what the current incarnation of currencies and behaviors we’ve been seeing.
I am a regular guy but I just never understood the point of Crypto other than for scams and get rich quick schemes. Not to mention it still is tied to the dollar for value which defeats the entire purpose doesn't it ? I thought it was supposed to be an independent currency. And then you have companies like coinbase which are centralizing something that was supposed to be decentralized ? I just don't get it.
The decentralised mode never interested general public, even though it was mildly interesting as an idea to skip hierarchical trust. The established use of crypto is exclusively money laundering and investment scams, made usable for general public though use of centralised exchanges. The crypto isn’t important, it is just an excuse.
Yea I just don't see any real benefit and it has been almost 20 years. This is why I immediately lose respect for anyone who still peddles crypto even though there were some well meaningful people in early days.
As the decentralised crypto experiment shown us, hierarchical trust has its benefits.
My wealth may be decentralized, but my body is in one location and pretty vulnerable to the 5 dollar wrench. Putting some emergency money in a foreign bank account and a bag is a much better option if I wanted to flee a country.
At least initially, much of the "point" was to bypass Chinese currency controls. Buy mining hardware and electricity in yuan funny money. Mine cryptocurrency. Sell it for real fiat currency. Buy real estate in Vancouver.
Crypto was originally born during the Great Financial Crisis. It's not surprising that the idea of: "Hey, wouldn't it be neat if we didn't need any of that," seemed attractive back then, even though that is obviously far too simplistic a view of what the financial system actually does.<p>But the end result is that crypto currencies never really delivered on their promise, because they barely work in practice, and the only reason to engage with them is for gambling or crime. Anything else is just too slow, too expensive, too cumbersome, too error-prone, and just generally far too inconvenient. What's the point of a digital currency that is best stored on an air-gapped device that must never connect to any network?
It's not tied to the dollar and yes, the purpose is to have a neutral currency.
The argument for crypto is that all other methods of exchange have an arbitor that can use their arbitration powers to their own advantage.<p>There are defenses of traditional currencies that don't hold up to scrutiny, for instance the intrinsic value of gold is way lower than it's traded value. The ability to pay taxes in a currency is only valid while the arbitor allows it to be.<p>The Blockchain is an impressive design to allow multiple arbitors where you can't know in advance who it is going to be so no single actor can act in advance of that knowledge nor act as if they had sustained control.<p>The public record combined with an international Comms network means noone is disallowed.<p>So the good parts are, 1. a mechanism where everyone can use it. 2. No one actor can control monetary policy.<p>The bad parts are, 1. Uses a lot of power (but less than often reported) 2. lack of understanding and unrealistic expectations allow fraudsters to exploit people.<p>It is not a stick-it-to-the-man scheme, nor is it a way to perpetually make wealth (it can create and lose wealth over varying time frames but only by guessing how people in the future will value it compared to today)<p>The dangers of theft of a scale like this are an artifact of there being no single arbitor saying "no you can't do that" there is actually a solution to this, but it is not really being done. It is designed to have no do <i>single</i> arbitor, but if you have a majority of people reaching a consensus on any issue the entire system can change rules to any paradigm they wished. You could theoretically have a majority agree to reverse all of the digits in everyone's balance and then update the system to make it so.<p>To prevent cases like these huge heists you could have a majority consensus to support an independent regulator that makes decisions that can involve arbitrary changes to balances. While there is a majority consensus to agree with the rulings of that regulator they could adjudicate cases like this. If the regulator started acting in the interests of any particular party that consensus would be lost and miners who disagree would not incorporate their rulings into the chain.<p>I think there is potential for there to be a better system there. It would likely involve governments becoming miners (or at the very least having some influence on the miners in their duristiction)<p>I don't think there is enough public opinion in support of doing that though.<p>Tldr; I can see a way in which it works, but we are not there. We might get there over a long duration (if crypto does not go away for another few decades). To get there quickly would require significant changes in public perception.
I know what’s going to happen. I will explain what crypto is for and then it will get downvoted just because it says anything positive about crypto.<p>The point is to NOT have a single place with access to all the money, votes, etc. Every participant should be acting as themselves, and there should be no way to do things on behalf of others without their consent.<p>The point of smart contracts is to have code you can actually trust. Your bank or openAI can change their website, APIs and even their models tomorrow. That’s not great for trust. Trust is what enables things to scale.<p>The same way you trust other internet protocols to just “route around problems” and not have one single point of failure, that is the substrate for Web3.<p>Imagine a Web2 website such as a student-teacher marketplace NOT handling millions of dollars, accepting money from students and paying them out to teachers. Imagine it being simply an interface while the actual transactions are approved by the students themselves, and instead of the central site signing payouts with some keys, the teachers get paid through smart contracts and code on the blockchain. The site can still take 10% commission from everything, it would be above board, and it can never change it without the consent of the people. The business logic is in the smart contract.<p>(Since this comment has the keywords “crypto” and “web3”, I know what will happen in advance already.)
Isn't this incident a case study in how immutable smart contracts are exactly what you <i>don't</i> want in a trustworthy financial system?<p>The stolen USDT will likely be returned because Tether can do manual freezes like a traditional financial institution.<p>Where code is law the funds are just gone.<p>Like even in your example of the marketplace I don't see the benefits over having a central authority. Who determines who is a student or teacher? Who kicks out bad actors? Who resolves disputed transactions?
You misunderstand. The very reason that this Binance hack is a huge issue is that $5B was concentrated in specific wallets under specific keys.<p>A decentralized network of wallets and balances doesn’t present an attractive target for hackers specifically because the payoff per wallet is so small!<p>It is exactly the <i>centralization</i> you are defending, which is at the root of the problem. In the decentralized case, no one has to determine who is a student or a teacher. If a teacher needs to pass KYC with a marketplace, they do it once, and from then on can permissionlessly receive their small payouts.
I'm not so sure.<p>Centralization (on Binance) made the attack appealing, but decentralization (of crypto broadly) is the only reason it's possible, and centralization (of USDT et al) is the only path to recovery.<p>Re: the marketplace: we'd want to be able to revoke teacher access too, and sometimes we may need to roll back transactions (Goods not delivered? Wrong goods delivered? Wrong goods purchased?), and then I have to ask... why involve a blockchain at all?<p>The only compelling real world use case I've seen is helping people navigate hostile governments or dysfunctional economies.
"The point of smart contracts is to have code you can actually trust."<p>That’s very naive thing to expect from code.
Indeed, very shortly after live smart contracts were introduced, someone exploited a bug to steal a pile of pseudo-money, and the humans in charge decided to fork the blockchain to undo it. So the whole idea of “autonomous” smart contracts was revealed as the nonsense it always was. (Actually IIRC only <i>some</i> of the humans agreed to do that, so the chain was duplicated, and what does that even mean from a currency perspective?)
Indeed, very shortly since digital computers were invented, there was corruption. For years, until the voltage could be controlled better and until IEEE standardized things.<p>Indeed, very shortly since modems were invented, there was need for error correction. They were slow and clunky. The only reasonable conclusion is that the Internet is a fad and not worth discussing. Same as this newfangled decentralized cryptography stuff.<p>Indeed, very shortly after the Web came out, regular script kiddies could write php websites with blink tags. Credit card numbers were sent in the clear with http. This “e-commerce” thing was a dangerous joke, only idiots would send their credit cards over the Internet. It would never catch on!
Yes, but as someone who worked in the cryptocurrency industry for a few years: that's not how it actually works. Smart contracts have bugs, it isn't peer to peer so someone has to run and pay for big servers, humans are sometimes criminals or Faustian bargain takers.
Where are the bugs in Uniswap? Aave marketplace?<p>I miss the old days of decentralized networks, and smart contracts that were audited. Forget the shitcoin memecoins and zero sum games mania, the NFTs and the prediction markets. There is so much positive sum that can be done:<p><a href="https://intercoin.org/applications" rel="nofollow">https://intercoin.org/applications</a><p><a href="https://community.intercoin.app/t/fund-for-refugees/2688" rel="nofollow">https://community.intercoin.app/t/fund-for-refugees/2688</a>
I broadly understand this as the utopian vision of what crypto could theoretically be, but it's not playing out this way in the real world and I have a hard time seeing it ever succeeding this way.<p>Being able to leverage crypto on this scale requires everyone to either A) be technical enough to understand and use smart contracts directly or B) delegate a party that handles this for you. This is where the utopian case usually falls apart, because most people are B and this requires trusting a third party, which kinda defeats the entire point of the vision.<p>Because most people don't want to do the work of learning and managing crypto directly, a huge industry flourished to service these people, full of its own interests, corruption and various levels of criminality. And well-intentioned crypto people have no way to reign this industry in because the entire point is to operate in a deregulated way.<p>Ironically, the piece that makes crypto fundamentally unworkable 20 years in is capitalism.
The has been a clear increased in payment processors ( be it Visa/Mastercard/Paypal/... ) that blocking payment access to websits.<p>These may be perfectly legal (example xxx sites), gray at worst (like anime websites). Some anime site that had (for example) paypal for over 15+ years. Plop ... gone.<p>Crypto has become become the alternative payment method for those sites. So its not "dictators that are doing pretty nasty stuff" but a ton of sites and services that can be affected.<p>Ironically, there has been a lot of focus also in Europe regarding this issue, as much of the internet payment processors are in or linked to the US. With the focus to get a alternative to Visa/Mastercard going.<p>The reality is that a lot of power regarding payment processing is in the hands off one country, that has a lot of large companies with interests/powers to dictate over the entire world, what is and is not allowed. And crypto has becomes a necessary evil. In a ideal world we do not need crypto as payment processors are neutral or at minimum have very stronger requirements to kick off clients. But the reality is different...
The real value in crypto is for storing black market currency. Before, it had to be stored in cash where it could be stolen by other criminals or confiscated by law enforcement. (Watch <i>Narcos</i> if you want to see a pretty good dramatization of how Pablo Escobar buried his money in caches around Colombia.) If Bitcoin was around at the time, Escobar certainly would have used that instead.<p>It does have speculative value, as well, but I suspect that if you subtract speculative investments, the remaining total market cap of crypto is the value of criminal profit.
I understand the sentiment, but as someone who had to use crypto because all other options weren’t available, I’d rather live in a world where it exists. (I do have different options now, but I still use USDT/USDC transfers when it’s cheaper.)<p>Without cryptocurrency, dictators and criminals would still be able to move money around, it would just be a bit harder for them. For ordinary people it’d be disproportionately harder and more expensive.
I think crypto lead in 99% of cases just to bad actors and use-cases, I still have to encounter one real success story of someone using crypto successfully long-term or to pay for legit, legal stuff where a different method was not allowed due to unfair restrictions.
I think one of the primary motivations for cryptocurrency was that legal ≠ moral. Therefore, I think cryptocurrency's best use cases are all explicitly <i>illegal</i>.<p>For example, you can donate to Sci-Hub with cryptocurrency. Sci-Hub has an ideological mission which is widely supported, but it runs afoul of copyright law and is illegal in nearly every country and sanctioned in many. You cannot donate to Sci-Hub with fiat currency.<p>Unfortunately, I agree that in practice >99% of cryptocurrency's use is for scams.
I have read of Venezuelans using it as a safe harbor against their currency instability.<p>That seems valuable, but I’m not sure how much truth there is to a story I read on the internet.
it's a pretty good tool if you need a ransom payment after you hack a hospital
Sending stablecoins is much cheaper and faster than sending a wire, and that requires Ethereum (or similar chain).<p>Of course, the bottleneck then becomes converting stablecoin dollars to real dollars.<p>In the end, maybe that friction is actually a net positive for safety.
I don't know, whenever I have to send money to friends, it's free and transferred instantly (Tikkie).<p>Whener I tried to send Crypto, there were fees over fees, from wallets, transfer fees, etc., probably I was doing something wrong, but that was the most frictionless path
it is honestly just a much better UX for transferring large sums of money, something that seems impossible in the US afaict
I want to add that this isn't people stealing from other normal people. This is dictators stealing from normal people. So there are losses in both directions: normal people losing their money and dictators gaining money to do nefarious things to normal people.<p>It would be better if it was dictators stealing from dictators or normal people stealing from normal people, but it's not that at all.
I think that public/permissionless crypto is going to remain a niche. It's clear that there are too many footguns and failure modes for the average user.<p>But I think private/permissioned chains will gain some adoption in the background of tradfi, especially for clearing and settlement, collateral management via tokenisation etc. Your bank might eventually use technology developed in crypto, but it'll be called 'distributed ledger technology' or 'tokenisation' rather than crypto because of the negative image.
The value of it to me is that as money has got more digital, I feel that there is an incredible amount of tracking that previously did not exist in a primarily cash based society. It really isn't my bank or the government's business what I'm buying, or that I went to a casino, or that I went into an adult shop, or <insert sensitive purchase for your situation here>. Using cash more is another solution, but that's not feasible for most online services, and not all businesses accept cash any more. Maybe this is all paranoia, but you see data breaches all the time, and you see how so many industries mine data (and there really isn't much better data for advertising than your entire purchase history).<p>This is why I don't particularly support most cryptocurrencies, as they don't solve these issues and feel more like a horrific version of the stock market. Monero on the other hand does pretty decisively solve these issues, I can give you an address to send money to without giving out any other information, I can send money to you without my purchase history being public (unlike bitcoin), the transaction fees are very low (unlike bitcoin), the block time is quite low. It does feel like the perfect system for daily purchases if it would be embraced, which I am aware it won't be. The issue of no recourse for keys being compromised could be slightly mitigated by putting only limited amounts of money in the wallet at a time, although I do know this isn't ideal (but it's probably a cost for having actual privacy). I really don't get most cryptocurrencies though, bitcoin was a good POC but it's been surpassed in every way by now.<p>I just feel like I'm being forced to give up my privacy, and Monero (or similar) is a potential solution to this that doesn't give up the convenience of digital currency. I guess though I'm seeing it from the perspective of a daily payment system, rather than a savings system (I'd pretty much always prefer my savings in an actual bank with the protections therein).
I think it's good that you have reached that point. Now, if you don't mind my asking (I'm curious):<p>Did it take 17 years for you to get there, or was it a while ago and you just say now that you were into crypto 17 years ago?<p>And I don't mean to be offending here: people routinely take years or decades on similar things. I have been observing that with climate change for 20 years now. And I see many many people who are still in that process. Actually I would argue that most people out there haven't reached the point where we can have the discussion, they seem to be in the "denial" phase still.
I thought that the whole point of crypto was money laundering and tax evasion. Like, it's in cryptocurrency DNA, even if people try to squint and see legitimate use cases. Does anyone think otherwise?<p>I mean, that's what the big mean government does, they monitor financial transactions and they collect taxes. But when we talk about financial privacy from the prying eyes of the government <i>as a goal</i>, and let's suppose people actually use crypto like was dreamed, this necessarily implies crypto being a tool to launder money. (in practice, this is better realized by privacy coins like Monero and ZCash, since Bitcoin sucks for privacy: your address is an anonymous handle but the network leak metadata. But, the desire for financial privacy was there in the Bitcoin community since the beginning).<p>And what else people do when they can hide their money from the government? In a lot of cases, they don't pay taxes (which is also a disposition present in the Bitcoin community since the beginning, with a rhetoric like, collecting taxes are not legitimate)<p>What I think was a later development was the main use case for crypto in real world, which is to collect payment for ransomware and things like this. This, I don't think it's something the early Bitcoin community envisioned.
I don't disagree, but the way you say that makes my eye twitch uncontrollably. So many of us have spent the better part of those 17 years trying to get the crypto proponents to have a real discussion about it.<p>> safe from dictatorial countries.<p>Yeah, that's definitely an argument. But it's kind of funny when the backdrop is that $6B was taken by North Korea.<p>It feels like a sibling to the popular attitudes towards not trusting big banks, or voting for <i><candidate></i> who demonstrably achieves the opposite of what you're seeking, or feeling that democracy ain't working out great, or that vaccines are scary and dangerous. There's just a fundamental lack of higher-order thinking. It's all vibe-based reasoning. What <i>feels</i> scary is what guides these behaviours. Which, I think, is why it's so unsurprising that people in these camps make such unbelievably strong candidates for exploitation.
The value crypto does bring to the world is this:<p>The unbanked, like myself. People that for any reason is being locked out of the "american" way of doing things<p>Stripe doesn't cover 200 countries, nor does Apple Pay, Google Pay, Paypal, Visa, etc (all american btw). So a parallel banking system is needed, no questions about that, and Binance provides the best of all, and that's why it's being targeted by we know who (just follow the money)<p>Now, whether if it is crypto or not, I don't care, all I want is the possibility to pay and receive money (USD, EUR or CNY as the top currencies right now) without the draconian restrictions imposed by the hegemons trying to asphyxiate does who don't kneel<p>That's exactly why we need a parallel banking system, crypto or not
I live in a developing country, and our government has more control over cryptocurrency than you can think of. Just a few weeks ago, many bank accounts were frozen because the account holders were trading P2P on Binance (mind you, that's the only way to buy crypto in my country), and some were even charged with financial scams, money laundering, tax evasion, and other offenses.
Binance is a bank.
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If you need crypto to avoid the legal framework when transferring value, accept the risk and operate accordingly. If you want crypto exposure as an asset class, find a custodian who will hold the crypto for you offline, prove it is offline, and allow you to borrow or otherwise leverage it as an asset on fiat or capital market rails that provide you recourse. Anything else is pointing a gun at your feet.<p>Analogy is holding and trading gold underground that hasn't been mined yet using securities or other representation subject to capital market regulations and the legal framework. Is it an asset? Yes, if proven, documented, etc. Is it safe? Yes. Will you get your value back if the capital market representation of the underlying is stolen? Most likely (finra, sipc, etc).<p>But having live value on rails that enable instant movement globally with no recourse for unauthorized transfer? You're gonna have a bad time.
Cryptocurrencies give sovereignty over your own money... and all the bells and whistles that come with sovereignty: You're responsible for keeping your own funds, and life, safe.
Outside of being money for criminals, there is some value for investors. For them, it is a way for their portfolios to get exposure to the booming criminal economy.
Notice that the hacking is mostly happening with centralized venues. And that is to say nothing of FTX, Celsius etc.<p>The original promise of crypto and blockchain was to cut out the middleman and NOT concentrate a lot of money under a few custodial keys.<p>If you took your crypto off exchanges when not in use, you’d be fine. Not your keys, not your crypto.
> Notice that the hacking is mostly happening with centralized venues.<p>That's not true at all. There have been <i>so</i> many smart contract hacks in the past.
Did you miss the recent hacks of bitcoin hardware wallets, like Ledger and ColdCard?
I agree with you. Is there a name for this logical fallacy?<p>I equate it to anonymity on the internet. Yes, if everyone had to associate their real identity with everything they posted on the internet some unjustly persecuted individuals would not be able to get their stories out. And there would be a heck of a lot less other bullshit.
One of the things I was forced to reckon with over the pandemic was that I'd spent my entire life with undiagnosed autism. Looking back, there were lots of warning signs but we know things now we didn't then. For example, up until the 2010s the medical consensus was you couldn't have ADHD and autism.<p>One of the ways this manifested was my ability to anticipate problems at work and poke holes in things. This made me incredibly unpopular. You never get thanked for this. Instead you get punished for being right too early. You are negative. You are a naysayer. You aren't a team player. And you were 100% correct and it didn't matter.<p>Back in 2012 I remember thinking "I don't see how crypto has any applications other than illegal stuff". And I stood by that. Note that morality and legality are two different things. Sending money to relatives in a country that disallows foreign currency transactions may be moral but it's still illegal.<p>What's frustrating is dealing with the same consequences of being right too early. It's muddied by true disruption. An example that was often brought up was Google. In the late 1990s, it was believed that search was a "solved" problem and there was no money in it. That's 100% true. But you can't ignore any criticism with "people once thought the world was round". It's a useless fallacy to deploy.<p>The absolutely dumbest people and outright scammers were attracted to crypto. A bunch of people who missed out on Bitcon's meteoric rise didn't want to miss the next meteor or they simply wanted to rug pull before they themselves got rug pulled.<p>The financial system is an endless series of Chesterton's Fences. So many things work the way they do because of a problem that occurred. They say that safety regulations are written in blood. People died to make those regulations. Well, financial regulations are the same way.<p>Being able to freeze assets and reverse transactions, for example, is a feature, not a bug.<p>The real story with crypto is how greed clouds people's judgment. So many people on HN thought they were going to make their bag on crypto and people like myself got shouted down as naysayers.<p>I really don't know what to do with this information other than those same warnings are beign ignored about AI and in 5 years I will be punished for being right too early. There's simply no market to recoup the trillions invested in rapidly depreciating assets around software with no moat.
i hope you say the same thing about AI 10 years from now
I got more utility from AI within the first week of ChatGPT being originally released than I've ever gotten from crypto, and I've had bitcoin since they were giving it away for free on Tor lol<p>They're not even remotely close to being comparable.
It is not even remotely the same comparison. AI has real tangible use and benefit. Crypto has none except scams and get rich quick.
> AI has real tangible use and benefit.<p>I agree. AI is useful to layoff thousands of employees as we have already seen, hacking companies and governments with agent swarms and also helping with accelerating cyber crime.<p>Now anyone including script kiddies can tell an AI agent to build an exploit to attack a website of their choosing the moment they find a vulnerability.<p>You cannot say it is useful (which it is) and it does not also accelerate and amplify all the negative consequences at the same time.<p>> Crypto has none except scams and get rich quick.<p>Stablecoins are quite useful for companies such as Stripe, Shopify, Square and others for payment of goods and one can send stablecoins around the world on the same day, 24/7 with extremely low fees.<p>Crypto is not the one that will cause the next financial crisis. That will be AI.<p>Thanks to the $3TN (and counting) debt that is now becoming a massive risk to the point where big tech companies are hiding it from their balance sheets [0] with Oracle and even CoreWeave being the most likely to default first. [1]<p>[0] <a href="https://archive.ph/DgKzp" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/DgKzp</a><p>[1] <a href="https://siliconangle.com/2026/10/14/shares-of-oracle-neoclouds-drop-on-coreweave-debt-concerns/" rel="nofollow">https://siliconangle.com/2026/10/14/shares-of-oracle-neoclou...</a>
AI might ruin all white collar labor power and drown the world in useless work via things like expand-message-with-AI --> summarize-message-with-AI. Meanwhile with cryptomemes you can remain unaffected unless someone manages to ransomware you.