I'm not afraid of looking like I don't understand - I simply don't understand. I've tried reading a few "yellow papers" for crypto projects and they are so abstract and full of jargon that I never come away knowing more than when I started reading.
If anyone has a good resource for getting into the technical details of crypto please let me know. I would like to gain a full enough understanding that I can finally decide for myself if it's revolutionary or overhyped.
In some cases, this is by design. The project is nonsensical and/or a scam, and the white paper is an obfuscatory smokescreen to provide an illusion of sophistication.
A lot of what we do might be sophisticated in some far corners, but at the end of the day the end results can be trivially explained.
"Taxi ordered from a phone app, "Sleep in other people's homes", "Restaurant delivery service with GPS tracking", "Exercise bike with a screen showing workout videos", "Someone else shops for you", etc.
Unfortunately with crypto, a lot of it is trivially explained as "obfuscated scam"
I don't think anyone ever claimed these were complicated or sophisticated, though? They're straightforward user-facing apps. A more comparable example might be cloud services or a good chunk of security products.
Fundamentally, we've been making digital versions of everything. We have digital phone calls, television, bookkeeping, document writing, drawing, etc.
One thing we didn't have digitally was a currency.
Why would we want a digital currency? For similar reasons to all the other stuff above. It's more convenient. When you "transfer money" from your bank account to another, your bank has to physically move the associated cash from it's vault to the other banks vault, by hiring secure trucks, people, and so on. If the money has to cross a border, that's even more of a hassle, now you have to physically cross a border with a truck full of cash. When a bank "holds onto your money", they need a big vault full of cash, they have to count it, account for every dollar, physically safeguard it, etc.
This is a huge cost, inefficiency, and a big challenge of banking, and it's one reason transaction fees and banking fees are so high.
Now we have an idea of why we might want to make a digital currency. The biggest issue with making one is how do you solve the "double spend problem". That is, if I have 1 unit of a currency and I give it to you, how do we guarantee I no longer have that unit after it was given to you? In a physical world, I'm giving you the actual unit of currency, but in the digital world I'm giving you a copy of it, it would be easy for me to keep my copy as well and have an infinite money glitch.
The solution to that is simple, you have a source of truth that processes the transaction. That source of truth records that I had 10$ and you had 10$, I gave you 1$, and now I have 9$ and you have 11$.
That's easy enough. Here comes the second problem, who would trust owning that source of truth? Would you trust me keeping the official source of truth log of how much money everyone has? I could easily add myself a few 0s to my account, or remove some from yours.
Would you trust the government of your country? Of another country? A big corporation? A US charity?
This is where crypto comes in. Crypto says, nobody would ever trust a single entity, but what if everyone could join a network of nodes that together form the source of truth? Not owned by any single person, but the union of everyone who wants to join the network, and you could join the network, I could join it, anyone is free to join it, and we can all validate and check each other's work to make sure no one else on the network is fudging the numbers.
And now a lot of complex cryptographic math comes in to from this network.
While I'm sure some of this is true for some banks at some point in history, this is the kind of understanding of a given industry that results in TechBros reinventing buses or juicing machines.
> This is a huge cost, inefficiency, and a big challenge of banking, and it's one reason transaction fees and banking fees are so high.
The reason banking fees are so high is because they charge what the market will bear, and most of the banks customers are a captive audience. It doesn't cost $2 to perform a transaction at an ATM; it costs pennies, if that. Banks should be paying you for holding, and putting to use, your money.
>
> This is a huge cost, inefficiency, and a big challenge of banking, and it's one reason transaction fees and banking fees are so high.
That's absolutely not how this works though. Banks perform electronic transfers and most of the money is accounted for in databases. The problems are slow, antiquated, technology, which is made worse by the amount of regulation surrounding it that makes it hard for new contenders to enter and drive down prices via competition.
Cryptocurrency is trustless, but there is an interesting tangent about if you _do not_ want a government to control monetary policy.
That hasn't been true for, uh, centuries. It's like literally the entire point of banking, to allow financial transactions to take place without having to physically haul around collateral anywhere.
(And if you want a digital version of what banks actually do, it's called SWIFT, and has been around since checks Wikipedia 1973).
See https://www.bbc.com/news/business-38499883 and elsewhere.
It’s really telling how poor the knowledge of financial history and the existing state of the art in traditional financial tech there is among people in the crypto-boosting space. Many of the “innovations” they claim have been around in traditional finance for hundreds of years.
Payment settlement is a solved problem and very rarely involves physical cash transfer. Most of this is just numbers moved between accounts which commercial banks have with a central bank.
That's several centuries out of date, I'm afraid. Even before computers banks didn't actually do that, but now they certainly never do that. They just change records in their books - it has been paper books once, now it's just database files. I mean, banks do move cash (still do) but not when you transfer money from account to account, it has nothing to do with that, unless when you're running a massive cash-based business (which most banks hate btw, for many reasons).
That’s not at all what happens!
Transfers are done digitally, physical cash does not move between vaults or bank branches.
Someone completely misunderstands how the real world works, misrepresents that even more when trying to articulate, uses convoluted wording to hide their total lack of understanding of the real world. Then create a "solution" for the problems that do not exist in the real world in the first place, in the process reinventing problems that are solved for centuries already or running head first into ideas that have been proven multiple times in history to just not work.
This whole machinery is then used by criminals to launder money, scammers to scam people out of money and speculants hoping to get rich quick, providing real money liquidity for the previous two.
In the meantime we can make some money off it legitimately, so why not.
For example, there have been a lot of novel or interesting projects centered around cryptography, consensus, decentralization, anonyimity. On a sociological level, there are a lot of interesting social/economic experiments unfolding in the DeFi world as we speak.
But I think that is where the truly interesting or valuable contributions to humanity as a whole end, and the vast, vast majority of it otherwise is just speculation or scams. It is hard to find that signal in the noise, but it is there, if you look.
On technological level? Yes. On the bullshit scam level with sixteen layers of new invented terminology? Most likely not.
And yes, cryptoworld is easier to understand precisely because it's unbelievably primitive once you pull apart hype, scams, and layers of indirection.
Edit: oh, it's also busy re-inventing most of the concepts that the world has had for centuries, and most people understand without needing to read books and whitepapers
Blockchain is pretty simple. There's a database, organized in a way that you can add records to it but you can not edit past records - or if you try to, everybody would know you did. There's a network of people maintaining this shared database, as a payment ledger - basically, this database for them says "X has $Y amount of database-money". People participating in maintaining this database get paid in the same database-money. They have incentive to do it properly, otherwise their database-money aren't worth shit. They also have incentive to steal if they could, but since they can't edit the database without other people noticing (who aren't interested in having db-money stolen from them) it's hard. That's the basic level of cryptocurrency systems, very shallowly and simplified, of course. If you want to know the math and protocols, there are full college degree programs dedicated to it (I am not kidding at all, there are). There's even free courses on Coursera and such which deal with the basics.
The second level is allowing to do other, more complicated stuff with the same database. Like keep ownership records for other things (that's basically NFT). The next level is turning it from passive database into a computation engine, so you can make computations that will be reproducible over the database. That's ethereum contracts and such. There also side aspects - like privacy chains, where the information who owns the money is encrypted, so you can prove you own the money but somebody else would have hard time seeing how much you got and where it came from (it's usually very easy in most chains). Etc. etc.
Whether it's revolutionary or overhyped - I have no idea. That's kinda societal question, certainly all the above (and more) can be useful and you can build useful stuff on top of it. Would some people use it? Probably. Will everybody switch to it from existing ways of doing things? I have no idea, but I suspect no. But I am nobody, so it's worth nothing. A lot of people smarter than me thought there's a use case for certain things, and spend a lot of time and money building stuff, and nobody every used it. Take Meta - the whole "metaverse" thing, nobody even remembers it now. There are many things like that. Is crypto one of them? I dunno. We'll see.
I empathize with the author, I really do, but you can't care about someone more than they care about themselves. If anyone has had the supremely unpleasant experience of trying to get loved ones to work out, they know. The last time someone (democrats) tried to tackle healthcare, they lost scores of seats all down the ballot.
https://www.quorum.us/data-driven-insights/under-obama-democ...
Democrats losing support can be explained by several reasons that have nothing to do with tackling healthcare. It can be the fact that it ended up being a weak half measure in comparison to the strong desire for a universal healthcare system. Or completely unrelated to healthcare altogether, like the Hilary Clinton scandal fiascos.
The claim then is that people don't care enough about having public healthcare (or are actively against it) for it to be a politically popular goal.
One problem with this argument is that insurance companies disagree and nobody with any power in the US seems to want to move away from the "insurance provider" model.
You can't get most Americans to care about anything they consider "socialism", and if you try too hard you'll get Trump.
> but you can't care about someone more than they care about themselves.
Human history tells us that we don't make it through alone. We thrive on social structures and forming coalitions. Sometimes we get down and our friends and family put in work to pull us back. Your claim is the mental equivalent of "I can't lift someone up more than they can lift themselves up." Sorry, but if all they've got is bootstraps then you bet I can lift them up high into the sky while they can only lift themselves as high as they can jump. I'm pretty sure most people can't jump onto my shoulders and I'm confident none could jump that high and stay without support. Stop asking people to fly and look down at who's shoulders you're standing on
None of them work cross-border. And one suspects the US Government is working very hard to make sure they never do (look at the money laundering accusations against the Brazilian system for a recent example).
“Reaffirm UN SDG: Global average cost of sending $200 remittance to be no more than 3% by 2030, with no corridors with costs higher than 5%” “75% of cross-border remittance payments in every corridor to provide availability of funds for the recipient within one hour of payment initiation and for the remainder of the market to be within one business day, by end-2027” “More than 90% of individuals (including those without bank accounts) who wish to send or receive a remittance payment to have access to a means of cross-border electronic remittance payment by end-2027”
[1] https://www.fsb.org/work-of-the-fsb/financial-innovation-and...
These technologies didn't fix the problems. There is too much regulation, you can't do anything without a license. The only solutions are political, not technological.
Everything feels like a scam within a scam. I feel dizzy just thinking about it. I'm completely demoralised. Everything related to career feels pointless, sisyphean because of the bureaucracy and monopolization. Any work that pays well is useless at best, harmful at worst. It's either illegal or impossible to do anything which might provide value to people. Even if all the hurdles could be removed, I'm not even sure I want to contribute... For whose benefit? And I feel totally disconnected from the broader society around me.
I basically completely checked out career-wise. I'm good at faking though so I just fake it. I just started bullshitting my way through life. I hate it but everyone is just eating it up and loving it. What can I do? Just give the people more of what they want I guess. Value creation doesn't pay, bullshitting pays... People are living a lie and they love it when you build on top of it. If you just say the right words, they will deny their own eyes; this is what COVID taught me and I can see this in my day-to-day life. It's depressing, they are good people, that's why they assume good faith. I was just like them before, living in a bubble, I understand, I'm no better than them, just less fortunate. If they saw what I saw, they would probably do what I do. Many would do worse.
I feel like I need therapy from being this way. I have bills to pay though. I think I did everything approximately right but I've been ridiculously unlucky. I was operating on limited info and incorrect assumptions. Now, I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place.
It's illegal to be homeless in my country. It's illegal to live in a tent on 'your own' property, you are not allowed to build your own house without some expensive license and approvals... You can't do shit within your means. All the things which seemed unimportant to me before are now the centre of my life and on that plane of existence, I see scams all around.
> Everything feels like a scam within a scam. I feel dizzy just thinking about it. I'm completely demoralised. Everything related to career feels pointless, sisyphean because of the bureaucracy. Any work that pays well is useless at best, harmful at worst. It's either illegal or impossible to do anything which might provide value to people. Even if all the hurdles could be removed, I'm not even sure I want to contribute... For whose benefit?
None of this is because of regulation. It's all because of greed and unchecked grift and profit capture. Technology is making the world worse because of greed and capturing profit, not because of regulations. The work most of us are doing is harmful because of greed and capturing profit, not because of regulations. Everyone is living a lie because of greed and capturing profit, not because of regulations. These uncountable scams are all because of unregulated greed and profit. People on HN are mad, but they're acting out against an imagined "regulation boogieman," not what's actually causing all of the shit.
But it's hard to fix greed. The solution to fix greed is way more radical, it's violent. The greedy will defend their interests with violence when confronted. The only non-violent solution I can think of is to let the system collapse, under their own direction. That's the only way the greedy would relinquish enough control to allow people the freedom to get things going again. There was a bit of this after COVID but it wasn't enough.
I just hope people can maintain their sanity through this. I hope it's not going to be an endless cycle of society repeatedly rebounding off from rock bottom... Never actually lifting itself out of the muck but basically always scraping rock bottom with only short temporary breaks.
As a developer, the system and code complexity we have to work with is increasing to the level that it should be considered mental assault. You need to develop a kind of apathy to get through life.
The regulation + limited liability combo takes away fear. The big companies doing harm love regulations, they breathe a sigh of relief when regulations are introduced. 'Regulatory clarity' they call it. They barely even know what harms the regulation is trying to prevent. They are disconnected from that.
The whole purpose of regulations is to reduce accountability (because instead of taking responsibility for their actions, entities instead just follow the regulations). It's not an accidental bug, it's a fundamental design flaw in the system.
Disagree. Zoning law and regulation-driven credentialism are the closest thing to a root cause you can find for most of the problems with modern society; sure you can say "greed" but that's a permanent part of human nature, and most societies find a way to live with it. Today's world where for a family to succeed both parents have to be putting 40+ hours into bullshit fake work in a circular economy of bullshit fake solutions to bullshit fake problems so that they can afford to get their kids the right bullshit fake qualifications is a distinctly regulation-based phenomenon.
> These uncountable scams are all because of unregulated greed and profit.
Sure. But are they actually any worse than the regulated scams? Often the licensed and regulated stuff hurts the end victim more than the direct scams.
The regulation is there to reduce the amount of scamming and con artists. It's the same reason we have Blue Sky Laws.
> Bradley Lott-Tillery, 24, from Arizona also entrusted Yotta with his savings, thinking his money would be protected by the federal government. “I emailed [Yotta], made sure it was FDIC insured. Of course, they emailed me back and told me, yes, it’s FDIC insured, which we now know is not true,” Lott-Tillery said.
> While the banks with which fintech companies like Yotta and Juno partner are FDIC insured, this only kicks in when a bank is found to have failed. Since the intermediary Synapse filed for bankruptcy, but not any of the banks, the money is not covered by the regulatory agency.
https://businessjournalism.org/2025/03/synapse-collapse/
(their money was "insured" in the same way depositing money in a random guy's bank account is insured: it's not insured against the guy! these bank-shaped companies managed to convince a bunch of people that they were close enough to banks and about as safe, and then it turned out they all handed the money over to the same fintech company to interface with the actual banks, and that company went messily bust)
want to elaborate which country this is?
And I am talking about myself here. My only excuse is that I simply don't use my money. Which is not necessarily a good thing either.
Repeat after me. Do not use technology to try to solve people problems.
Someone responded like "lol, sure, we can find some sociologists to start programming our apps", and I thought Damn. That's really missing the point. And it seems so arrogant. Like, not only do we laugh at the idea of people doing our jobs, we also need to laugh at the idea of the relevance of their fields.
Yet we really should depend on their insights to further our field, in my opinion. No profession truly stands alone, just like no person does.
I think we'll get better about this over time. Right now we've definitely got some growing pains.
Even in computing, a profession dominated by scientists and engineers, has a lot of failing. Even the damn SPEC benchmarks don’t know to average numbers correctly.
I am saying the solution to make people smarter or empower the people. Buy now pay later, credit cards, and all these bespoke algorithms is just an illusion to make people feel better when they get ripped off.
When I was growing up, I didn’t understand check cashing places, payday loans, the layaway counter in the stores, home equity loans, reverse mortgages, auto leasing, and such.
And looking back, I’m amazed how much nonsense is out there. These are more traps than tools.
And what I am saying is that this sentiment, right here? Is exactly what leads to your later observation below, because the only ones willing to pay someone to implement a technical system, are inevitably the greedy ones looking to extract value from the suckers, and pay a techie to o make the little blinkenlights do their thing. You can't look at the technical side as the "hero" in this encounter, because the technical is what is propping up the fintech dystopia in the first place.
>I am saying the solution to make people smarter or empower the people. Buy now pay later, credit cards, and all these bespoke algorithms is just an illusion to make people feel better when they get ripped of.
You are dead on with this observation, but again, the answer to this is not something the technical world can solve. It's a people problem. We have to start talking about how whether these practices around are fundamentally exploitive or not, and whether they have a place in our society. Whether we should even be trying the money lenders offering them. That set of questions is firmly in the realm of people problems (problems that are fundamentally questions of human interaction, and whether something should or should not happen), rather than the technical, to which most systems in the fintech basically boil down to being a CRM, a set of ledgers/accounts, an invoicing/bill payment system, and some email/login/account viewing screen.
As someone with over a decade having been wasted trying to find a way to genuinely help people through the financial/insurtech sector (I know, what an idiot, right?), you cannot use technology on the service provider side, without it morphing into a more efficient value extractor, and often the other side of the transaction, the ones being fleeced, are in the worst place to say no in the face of a tech enabled lender.
Hence, I know it sounded sort of glib, but I'll say it again. No using tech to solve people problems.
I mean look at something like the Rabbit R1. I'm an AI researcher and I saw my peers get fucking excited about it because it was a leap ahead of all the state of the art research we knew. Sorry, but what? It takes time for research to get into a product, sometimes years, even in tech, even in the fast pace AI world. Like you think they put what normally takes at least one $10k GPU and put that into a $200 device? That they could leverage GPT and not have a subscription fee? You're not going to beat ChatGPT by using ChatGPT lol.
Somehow stuff like this keeps happening and we never learn our lesson. Author is right, they're just chasing. And the irony is that that chase is actually preventing us from getting what we're really chasing
This will break, sooner or later.
When external buyers stop buying treasuries US will have to massively inflate its money supply, taking bondholders and a bunch of other groups to the cleaners. Such events have a lot of collateral damage, which may fit the definition of financial blow up. But I would place us much further away than 6-12 months, likely at 5-10 years. If there is a viable alternative to US treasuries, potentially sooner, but still not in 12 months. My 2c.
In the shorter term...
NVIDIA is 8% of the US stock market.
88% of NVIDIA’s revenue comes from enterprise-scale GPUs primarily used for generative AI, and half of that is purchased by only 4 companies, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta.
By the end of 2025, these 4 companies will have spent over $560 billion in capital expenditures on AI in the last two years. Their AI revenues? Around $35 billion.
And then there's Tesla, which is 'worth' more than Ford, GM, VW and Toyota combined.
So, 6 out of the 7 largest companies in the US are in a strange position.
Only Apple, the laggard in AI, seems relatively safe to me.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondex (Mastercard)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Cash
And there is ongoing from the BIS https://www.bis.org/about/bisih/topics/cbdc/tourbillon.htm beside that there are many CBDC projects designed for inter-banks usages or some for wide public usage.
Of all of the supposed use cases for NFTs, this is one of the silliest. If you've ever looked into video game modding, one of the things you tend to realize is there is nothing close to a standard model format for art assets, so it's an insane amount of work to get an item in game A imported into game B, and that's only considering the work in mapping the visual design--the work that goes into mapping item properties is in some cases just "there's nothing you can do." (And this is despite there existing just three software packages that gets used in practice to make this stuff!)
I understand why that would have been a road block in the last, but my hunch is that this type of problem (mapping visuals and item properties) is something AI would make quick work of.
I think this is successful in its goals
Liquidity providing on concentrated liquidity pools is something I would like to see in the high volume US equities market
But will realistically only exist on tokenized platforms that trade their surrogates
It’s extremely lucrative and was only in the domain of market making firms before this technology
A lot of these things are lucrative until they're not. If they are inherently lucrative then that profit will diminish as people catch on.
back to what I'm a fan of: CLMMs (Concentrated Liquidity Market Maker) is a very competitive field. The level of profits depends solely on volume and amount of capital participating. You are counting on other capital getting bored and moving away, as well as volume rising. Thats the game, it will always be the game. Its already "lucrative until its not" so its not really a gotcha or that insightful for those passing by. I'm glad you have some experience with it.
I feel like at this point there isn't anybody defending stablecoins who isn't using them primarily speculative investment/trading. There has yet to be a usecase for distributed ledger that isn't solved better by a centralised ledger other than niche counter-culture solutions whose users are typically blinkered to the fact that they are already a self-selected techno-elite who can't bring their utopia to the commons. That ended a bit more nasty sounding that I intended, apologies.
Although the current government is having a good go at reducing the value of the currency, it's barely budged on the chart.
This is the only new thing. Maybe.
check binance & other markets - e.g convert USD 10 to USDC
Of course, if you're a US citizen transferring 200k USD from Chase to Bank of America, crypto doesn't make any sense.
People hold dollar-backed stablecoins because they believe the US dollar to be the most durable unit of account on the planet.
All the proof you really need for that is that most crypto users outside the US still consider the value of their crypto tokens in terms of how many US dollars it’s worth.
The author of this article talks about this being a “parasite” to the US monetary system, but it’s hard to think of a better thing that could’ve happened for the US. Not only has it reinforced that dominance… it’s also driven hundreds of billions of dollars of US treasury bills purchases from providers like Tether and USDC.
what about situations where centralized ledgers won't serve you? e.g. someone who wants to buy drugs, or sex workers want to get paid. And you mention "niche counter-culture solutions" but I don't think it's so niche - in 2002, the government of Argentina stole 2/3rds of everyone's savings by forcibly converting their dollar-denominated bank accounts into pesos at a terrible exchange rate. Not having to worry about this because you have a trustworthy government is nice, but it puts you into an elite class of your own.
Do cryptocurrencies provide value to people living in third-rate hellhole countries? Perhaps, because they are connected to the outside world. Ideally you could just have a foreign bank account that your country cannot touch. If the big governments gang up on crypto exchanges, then crypto will be worthless. The only reason they don't gang up on the exchanges seems to be that they (the people in government) use crypto for nefarious activities and money laundering.
The technological innovations of cryptocurrencies make for good thought experiments or puzzles, but serve as a distraction from their inevitable uselessness.
Doesn’t solve the problem as these assets can still be seized by foreign governments.
I don’t understand your point. You said that crypto is only useful as long as governments use it for nefarious purposes and money laundering — so basically it’s a guaranteed relevancy in the future, no? How is that inevitable uselessness?
How easy is it from most people in the world to "just" open a bank account in another country?
The problem stablecoins are solving are self-inflicted: KYC to open a bank account, restricted nationalities, account freezes, capital controls, taxation over-reach, etc.
At some point someone figured out that if they start over, there is a lot of “value” to be unlocked out there; and paid/lobbied/sponsored the right person to execute on that.
I think you’re right to criticize crypto as a techno-elite project. However I think stablecoins have a legitimate use case for billions of people who don’t have access to good banks, or a stable currency, and can’t afford traditional fees. IMO it’s one of the best things to come out of crypto.
As I understand it, many countries in the European Union use distributed ledgers for elections. Essentially it lets you cross reference votes and store that database across servers in multiple countries. It also prevents post-election data tampering by the state holding the election.
My understanding is this this system is not an open to every random Joe who wants to have a server (like bitcoin is). I think you still need to be a state actor to be part of the distributed database (so it's not a zero trust environment).
(Unfortunately, I don't have any good links to back this claim up)
What crypto is already useful for is not to replace the cash in your pocket and your savings account. It is useful to replace SWIFT and Fort Knox.
What crypto will be useful for in the future is uncertain. But uncertainty does not mean pie in the sky. How the internet would be used was uncertain in the 70s.
Yes, nerds were already excited about the internet in the 70s. Have a look ath the "Mother of all demos": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos It takes decades to iron out the details of how to use fundamentally new technology.
Fear of change. Is there any new technology that HN is in favour of?
As I pointed out last time, Bitcoin was released at roughly the same time as the iPhone. Nobody needed to wait for use cases for the iPhone: the global economy immediately reoriented itself around the smartphone, because it delivered massive amounts of obvious value to customers. If this isn’t happening around cryptocurrency, at some point you have to face facts that it’s because the value isn’t there.
That is what I mean by point 3 in my comment.
Surely more business is being done with crypto today than was done using the internet in the 80's.
I've been paid my salary in crypto for the last 8 years. The company I work for pays nearly all their expenses in crypto. I pay for my rent and most major purchases with crypto. A significant portion of my savings is in crypto. For fiat purchases, I'll use a reloadable crypto visa card. When I travel to foreign countries that mostly use cash, I'll usually exchange crypto for local currency rather than carry large amounts of USD or deal with sketchy ATMs.
Where's the value creation? At some point value has to be coming into the system, and as far as I can see that side still all bottoms out in crime or scams.
> For fiat purchases, I'll use a reloadable crypto visa card.
I've always felt those were an admission of failure of the whole crypto enterprise. All of the downsides and none of the upside.
Some of its use cases such as having a "smart" personal/digital assistant on the computer helping organize your day are only popping up now thanks to the combination of LLM tech, model self hosting and MCP protocols.
Only took 50+ years, right?
But it seemed pretty obvious to me more than a decade ago what cryptocurrency would be useful for. I remember the ideas flying around in the early days.
It's been a bumpy road...but then, I also remember through the late 90s (and especially after the dotcom crash) when there were countless takes on how the Internet (and PCs in general) had been vastly overhyped. "Computers were supposed to eliminate paper, but we're using more paper than ever! We were supposed to do all our shopping and get our news from the internet, but Sears is thriving and I still get my daily newspaper every morning!"
Somebody could absolutely have made a book out of all the overpromises of the "Internet Superhighway" era.
The path to general use for cryptocurrency has been, and will continue to be, rocky. Moreso than the net. It inherently involves money--lots of money--and so it's been rife with scams. "Nigerian Princes" on steroids.
But I can tell you guys: before the rush of investors and crazy bubbles, before the scams and collapses, long before hucksters like Trump got involved, there was a group of people to whom the potential of cryptocurrency seemed obvious.
Fort Knox still exists. US gold reserves are still increasing:
https://www.statista.com/graphic/1/188843/united-states-offi...
Yeah, it's basically Uber for finance/banking/etc. Reap the free real estate created by rules and regulation by..skirting the rules and regulations.
It also adds indirection, which in turn allows all the parties involved to point fingers at each other Spiderman-style. "Oh I thought $X was responsible for $COMPLIANCE." Eventually, y'all get audited and shape up but that's a years-long process. And in that time you've grown and grown and finance/banking/etc is pretty sticky. Kaching :)
And I’ve never felt clear on how people trust wallet, hot or cold — at some point they connect to the internet for transactions, and all the vendors seem suspect. I really doubt most users are building their wallet from code reviewed cryptographically signed source… but maybe I’m wrong?
Having no other way to do these simple things, from my point of view, it is not a problem of hundred thousand people in Venezuela, it's a valid problem of tens (if not hundreds) of million people around the world.
IMO The author significantly underestimates how limited and inaccessible the current financial system in the world is.
Also, what is this headline even about? Why the bashing on fintech? I worked for 4 fintechs and communicated with many more, not a single one was blockchain related.
Why is this even on hn?
If you want to read proper criticism of blockchain, read Molly White's essays instead
(And to be clear, I’m someone who has never been particularly enthusiastic about crypto or blockchain.)
If the latter, I think that explains why stablecoins are popular in countries with weak institutions.
In a country with strong laws, and strong rule-of-law, "Code is Law" is a solution in search of a problem. But in a country with weak laws, it can be a lifesaver.
Consider living in a country with an unstable and fiscally irresponsible government. And having a net worth <$10k. Suddenly being able to hold your money in USD, on an account that cannot be seized, and can be used globally, becomes incredibly attractive.
You don’t need financial literacy, there is no min-buy in like ETFs/bonds, and there is minimal KYC or other identity restrictions. I think this is an incredible boon for the billions of people living in such conditions.
Is it high fees, is it overly burdensome sanctions/AML checks, something else?
This is just one example of a few factors that lead to a sort of isolation from international banking.
The flipside of this is crypto turbocharging online scammers.
"The industry in Cambodia now generates more than $12.5 billion annually – half of the country's GDP, according to the United States Institute for Peace."
"The criminal gangs entice trafficking victims with fake job offers posted on social media and then force them to financially exploit people online including through fake romances or “pig-butchering” schemes in which the scammer builds trust with a victim before stealing their money, Amnesty said."
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/amnest...
The scammers will make friends with someone online, persuade them to deposit increasingly large amounts into a "crypto trading platform", then finally run with the money.
Crypto has created an alternative financial system with many fewer rules. This can either be good or bad depending on the circumstances.
I think it has the potential to be a good thing in the long run. In the short run, however, people need to learn to instinctively distrust crypto as a scam. Especially if the situation involves a friendly attractive lady you've been chatting with online who's really good at trading cryptocurrency and wants to share her secrets with you.
E.g."Stablecoins won’t bank the unbanked, because people get stablecoins by purchasing them on a crypto exchange, and no crypto exchange will open an account for a customer unless they have a bank account."
Well, I understand that US has dystopia level of financial surveillance, but in many places in the world you can change cash in person to crypto without many issues. And you don't need to use any major exchange for that, that defeats the whole point.
And yes, Russians, Iranians, Palestinians are known to use crypto, for example. And the majority of them don't have US bank accounts.
One of the core features of crypto that it's not an American (or anyone else) thing, like paypal, stripe, or any other system and American laws can be easily ignored if both parties are outside of the US. That's already a very liberating feature for at least a billion of people of nations hostile to the US and potentially to 8+ billions of people more.
It's not an 'all-or-nothing' thing.
Those are instruments which already help many people (those you define as questionable for some reason). I'm actually pretty happy to see that the world has a tool to help millions of people with "questionable" religious, cultural, political, ideological views or sexual orientations. That reduces the pressure and advantage of people who want to make their lives harder.
If you don't need it, don't use it. That's totally cool. It doesn't have to be global. To be honest, I don't think anything needs to be global. That gives too much leverage to a single group at the expense of everyone else. The world is better off having many options for everyone.
Democratic solutions are, imho, doomed to failure. In order for them to work a significant portion of "take back control" and "make my country great" brigade will need to have some kind of revelation about the direction of society as a whole. Given the amount of resources pumped into keeping people separate and fighting one-another, this seems like naive optimism.
I consider this to be a woefully inadequate response to a vast, complex and thoroughly embedded set of interconnected issues. Appropriate solutions will require a deep appreciation of complexity science, radically better system design and, frankly, a level of imagination, determination and competence that simply doesn't exist as a social norm, and will not emerge for at least a generation (or three), given that educational and political institutions are so deeply rooted in the current mode.
I don't think Bitcoin is revolutionary - it's just algorithmic scarcity - but I do think that distributed ledgers are an important piece of a future puzzle, as they provide transparency where previously it didn't exist. That said, there are no silver-bullets and not everything should necessarily be held on one.
My position is that, until we actually address the misconception of infinite growth within economic system design (i.e. not by external constraints, such as taxation), we haven't even started. Some may say that Bitcoin already does this, but its capture by the financial sector demonstrates that it is, at best, another asset class.
My anticipation is that this won't happen, so I am fully expecting a kind of looney tunes moment as we race off the side of the cliff. I am interested, not in preventing that from happening, since I think it is inevitable, but rather on planting bushes on the side of the cliff that might give us things to grab as we fall. Feel free to accuse me of either pessimism or optimism.
That worked in the U.S.
European banking regulators saw through this ploy and forced them to seek a banking license.
dotcoma•7h ago
jb_rad•2h ago
dotcoma•2h ago
https://fintechdystopia.com/chapters/chapter3.html