But, how else would you have driven towards your goal of building a new financial system?
What if the end result is harmful to society?
You're changing the subject. Nobody is arguing that the author is irredeemable. On the contrary, the author seems to have recognized his own mistake and changed his course, at least to an extent. The question is whether the author's years in crypto were a waste, and I would say that it's indeed a waste to spend 8 years on something just to "learn" that one shouldn't have done that thing.
> Everyone makes mistakes
This is also changing the subject. Everyone does not spend 8 years in crypto.
I've made some big mistakes, and I think I've also wasted a lot of time. The wasted time was not "valuable" by learning that I wasted my time. It was simply regrettable.
On the other hand, I don't think I've ever spent a lot of time and effort on an activity that broadly harms society. I don't need to do that in order to learn that I shouldn't do that. Some things are just blatantly obvious in advance, or should be. You shouldn't need to dedicate your life to crypto to realize it's all a big casino.
> I don't think I've ever spent a lot of time and effort on an activity that broadly harms society
Me neither. I worked in the cryptocurrency industry, sold drugs, interacted with gangs, and a bunch of other stuff but none of them broadly harmed society, so seems we're more or less the same on that point.
But everyone's frame of reference and reality is difference, there is no absolute truth here, trying to paint it as such is actively doing a disservice to any sort of discourse we could have about the subject.
One could surely argue that making "paid browser extensions" somehow have a net negative impact on the world, and if that was proven, would that mean all the time you spent on those sort of projects were suddenly wasteful and you should have realized this up front? Seems inhumane if so.
Of course you can learn from your experience, and the author did learn from his experience, which is the entire point of the tweet, so the author doesn't need to be told that he can learn from his experience. He already knows!
Nonetheless, the author considers his time to have been a waste.
> meaning it wouldn't be a waste
This does not follow.
> I worked in the cryptocurrency industry, sold drugs, interacted with gangs, and a bunch of other stuff but none of them broadly harmed society
Ok...
> One could surely argue that making "paid browser extensions" somehow have a net negative impact on the world, and if that was proven, would that mean all the time you spent on those sort of projects were suddenly wasteful and you should have realized this up front?
If that was proven? Well, prove it. Go ahead, make my day. Otherwise, this is just a silly piece of sophistry with no applicability.
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.
Now the uninformed gambling on futuristic sounding hokum? THAT is easy to understand.
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.
The initial people still exist, although they are few compared to the money people who've infected the ecosystem.
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
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.
edit: by "murder and steal" I generally mean something that is "lawfully and/or morally disallowed"
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.
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.
Again, there is no "LaunderBTCAndTurnIntoUSD" function in the Bitcoin protocol...
> get it out of the banking system into crypto
And please describe how you do so without involved A) banks who look the other way and B) registered companies who handle the on/off-ramping from/to BTC.
When people argue that it makes it so much easier to launder money, please spend at least a minute to actually figure out how that will work in practice, and you'll understand that Bitcoin makes the laundering HARDER than what it is with cash, not easier...
There is actually a BitcoinToUSDPipeline. The real problem is that the exchange crypto transactions are NON REFUNDABLE as you know, that means once it leaves the banking system (via making victim register a coinbase or kraken account, or register it for them using their credential information and compromised webcam for liveliness checks) you have an unlimited amount of time to do whatever. There are also various real life ways of bitcoin atm, using card to buy <1k giftcards (no kyc).
Okay you have your money in bitcoin, now what? Well, welcome to dex - decentralized exchanges. Using smart contracts you can wrap your btc into eth-btc, using etc-btc you can now trade it to any other crypto currency no strings attached and the most popular currently is tron.
Tron has tons of merchants which will simply swap from a to b from two different liquidity pools and those transactions are done off-chain and exist only on their database, since there are usually dozens of transactions mixed it becomes increasingly difficult to continue your investigation without having to use the slow legal route which is especially difficult if the merchant is offshore often ending up in a dead-end, at that point only INTERPOL really has the power and resources to trace it. Liquidity pools are used for perfectly legal reasons and it is not like tornado cash.
Now you have two choices: just spend the money directly (in Georgia (the country) everyone accepts crypto), buy giftcards or if you don't really care and aren't doing anything interpol would be interested in just deposit to binance and withdraw to your bank account, depending on your local government they might not even care.
Great, finally someone in this submission who know what they're talking about, exciting!
> in Georgia (the country) everyone accepts crypto
Oh no, another larper. You cannot walk around Georgia expecting to pay everywhere in BTC/USDT like you would with cash or a standard card, and I'm not sure what you're basing the information on because it's surely not based on personal experience.
Guess we'll continue waiting for people with actual knowledge to drop by.
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).
So many Western governments and their elected officials? The US? Israel?
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.
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 regular people who don't need to justify their economic transactions or risk their wealth being diluted. This "criminals" angle is just farcical, ignorant, and also very tired... you're not the first to suggest it.
all the 3rd party summaries/interpretations of this paper are problematic. Read the original.
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.
I wouldn’t put my house in an S3 bucket…
Proof of Work is highly inefficient and inconvenient. I agree to this.
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'.
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?
Proof of Stake is actually highly efficient; it's basically a ledger with dynamic runtime replication ability.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
This may not help much, but it's really a (self-)governance thing. That's why they start their article like so:
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
It doesn’t mean that Bitcoin using blockchain is stupid.
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.
Or, maybe, 40 years working in IT turned me slightly cynical.
If you mentioned NFTs though you’d be spot on
Read The Big Short by Michael Lewis. You could even start with the film by Adam McKay who also gets it. Then read Other People's Money by John Kay.
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.
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.
The problem with 2008 was corruption not monetary policy.
And, mind you, I only purchased/sold legal stuff.
instant, fee's a fraction of a cent, I thought this was it, international payments that don't rely on visa/mastercard!
and then it just went no where :\
However a currency was grafted on, is used by millions and has a $1.7tn market cap. Seems real.
Yes... During a hype rush, sell memes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusion...
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.
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: https://blog.dshr.org/2025/09/the-gaslit-asset-class.html
You can compare that to USD M0 which is $5 trillion or EUR M0 which is around €4 trillion.
Not bad for an "extremely inconvenient database".
The crypto ecosystem though is totally disconnected tho...
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.
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 would never own a crypto but working with the current financial system can make you feel like a criminal more than crypto at times… :)
you understand how to construct complex & stimulating games that people will play compulsively for money. that’s good.
next, craft games for which you can guarantee a house edge. should be small yet assured.
you’re already an experienced casino game developer
I'm glad OP has been enlightened. Growth can be painful.
There are paths towards redemption - the author could begin by donating every ill-gotten cent to a worthy charity.
What's that? Crickets? Thought so.
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.
Of course, had I held onto those, I'd be set for life now. But hindsight is 20/20
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. "Store of value" won the war, and soon after "moon lambo".
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.
Well, there's your problem. Here is a potentially interesting math paper that comes to very different conclusions: https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/BTC-QF.pdf
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 valid academics 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.
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.
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.
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).
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 mean, isn't it the goal of US libertarians?
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.
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.
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.
They are very far from the end of their story, but the midpoint, so to speak, has been passed.
chistev•9h ago
spicyusername•9h ago
Once you stop visiting a sure regularly, it's easy to forget it's still "real" to some people.
lurk2•9h ago
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.
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.
achairapart•9h ago
https://nitter.poast.org/kenchangh/status/199485438126794764...
Or
https://xcancel.com/kenchangh/status/1994854381267947640
Liquid_Fire•9h ago
> This page is not supported. > Please visit the author’s profile on the latest version of X to view this content.
...I am using the version which their own server just served me.