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Once you stop visiting a sure regularly, it's easy to forget it's still "real" to some people.
But, how else would you have driven towards your goal of building a new financial system?
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.
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
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.
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"
all the 3rd party summaries/interpretations of this paper are problematic. Read the original.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
The initial people still exist, although they are few compared to the money people who've infected the ecosystem.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
And, mind you, I only purchased/sold legal stuff.
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.
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.
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 :\
> 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 .
If you mentioned NFTs though you’d be spot on
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.
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.
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.
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… :)
ANYONE can calculate the sums, anyone can verify and proof hashes, identity is kept secret, trust is installed with hash checks for each and every voter - etc etc etc.
It's certainly more airtight than the solution we have today - where trust and efficiency can both be compromised fairly easy.
and he said no, because you also can't do this. Bitcoin has not solved any problem there.
But the more I look into it, the more I wonder: if one Bitcoin can be split into 0.1, 0.01, 0.001 or even smaller fractions for transactions, doesn't that kind of undermine the whole “fixed total supply” idea?
Also, sure, cryptocurrencies are decentralized in theory and the transactions are hard to trace. But at the end of the day, anyone holding crypt is still very much under the control of governments. You can't magically escape regulations or enforcement just because the currency is "decentralized." It's an interesting tension between theory and reality that I don't think enough people talk about.
Looks like other people still trying to solve as well:
> Earlier this year, Coinbase changed online payments forever with a new protocol called x402. But could this technology really usher in a new age of 'machine to machine' payments? Let's run it...
The fixed supply describes the total sum of units that have been issued, and that are intended to be issued in the future - it doesn't relate to the divisibility of those units.
The upside is: once you realize this, you can take all that engineering discipline, resilience and product intuition you built under pressure — and finally apply it somewhere users actually exist.
HN commenters claimed it was dead
Was it something the state enforced, or something being done by the agents of the transaction (ie the mortgage company)?
Typically one of the properties people want from elections is the inability to prove to soneone how you voted, e.g. to stop someone from going, prove you voted for my candidate or i beat you up (or dont give you the bribe). Your scheme wouldn't support that.
At the end of the day you are always just working to make someone else rich or to give them the promotion they want. If you get rich yourself along the way, take that as a win.
Bitcoin has a great mythology associated with it. People over emphasize the technical aspects, i think its the "story" that made it succeed. Its about taking back "control" from the man. People love an underdog story, people love a rebellion story. Lots of people in the tech space are anti-establishment or libertarian. Bitcoin is the perfect fulfillment of the dream of that ideology.
When people try to sell bitcoin, they aren't selling merkle-trees, they are selling "freedom".
I think if it was actually just about digital currency, then chaumian ecash would have taken off. It technically has a central party but not in a way that matters. It makes so much more sense than bit coin. But it doesnt have the total freedom story.
> 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.
I mean, it did work. It is a shitty currency no doubt, but you can buy and sell stuff with it. There are bitcoin atms in my neighbourhood. I think the bigger mystery is not how anyone thought it could be a currency, but how the hell something so silly actually sort of became one (albeit bad one)
And yet, as you say, there's no mass adaption (yet). All it's doing is making tech bros and speculators even richer. It's possible that wider adoption will eventually happen, but as years pass this claim gets harder and harder to make. It's not any easier for "normal" people to use than it was ten years ago, and the main use cases are still "speculation" and "paying for drugs", also just like ten years ago.
From someone who also genuinely thinks the underlying crypto tech is fascinating, it's hard not to see the "currency" part of it as a kind of cancerous growth on the world economy.
Bitcoin was just a waste of talent and resources.
Believe it or not, banks don't ferry around cash to each other. It's all just numbers in a computer.
Github is nowhere near the world's "central and only" service for Git, so what am I missing to not laugh about?
The downside of a global distributed database (no matter what) is the speed of light, if you need ordering in any transaction you are in trouble, and no classic service requires that for all transactions in its scope, we figured out partitions, row locks, and shards a long time ago.
It obviously has no pseudo anonymity, is literally the least democratized banking system in existence, and is subject to the government’s whims in a whole host of ways. But it is a digital ledger of massive sums of real dollars (the banks can ask for it in cash if need be), and you couldn’t really steal the money even if you managed to create an unauthorized transfer on some bank’s master account.
This seemed like an amazing innovation to me, made even more amazing by the fact that it was, by all accounts, the original protocol.
You could do some pretty amazing stuff with it, for example store a SPA on chain and then store individual posts on chain, and have the SPA read the app.
Unfortunately, the ecosystem was completely greed focused, and nobody is interested in technological advancement in the slightest.
These statements still surprise me to this day. If you're a good person engineer, why does sending money in seconds need blockchain? There's parts of the world where this is commonplace and free as well.
I don't believe cross border was there in 2010 or so but why not implement that feature in an existing system instead of building out a parallel universe
Nonsense. Your funds can be frozen with no recourse even if you're innocent. No-one will tell you what you supposedly did wrong. Everyone who hears about your predicament will make up reasons to believe that you'd done something wrong because they want to believe that the system doesn't make mistakes.
In order to be that currency it cannot be volatile. Ask any country with high inflation how useful their actual currency is...
Bank transfers can be quick but also can be slow so fair point there.
I dont experience much friction paying for things though so I dont feel I need crypto for that.
If you're an engineer, no matter what you say about the method, you know a country at war will make you lose all your savings. Or if you're a foreign citizen in a country that will seize your assets, even "by accident".
Vitalik touched upon this briefly in an other-wise long and wide-reaching essay. I think its a good treatment of the topic that the author is talking about. He categorizes the ecosystem broadly into 4 cohorts- [token holders] (which includes investors, speculators, etc.), [pragmatic users] (actual end-users who spend crypto to buy stuff), [intellectuals] (who give the vision and ideology), [builders] (of blockchains, apps, etc.) - These 4 groups come together but with different motivations and there is a gap in understanding between them. Indeed, there is even resistance against trying to reach an understanding - one which plays out in the comments section of every crypto-related post on hn. The author of this twitter-post clearly falls under [intellectual, builder] and has been disillusioned by the speculators from [token-holders]. Yet the [token-holders] are a vital component (as are the other groups) as they fund most of the development and adoption. Ultimately these 4 groups have more in common than not. The challenge going forward is to balance the occasionally conflicting needs of all the 4 groups, which includes checking the excesses of each group, while try to achieve a consensus. (Vitalik provides a nice diagram that maps out what that would look like). Crypto is an experiment in economics and economics is a science as well as a social-science. Anyone looking for a good solution must seek to understand and address the psychology of all the actors involved.
https://x.com/saylor/status/1878154748353818932
> "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."
The answer to your question is humans' inability to resist printing money out of thin air if it's possible to, and the disastrous effects it has on the world. Bitcoin is money that can't be printed out of thin air by anybody. The only way to obtain it is by providing work of equal economic value.
Look up the M2 money supply over the decades and realise that each time it doubles, the value of your wages, savings and pension are halved. Worse still, that value is stolen, sucked out into the hands of the people above you in the fiat pyramid scheme (see the Cantillon Effect).
It's one of the most important inventions in the history of mankind. This is because it shuts down the biggest scam in the history of mankind - central banking. Bitcoin's positive effect on the world is to restore power to the people and end their monetary-based enslavement - the changes will be profound.
When incentives reward casinos over products, even talented builders end up optimizing for the wrong game. That lesson applies far beyond crypto.
This doesn't pass the sniff test. Everyone must store the full blockchain in order to verify it. So to run a full node you would have to store everyone's JSON, HTML, music, videos. Full mirroring for every node in a distributed system is about as close as you can get to the definition of doesn't scale.
Just like those airplanes of bills shipped to Iraq, etc. in the past.
Sure, I suppose. You'd need zero knowledge proofs for the reversals anyway.
>"one of the properties people want from elections is the inability to prove to soneone how you voted"
Your political party affiliations AND the fact on whether you voted is already public knowledge in our current electoral system; so 2/3 aren't supported now anyway. That said, my scheme DOES support all of those; it wouldn't tell you the identity of the person that voted for "Person A", so bribery or extortion is NOT in the cards.
If you somehow get access to someone's license, their hash won't tell you how they voted - just that they have already voted. And like I said to another commenter, if they beat you to a vote by using your ID (or whatever form of government ID is decided for the hash, they're all numbers anyway - we can just as well do social security), then in the current system that's bad - but id.me and real are already doing early-stage multi-factor authentication use cases for otherwise deterministic identification methods. Which is long overdue anyway, and I'm not sure too many people who would morally oppose such election reform if a byproduct of it being passed and enforced is an additional reform on deterministic identification.
If you give someone your block ID that says how you voted, then yeah ok - but you can do that today by taking a picture of your ballot. People brag all the time with photos of their ballot on election time - that's your choice.
> ANYONE can calculate the sums, anyone can verify and proof hashes
This is completely false. In fact, at the scale of a country, almost no one can actually do this. 95+% of the population doesn't have the knowledge required to do something like this and understand why it works. And while in principle they could learn to do it, they don't have the time and energy and other resources to spend on this.
And this is a deal breaker, as having the population believe and easily able to convince themselves that their elections are free is an extremely important part of democracy, especially when things are not that rosy.
>"If you somehow get access to someone's license plate, their hash won't tell you how they voted - just that they have already voted."
If they beat you to your drivers license information (or whatever form of government ID is decided for the hash, they're all numbers anyway - we can just as well do social security), then in the current system that's bad, but id.me and real are already doing early-stage multi-factor authentication use cases for otherwise deterministic identification mediums. Which is long overdue anyway, and I'm not sure too many people who would morally oppose such election reform if a byproduct of it being passed and enforced is an additional reform on deterministic identification.
So this statement is "you can scale blockchain tech by using another tech in its place that doesn't offer the same guarantees".
Everybody gets a copy of a verifiable hash etc when voting, allowing voters to mathematically check their vote.
The kind of knowledge allowing to design such clever algorithms is the real meaning of the word "crypto" (cryptography).
Purchase and sale of bitcoin is highly regulated and obviously tracked - and the blockchain itself provides little privacy - I’m guessing state-level actors have already attached identities to most of the wallet addresses out there.
So if I hand you access to $1 billion dollars - cash or in a bank account - how could I practically get $1 billion dollars to an individual in Uganda so that they could spend the dollars?
Answered them. Introducing 0 knowledge proofs was a good point but blockchain can still be a medium to utilize these possibilities. I don't believe a conventional database or transparency log can meaningfully substitute the decentralized nature of blockchain for such an operation, though; and I said as much in my replies.
>"This is completely false. In fact, at the scale of a country, almost no one can actually do this. 95+% of the population doesn't have the knowledge required to do something like this and understand why it works."
Why can't I apply this logic to current election systems? You can memorize and regurgitate a usa.gov or National Archives article to articulate it - but 95% of the populace doesn't actually know about those ballot counts, ballot transportation, result tallying, transmission and communication of said results, implications of Independent State Legislature Theory and how challenging it - at least on originalist grounds - can cause 50 different processes for each of the 50 different states, etc etc etc.
There is no more wasted time, energy, or blind trust than in the current system, and at least introducing zero knowledge proofs, blockchain (or another system) and cryptography to the electoral system can be rooted in the pragmatic AND be abstracted to a layman from any given savvy person, of which there's many. Even in the long term. As it its, it's not like independent researchers or cryptography nerds haven't called out institutional-wide folly; it's what happened with Dual_EC_DRBG, and was promptly laughed out the door for any serious cryptographer and highly publicized.
As for the rest, it's well known that the data is collected and retained on voter information as it is. We're seeing states like Colorado, just this past week, deny giving the current federal administration voter data from the previous election. You can reasonably predict roughly half of America's voting anyway; when their timeline of party affiliation AND the knowledge of whether they voted or not is already public information.
Because, most of the time people say that just in the context of the blockchain. In that sense I can also say that you can control vast majority of money by just having knife and glove skins in Steam (for the game Counter Strike). You also can trade/send/receive. But the moment you decide that you want to convert to "food" all sorts of problems arise that are worse than what banks offer.
I'm telling you as a person who received salary in crypto while living under sanctioned country
For example, if I send cash through the post office, and I don't sign the envelope, that is a form of anonymous payment - it's impossible to tell who sent the payment (assuming there is no footage of the post box where I deposited the envelope, and I left no DNA on it, etc). If you receive a second payment, it's impossible to tell whether it came from the same person or someone else.
Even if every voter gets a hash and can check that their vote is in the log, you still have a bunch of places where a central actor can misbehave: Deciding who gets to write to the log in the first place, rate-limiting or dropping submissions, or running split-view logs in the event that there's not a ton of replication - hoping that wouldn't be the case in an election.
With a (properly designed) blockchain, you at least push those assumptions into a consensus layer with many writers/validators and game-theory penalties for rewriting its history. It's still not magic; but for something like elections, I'd rather minimize the points where a single operator can tilt the playing field, which is why I was thinking "blockchain" instead of "centralized transparency log"
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energ...
We're currently all subsidizing the AI industry. When we solve the energy problem then we can talk about potential benefits of LLMs
Yes it is possible for the state to inflict violence on you, and if the state wants to, it probably will do so. Putting your money into internet tokens instead of state backed money will probably just get you tortured more until you give up the keys, or die. Crypto isn't some "one weird trick" to prevent the state from taking your property and possessions.
- Tool/facilitation of "brick and mortar" crime, as well as some cybercrime (moving drug money across borders, way to pay ransom in a way difficult to track, etc).
- Tool for scams.
- Hacks, including (but not limited to), on-chain hacks.
I know a lot of people who made 9-digit sums in crypto. None of them invested or traded coins (none were from the 'crime' category either). Most typical kind of people are those who did hard-core (hundreds of thousands of accounts) sybil attacks on ICOs and launchpads in their heyday in 2017-2021. So it was scripting/scraping/cloud deployments using residential proxies/buying passport scans on darknets.
Also those who ran Solana nodes from massive sybils too (up to 200 people - it's 1 node per person so one has to have many persons). While that probably qualifies as speculation/"trading" Solana, servers being little but a booster, so in part it was "casino".
A heartfelt "Thank you!" to Ken on account of having at least the courtesy of saving cool people's time by putting the Origin Story into the first sentences.
That problem already has solutions. The problems cryptocurrency is supposed to solve are, I want to buy subversive literature from someone I already trust not to rip me off, or for an amount I'm not worried about losing, without anyone requiring me to give them a government ID. Or I want to sell it to people without requiring them to give anyone an ID. I want to donate money to Wikileaks. I want to commission art or software from someone in South America who doesn't have access to US banks. I have the same name as someone on a list and I want a way to move money without the government ruining my life. I live in an oppressive country and I want to finance the rebellion, or buy contraception or some other thing which is banned by the baddies when it ought not to be.
It's for doing the things where the existing system fails you, not the things where it works. But it can do those things too. Cash works the same way. You're not worried about a restaurant stealing your money because by the time you pay them you've already eaten. You're not worried about Newegg sending you a brick with "lol" written on it instead of a GPU because they're a well-known company and if they did that it would cost them more in damage to their reputation than they'd gain from the theft and people would sue them independent of payment method.
You don't always need your trust in other people to come from the payment system when it can come from a dozen other things instead.
There are builders and there are opportunists. The builder's goal is to build something useful. Often the most useful things that you can build are not going to earn you a single dollar, but a builder will still go ahead and build it.
The opportunist is just trying to make personal wealth, which could come from the pockets of end customers, or investors, or other speculators (the "greater fools").
A lot of people made a lot of money from crypto and blockchain, even if ultimately almost everything built in this ecosystem is inconsequential trash.
- store of value
- unit of account (a measuring stick for value)
- medium of exchange
Allowing the financial system to inflate the money supply destroys two of those fundamental qualities. The fact it can additionally charge interest on the money funnels the stolen value into its hands.
Interest on money loaned out is the only incentive required for putting money to "productive uses". Nothing about hard money affects that. In fact inflation only causes the people at the top of the pyramid to hoard all of the economic value instead. They are buying up and hoarding the entire world with the wealth they are taking from the people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payment_System_%28Unite...
The promise was to make this available for everyone, to send money everywhere.
For example for me in Sweden it's really, really hard to send money directly to people in Ukraine since the Swedish banks simply refuse to send money there.
How do you stop inauthentic licenses?
Perhaps some sort of central authority?
This is the main problem with most of the blockchain/crypto issues is that its all fine until a dispute, and then we all fall back to the state to sort it out (ie the legal system)
Russia's invasion of Ukraine completely hard-flipped this overnight. America once again became the good guys of the world, and with it died any serious movements to disrupt the USD and greater financial status quo. More critically it also started the narrative that China might do to Taiwan what Russia is doing to Ukraine. It basically brought the world back into the late-20th-century good guys in the West versus bad guys in the East bipolarity.
what you're arguing for is a system that you understand and can verify, but not other people.
You're also missing the bigger issue which is that voting systems vary by state, which means to do what you need to do would require federal/constitutional change.
Plus how do you verify and guarantee the terminals are not tampered with (especially as they are all going to be digital, and securing hardware in remote locations is fucking hard. )
Much as its not fun, paper votes with local counting stations are harder to corrupt universally (unless you have government collusion)
Anybody here that loved the books and would care to elaborate it speak to them so much?
The issue is that crypto boosters (including a few already here) claim it solves a whole host of other problems without thinking things through, kind of like some communists. Then if you argue enough they'll point out that things can be fixed ... but bitcoin is now indistinguishable from any other currency, other than its payment system that will no longer be widely used.
Like, you can make it easy to use if there are banks. And those banks will be subject to regulations. Boom, now you have banks and regulations.
You can get a loan from those banks. Now there's fractional reserve banking, with something like a virtual gold standard.
If it ever gets big enough, the fed can write bitcoin denominated bonds, and it's now prerty much a fiat currency, not even virtual gold.
Yes you still have a shadow sector where you can use bitcoin to buy drugs or dodge the taxman. But all the other supposed benefits have gone.
Still, whole thing is saved by not enough people actually tracking it to that level.
And on other side, BTC tracks every single transaction ever. Which is also detriment, that is we keep everything stored forever in lot of places... Which kind seems massive waste.
We have to remember 2008 was 17 years ago. People who were born during the crisis are now adults. The tragedy is there might not necessarily be another huge crisis. We blew it 17 years ago. We didn't fix anything. People stopped talking about financial reform about a decade ago. So now we might just have to live with a system where a few elites are creaming the top of the money supply. A system where the brightest and most talented people go and work for something like Jane Street, spending their days playing games and trading bits of paper with each other, causing real effects for people doing actual work, but adding nothing of value themselves but taking loads.
This Douglas Adams quote explains a lot:
> I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
Let's go through these. To begin with, "fraudulent transactions" is redundant because that's either someone stealing your credit card number or someone you paid not doing what they said. So let's consider those two:
> people stealing their credit card number
This is the problem caused by the existing system, which is designed with such poor security that breaching a merchant allows the attackers to make charges to their innocent customers' cards at a different merchant. They get zero credit for providing a mitigation to the problem they created themselves.
> businesses charging them and not delivering goods
This gets sold as a benefit, but it's also a cost, because then it becomes a mechanism to commit fraud. People go to a business that does deliver the goods and issue a fraudulent chargeback. The merchants then have to pass the cost of that onto everyone else, which means that it's also a fraud against every other customer.
Meanwhile we have other solutions to that problem that don't do that. Established businesses don't want to ruin their reputation. If someone rips you off you can sue them. Sometimes you're just paying someone for something they're already delivered.
And most importantly, there instances when you would trust someone to deliver the goods independent of the payment system, and other instances when you wouldn't. Which is why you want both payment systems to be available instead of just the second one, so you don't have to pay for the chargeback fraud when you don't need to buy your trust from the payment system.
Also, as you point out, BTC is a massive waste of resources and storage space.
Neither of these are how you actual voted so they don't really matter.
That said, as a non-american, the party affiliation thing is super weird.
---
> If you give someone your block ID that says how you voted, then yeah ok - but you can do that today by taking a picture of your ballot.
And in many countries this would be a crime and have legal consequences.
But that again, is such a low niche and something that includes exchanges fees too
Recently I wanted to get a domain name on black friday so I went to namecheap and paid them 10 $ in crypto, I had to pay 80 cents to an exchange to convert my usdc polygon to btc to then + some btc fees because namecheap just accepted that
I am a teenager so technically buying this domain pseudo-anonymously (yes I know I can do things with monero too so thus anonymously too) is the only real use case
I think stablecoins have potential to atleast remove this stripe/paypal/visa/mastercard etc.'s monopoly and allow cheap payments
Honestly I wish UPI from India or Pix from brazil were implemented at a global scale, they are so good.
My thoughts are nuanced but since I am a teen and yes I have a bank account but it cant be operated fully until I turn 18 by me, its all just complicated and crypto kinda solves some aspect of it
But this whole field is niche too and most people who build on these primitives basically build gambling as the author said
Here are my thoughts on crypto that one time I was on HackerNews on a similar thread and wanted to give a proper space to my thoguhts: https://justforhn.mataroa.blog/blog/most-crypto-is-doomed-to...
Let's say you loose your wallet. What do you do next? You call your bank to block your credit card and to take an appointment with the administration to make a new ID, driving license etc. The cash in your wallet is gone but everything else isn't. The process is annoying but at the end of the day you'll be fine.
Now if all this is based on a private key and you loose it, you're completely done, you're just not part of society anymore.
No one will ever embrace this because humans are messy and make mistakes all the time. Crypto and blockchain are so resistant to mistakes that for this specific case it's just not good at all.
You use monero to do those things or zano or freedomusd and similar things for these but I didnt understand the conclusion of this statement
Basically you are saying crypto is just an less regulated fiat nowadays?
A legal curry of tech jargon just meant to replace laws and regulations?
"Why do house prices endlessly rise?"
"Why am I working so hard in such a technologically advanced world yet can't even afford to raise a family?"
Once you see the reason, you can't unsee it.
We also have Gresham's and Thier's Laws on our side.
Subversive literature printed on blotter paper.
Outside of buying sex and drugs the only uses for cryptocoins are, and always has been, ransoms, scams and gambling.
But most of the engineering around blockchain was to improve throughput (ie off chain transactions)
Its not like you can really do fractional reserve banking on the blockchain, well not practically. this means that you can't treat it like "money" ie the ever increasing supply of non-central bank controlled cash (ie your eurodollar, yen etc.)
There is no utility in stablecoins. They are basically joint stock company, but without an income, or case law to help you when it goes pop. Of course they are popular because they have no regulation and can basically do what banks do, but without any of the oversight need for stability/fraud prevention. "we are going to act like an investment bank, and create money, oh no, not by securities, but by word of mouth, that word being pyramid."
I think the main issue is that our current credit/debit cards primitives can be stolen/worried about, there are companies which accept your free tier and will auto charge you and hope you forget etc.
Another issue is privacy, Crypto provides some privacy by having usdc <->monero <-> usdc <-> pay where you want.
Another issue is for teenagers, I am a teen, I can't create a banking account but I have accepted money for 0 fees well technically but exchanges are a mess and I have used those to buy domain names and similar via crypto.
I think that there are stable cryptocurrencies with low or 0 gas fees so it can allow some primitives like just having a public key online -> convert it to respective token's -> send lets say 0.1$ as a token of gesture and then like it can enable a sense of microeconomy but the people who try doing it try to mess it up by having their own coins or whatever whereas I believe stablecoins should be the one doing it
Personally I really prefer gold tokens because that is the best way to get "yield" in my opinion because most places like aave etc. kind of work via providing liquidity to traders or this gambling and due to ethics and just in my opinion, gold coins since pegged to gold have an 100x more volume which is genuine.
Personally as a teen, I have always loved the tech behind crypto because it can enable somethings impossible but its current implementation with 0 pegged coins,trading/gambling etc. sucks and is scummy. I think stablecoins are genuinely really nice
I have shared it in another comment but frankly let me reshare it : https://justforhn.mataroa.blog/blog/most-crypto-is-doomed-to...
Man, I really wish if there was someone who can work with me accepting crypto usdc <-> bank account as I know people in some industries who want to work with crypto but crypto is regulated with them in their country basically or like personally although I stay away from crypto even though I have built things on top of it (nanotimestamps), I would love working in stablecoins but I think that the market is saturated and it requires a lot of regulations and funding to establish a new stablecoin and for what basically when there are already good enough options?
Personally I dont think much of what I said makes sense if you are an adult (90% of the population) 90% of the time, privacy makes only sometimes sense when you are buying something very privacy sensitive and want to fundamentally be unable to link yourself with that identity
So mostly crypto would just be for ephemeral things, like I buy some monero right now instantly sell it to someone, like no need to "hold" things imo or only holding a very small amount
Or it can be good for teenagers which I wish man, people should do something about it.
Also for less transaction fees that visa/mastercard etc. take, I wish if companies can implement UPI transactions/Pix transactions or some system expands soon relating to it but UPI is genuinely so good that most of you do not know what you are missing out on if you aren't Indian. I have heard good things about Pix too
Something that outside of the US is solved by SWIFT, or the state equivalent of instant bank transfer. Most of the rest of the world has instant, or near instant bank transfers. The US doesn't, it has venmo or similar.
- private (as in privacy) store of value without necesity to build a vault (or trust a 3rd party for storing)
- Transfer of money by immigrants "back home". Good luck sending money to Cuba or Venezuela right now
- Micropayments / Webpayments via Lightning (TradFi failed on this) - you can literally send 10cent right now to someone at the other end of the world - or pay for a news article.
- Decentralized / Ad-free social media like Nostr. Pay with micropayments for everything (hosting, forwarding, micro-donation for content). If you look at how damaging the ad-based social media economy is fighting for engagement and attention, it is obvious society is better of without Instagram/Facebook/Youtube/Tiktok trying to get you to watch more, to get more ad revenue
- Insurance against dictatorships taking over free democracies. If monetary policy is not done my the government, they can't use it to control the people. In Bitcoin, the people are deciding and voting on monetary policy independent of the government (miners, node runners/validators, acceptance of transfers etc.)
- Insurance about fiat devaluation (governments printing money)
Not perfectly. A lot of heuristics are needed to link a unique owner to multiple transactions. With bitcoin, it's recommended to use a new address for every transaction so, for example, in a basic transaction, it's not so easy to identify which output is the recipient and which is the change.
And there's Monero that tries to hide these links a lot more.
The US has a large bitcoin strategic reserve. Banks offer bitcoin accounts (in some countries). You can get a loan backed by your bitcoin.
We're not yet at the point where you can get a credit card and 60 year home loan denominated in bitcoin, with the fed writing bonds or even issuing fiat to stabilise rates, but if it was more popular then is there any technical reason we couldn't get there?
I like some aspects of Ayn Rand, I like some aspects of crypto. I like some things Elon did.
One takes in info, incorporates it into ones world view. One does not go nuts following just one gospel as absolute truth.
This piece has nothing to do with Ayn Rand, or Crypto. It's just another example of how, when you're young, some oversimplifications can make you feel like you really understand the world. It's important to guide the young ones through this phase. I also remember putting down Atlas Shrugged thinking I'd find THE WAY. But it's the start of a learning process. Models (as in the models of the world we build in our heads) are useful, but always approximations. One needs to learn to appreciate that. For me that came with age, OP is going through something similar.
Only as long as its use for the former doesn't outweigh its use for the latter. Trying to resist a government by using a digital currency is putting the cart before the horse. The dollar is an abstraction and an accounting convenience over the genuine temporal powers of the consensus that issues it.
There's the possibility of double spending by committing to the bitcoin blockchain an old version of your "database", but then you would face the penalty of having your entire balance confiscated by the other party.
More details here: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/67141/how-is-a-d...
He's now wiser than the average Randian acolyte, but still seems to think this structural feature of capitalism is somehow unique to cryptocurrency.
That's just a self-fulfilling prophecy. Obviously the early adopters are going to be the people for whom the existing system fails, but if you use that as an excuse to ban it or otherwise make it an insurmountable inconvenience for ordinary use through regulatory suppression then you're just preventing people from using it to buy lunch, not preventing them from using it to buy drugs. Which is useless and spiteful, especially when you're not going to address any of the problems that caused people to want it to begin with.
The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks
In many rich countries, all signs point to nasty inflation for the foreseeable future. Bitcoin is inflation-proof because there is no central bank that can print more Bitcoin. Having a secure system with that property means accepting some tradeoffs in terms of usability and efficiency, compared to a centralized database.
It was an ad that started off like a typical quality coffee ad, nice pictures of beans, people harvesting, some roasting etc. But than it switched to the topic if making sure that "fair trade" was really applied - switching to IBM Blockchain and claiming that through the use of Blockchain there is safety that everything went fair trade.....
And i just thought.... sure... your blockchain approves that those workers harvesting got paid fair... or does it? All it actually does is proof that someone inserted the information that they got paid fair. If it really happend? Noone knows. Therefor Blockchain is a representation of what you feed into it nothing more and nothing less. At the moment it touches real life - as in the fair trade/payment for coffee bean harvesting - especially in countries where alot of payment is still for dayjob/cash - there's no way the Blockchain can assure that everything went the way it is stored as.
> Interest on money loaned out is the only incentive required for putting money to "productive uses".
And what is the incentive to loan money in your system?
Someone from the operational team just learned that business relies only on the first group to be successful.
That's exactly what Bitcoin was for.
I don't know where you live, but most places it's the banking system which fixes the citizens, not the other way around.
Only way I imagine being able to fix a bank is with a brick through the window. It's why one level up from where I'm at banks are closing their physical locations, keep no cash, and only have people for 1-2 hours in the morning when only the most obedient are awake and not occupied.
However because opaque anti-fraud stuff, that I am not informed about, I was stuck in the middle of a field trying to convince someone in a call centre that the car I could see with my own eyes (and I had done all the appropriate checks) does indeed exist. This whole process took almost an hour because their anti-fraud team has a two hour response time.
There are obstacles in the banking system that make doing legal transactions difficult.
Your argument seems like "only criminals want privacy" which is a no.
>>And this is a deal breaker, as having the population believe and easily able to convince themselves that their elections are free is an extremely important part of democracy, especially when things are not that rosy.
And it's currently not the case at all.
I think blockchain is a terrible idea for about anything. Electronic voting is hard. Voting is hard. It doesn't change the fact that the current system is a complete security joke .
If a corrupt third world government is scared of a piece of tech, it is, imo, good tech
Only if the other party notices in time that you did this. You are reliant on active monitoring of the blockchain to know that your transactions actually happened. And the more you want to scale (i.e. the more transactions you do on a single Lightning channel without settling it on the BTC blockchain), the bigger the risk becomes.
Back in school we used to do things like "dare" people to do something or bet on a coin toss or something with the stakes being a snack or a desirable bit of stationery. I feel like everyone believes there is some clear boundary where things suddenly become "grown up" and "real". Do you remember when you became "grown up"? No? Nobody does. The secret is it never happens. The only difference is children have no "real" assets to play with.
What makes some derivative traded on Wall Street, like a "synthetic CDO", any more or less meaningful than alt coins?
It doesn't take a lot to figure out that hard currencies with some supply cap tend to hold value better. BTC might not be it - it might be gold or silver - but you really can't ignore the inflation issues inherent in fiat currencies anymore.
Sure, you can hope the state won't find out about your crypto, but then how do you enjoy it?
So you're back to square one
Plus, the system overall is dead simple, first grade math skills are enough to understand it: we just count the votes in every precinct, and sum up the votes later up. No hashes, no smart group theory schemes, nothing complex.
This also supports and funds the productive economy, unlike crypto.
You could do worse than building crappy blockchains
By not using your cash (by for example holding crypto) you’re making the money that circulates higher value
Instead of being a true rival to FIAT, it became a thing with a toxic-as-hell commumity, fraud, and basically its nothing more than a high risk stock. The risk is NOT only "will this go up or down" but you have a high risk of being robbed, as have happened to millions of people.
Maybe there will be a better alternative in the future, but right now bitcoin is not it.
Bitcoin was to be an alternative to FIAT, but it ended up being nothing more then a meme-stock that consumes more energy than Poland or Argentina.
Its sad really. But the greed in people turned it into shit.
$100 put into gold in 1975 would be about $2600 today, or about $440 in 1975 dollars.
S&P 500 would have had 3x the returns of gold.
What should you do? Censor their transactions? Who gets to say who gets censored?
Like democracy, bitcoin is for everyone, including your enemies.
That is a very shallow take. There are real non-criminal uses for crypto that people in stable, wealthy countries often overlook. Millions rely on it simply to move money between family members across borders when traditional banking is slow, blocked, or outright inaccessible due to politics. In several countries, people use crypto to buy food, medicine, or basic goods because their local currency is collapsing or their banking system is dysfunctional, or their entire nation has been cut off from the global financial system as a decision of few politics persons.
Its fine to criticise the scams and speculation — there is plenty of that — but pretending thats the only use case ignores the people who depend on it for everyday survival.
I'll even allow you an imaginary thing as long as it's constrained by the real world.
https://www.macrotrends.net/2324/sp-500-historical-chart-dat... https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-...
This means bitcoin's average price will go up forever when priced in fiat tokens. Or anything else for that matter - even gold's above-ground stock doubles every 35 years. How's that for an incentive?
The largest amounts of value will always settle in the best store of value for large amounts of value. Show me one with better fundamentals than bitcoin.
There are conditions on every payment system. With bitcoin you also have something to do to prevent double spending: wait for some number of confirmations (and making sure you're on the right chain).
And "double-spend protection guarantees of blockchains" is very dependent on the cost of doing a 51% attack, so it's not strong by itself. It's very strong in bitcoin only because the quantity of hashrate/money required to do one is astronomical. It's not so strong on small blockchains.
And I fail to see how the risk increases with more transactions on a single lightning channel.
If crypto allows people to do something that was previously not possible(order drugs in the mail with the convenience of amazon, invest at consistently insanely chaotic conditions, run multimillion hustles with total impunity) versus doing something that was possible already, just re-skinned(make bank transfers), then it's really no surprise what will see better adoption. The biggest value-add is in the degenerate stuff.
Using a cryptocurrency (originally) meant basically opting out of the governmental violence-as-a-service for cryptocurrency/-token purposes and taking care of this aspect by yourself.
Depending on your resourcefulness and lifestyle, this may mean
- hiring personal security
- being very careful about privacy aspects, e.g. making it very hard to link your personal identity to your cryptographic keys; distribute your crypto-tokens among many keys so that if one key gets "linked", the attacker will find only few tokens there; use anonymization services; ...
- think about what mitigations you have in place against "rubber hose attacks"
- live a modest life so that people (and also taxation authorities?) don't get suspicious that you are secretly rich, i.e. don't boast about your richness
- ...
What if Henry Ford evisaged his Model T being used as a temporary alternative for when your horse is unwell? Or a fairground ride? Bitcoin is what it is.
> And what is the incentive to loan money in your system?
Interest - the age-old solution. Offer me interest that both compensates me for not having use of my money and for the risk of getting it back, and we have a deal.
It turns out this doesn't matter: you can't hear the inflation argument over the volatility. The amount of goods you can buy per Bitcoin changes dramatically on a month by month basis. It's just that everyone loved it while it was going up, but that's not actually guaranteed!
Also, you can't print more Bitcoin, but that doesn't matter: you can fork it (people have, BCH), or you can just endlessly spawn new token chains, or you can have things which both sides regard as abominations but are somehow immensely popular: stablecoins. These give you the legal stability of crypto tied to the price stability of the dollar. It turns out that what people actually wanted was several hundred billion dollars of virtual poker chips.
The argument is right here:
> Outside of buying sex and drugs the only uses for cryptocoins are, and always has been, ransoms, scams and gambling.
It doesn't contain the word "primarily" which indeed makes it false, and the rebuttal to your different claim is this one:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46190260
> Also, if you want privacy, don't use crypto.
Can you tell me another way of buying something over the internet without tying the purchase to a government ID?
I think this is a totally valid conclusion, especially for someone growing out of Randianism. It's yet another Chesterton's Fence, or someone discovering that the safety rails were there for good reasons.
I'm not sure how we got from the massive international overreach of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg to "sports gambling is now endemic and everyone has trading-themed gambling apps in their pocket". It seems like gambling is too cancerous: you can't just have a little gambling in a corner somewhere, it will take over everything if allowed to exist.
The utility value is now a pure gamble that a person tomorrow will pay me more than I paid for it today, thinking that a person in the future will pay them more than they paid. And that can be a powerful enough narrative to keep it going.
But if bitcoin disappeared today, 99.99999% of the world wouldn't even notice, that is how little of a problem it solves.
Anyway, the point is, imagine the scenario if ethereum overtook bitcoin in value. What will this actually do to the ecosystem? In my view, it would be catastrophic to the value of all coins, because it suddenly destroys the narrative of a "store of value" (the last lingering narrative). Any other coin could just overtake ethereum, and out of all the thousands of coins, which one? At that point, I think the whole thing comes down.
What you put on top is not the core value proposition of cryptocurrencies? It's what's underneath that's different, that was always the point. Fiat currency is built on a foundation of gov't control, whether it's the physical currency or the money in your bank account. Cryptocurrencies, fundamentally, are under no such control. If you're stupid enough to go get a 5mil loan in bitcoin from a bank who is only holding 1.7mil, and the delivery of said bitcoin is a slip of paper saying "iou btc lol" that's not the currency failing you, it's you acting stupidly.
If they truly feel sick about it, they should donate the money they made (or the vast majority of it). Otherwise, hypocritical is right.
> Look at what they do, not what they say
I remember Thailand letting everyone free with weed related crimes.
Or sometimes being a whistleblower is seen as criminal. Or if it isn’t seen as such but the government wants to view it that way, they will make it happen.
As I say, crypto is only useful if the whole world is already on the chain. Until then you need to trust outside sources which undermines the entire deal in trustlessness and undermines it in performance.
Some people saw it as an opportunity to push for an ideological agenda because you can convince a lot of people that cryptocurrency is a silver bullet (it's not).
These exchanges freeze accounts in fear of what governments might do to them if they weren't cautious/suspicious enough. They have no economical interest in freezing account otherwise, that's one less customer trading and paying them fees.
We, the people, make the rules. Replacing our democratic processes with finance controlled by the one with the most computing power, control of the software, or having horded the most of the tokens, is in no way desirable or realistic.
Even if the proposition wasn't borderline idiotic in the first place, there is no clear explanation how such a system should reward early adopters and allow them to cash out at a profit many times exceeding inflation.
It's all a scam.
Also, my point against tfa was less "the author holds a bad opinion" and more "the piece claims to talk about one thing, but actually talks about a completely different thing, drawing bad conclusions as a result."
- waiting for users to do very simple things (gather a few fields, expand a template, store)
- sleep during the night (as their users were sleeping too)
- emit very small amount of data
- struggle with security
- reimplement 70s business but on top of digital network
in some corners of society this kind of tools (doctor appointments) seemed to be a net benefit, you can now book your GP even if it's 10pm, the system was ready to fire.
and when I see some news on zk parallel vm for smart contracts i feel some valid technical quality..
but maybe it's really just a fools errand i don't know
> you could send a billion dollars to anyone in the world in a few seconds. That belief is powerful and I still ascribe to it.
I'm sorry, but that just seems idiotic. Ever heard about anti-money laundering or KYC?
It is not desirable to send a billion dollars internationally "to anyone" within seconds, and certainly not without checks and irreversible. The core idea was fundamentally unrealistic from the very start.
Its really interesting, feel free to use your favorite LLM to translate it :)
Similarly I believe that HTTP Live Streaming is using Internet...
Cryptocurrency was a hidden blade. People were drawn in on the promise of avoiding the things they don't like about capitalism, but then cut by a more unregulated version of the same.
If you're going to dismantle all of the institutions of liberal democracy and capitalism so you can send a billion dollars to somebody, why not just go ahead and get rid of money while you're at it?
Everyone talks about "decentralized bridges" but them end up as centralized swaps wrapped in jargon.
The hard problems aren't being solved, they’re being obscured.
Blockchain enables transparency from the farmer to the consumer. It does not ensure that the farmer was not coerced.
Finally:
We, the people, make the rules.
Compared to that for energy consumption, Bitcoin is superior really.
If your concern is the webshop finding out your address, well I’m unsure how you solve this when you buy with crypto, but again ship to your home. If you have an alternative place to get it delivered for privacy, might as well do that with fiat transactions the same way.
Accurate data illuminate a lot of things.
If we keep curtailing the former to serve the latter, we will end up perfectly safe from interruptions, doing nothing at all(aside from what the government dictates as 'serving the common good')
Nothing more? Proof-Of-Work wasn't innovative?
With fiat you have high risk of losing 50% of USD's purchasing value within 2 years, which already happened, and which is not far from being robbed, as have happened to millions of people too.
> Can you tell me another way of buying something over the internet without tying the purchase to a government ID?
Isn't the real question more, does crypto actually allow you buy things without tying the purchase to a government ID?
I'm no expert but I regularly see articles about de-anonymisation. This leads me to be sceptical about claims to privacy, certainly given enough time and motivation by a government actor.
(I just wish I'd bought more)
If you deploy a non-government fiat monetary system... most of your users are going to be people who want to avoid government currency controls.
Consequently, without a counterbalance, they're going to skew the industry towards their needs.
In the same way that allowing the largest advertising company in the world to own the most popular browser in the world has some conflicts of interest.
Money sets strategic direction over the long term.
When it was just a value exchange to buy tokens, it was fine, except that there’s a limited number of tokens and they needed supply to actually operate as an exchange so they became a trading platform and forex-like fraud house.
[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/11/19/n...
could you share some links here to these EU-supported projects?
Thats Gresham's Law
To take this a little more seriously, this is computer programming, very famously you don't need massive gobs of VC capital to build something. The only reason for the [builder] needs [token holder] is to hire [intellectual] to scam [user].
Oh and of course, [token holder] [builder] and [intellectual] are the same guy with 3 different anime profile pics.
For instance, the Bill of Rights doesn't grant you the right to free speech. You already naturally have that. It instead makes it unconstitutional for the government to try to hinder that right. By contrast the USSR and China both had/have guarantees of freedom of speech in their constitution, but they mean nothing because obviously you have freedom of speech by virtue of being able to speak.
You having the freedom of speech says nothing about the ability of the government (or private companies in contemporary times) engaging in actions making it difficult to exercise that speech without fear of repercussion. Or as the old tyrannical quote goes, "There is freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech."
If I give you a dollar bill with the serial number 100100, it's impossible for you to prove that bill came from me (unless you have forensic evidence of me giving it to you, of course - but that's equivalent to having photo evidence of me typing in my private key to a BTC wallet) . If you find a dollar bill on the street, it's now yours, you can't know anything about its previous owner.
In contrast, a BTC address is a unique identifier for someone who owns the BTC. The blockchain stores all addresses that it ever interacted with, so even if you create thousands of wallets, they can all be-anonymized quite easily if one is, as you can track how money was sent between them.
Personally I prefer usdc on polygon
Basically Lightning is like a tab that you open in a bar. You perform various transactions on the tab, and only settle later. No one would say that you're using Visa when you tell the bartender to put some drink on your tab, even though at the end of the day or week or whatever, the transaction will go through Visa.
Then two things happened: people figured out that it's actually very easy to connect the dots, particularly if somebody ever does something like: "donate here: (hash)".
And, Bitcoin is hard to get into. As soon as difficulty went up, making yourself some went out of the window. Now you have to buy it. And its characteristics mean that anyone selling any online wants to be really, really sure of your identity. Thus near everyone ends up creating accounts at Coinbase or wherever with very accurate identity verification, and now we've got real names connected to those random looking numbers.
https://kaveh.page/blog/what-is-blockchain-actually-used-for
With crypto you don’t need to trust the authority that holds your digital money, the authority that executes the transaction, or the authority that manages the issuance of currency and other factors that may affect its value (interest rates, fixed exchange rates…).
That being said, I agree that in practice this is a rather niche problem to solve, and among the people with this problem, there are far more bad faith ones that good faith ones.
And it is never completely trustless anyway, for most crypto you need to trust a single dodgy implementation, the issuance policy of the founders hoarding the vast majority of the tokens, and whatever backdoors they have put in place for disaster recovery or other purposes. And then there are all the surrounding systems that make crypto actually practical to use, like exchanges, that are absolutely not trustless.
It’s absurd how the top exchanges keep their customers crypto in big joint accounts that the exchange controls and transactions mostly just happen in their closed database outside the blockchain, canceling out most advantages of crypto anyway.
We put so much law and limitations about anything money purely because at times when we did not, stuff went wrong.
The whole idea of currency without any laws and limitations around it means any and every problem that those law were supposed (some do it better, some worse, some make actual problem worse, not trying to pretend they are perfect here) to help with will happen, easily, with the "new money".
The fact that on top of all the old problems the crypto invented a whole set of new problems is just a little turd cherry on top of a manure cake.
Okay, that was harsh, manure have some actual positive use
Freedom to walk anywhere means someone can walk onto your property ("done to you") You can curtail that freedom, because you are essentially giving up ("inability to do something with stuff someone else owns") some freedom to get some other freedom ("ability to own stuff that will not be used by strangers").
It's a tradeoff. A good one. Tradeoff of say "nobody's anything is private now because that allows govt a slightly easier time to catch criminals" is not a good tradeoff.
You touch upon an important point: the entire foundation of our current economic system is built on high velocity of money. You are incentivized to spend rather than hold because without it, there's no mindless conspicuous consumption. A deflationary currency will grind this system to a halt
But the question you need to ask is: has all this mindless consumption really done us any real good? For the handful of genuinely useful things to come out of excessive consumption, there are a gazillion pieces of wasteful crap that clogs homes first, then landfills
A deflationary currency is bad for the current economic system. But that doesn't mean it's bad by itself.
Many people in the bitcoin community have been and are still calling out wallets that rely on 3rd party trust, decentralized exchanges that are build on a house of cards, alternative coins that are created purely for the purpose of pump and dump etc.
Meanwhile the core technology progresses and deals with functioning at larger scales, with lower entry and exit friction, improved safety guarantees.
But if you're suggesting blockchain is anonymous and payments are untraceable, that's not the case for bitcoin at least. It's a gift to law enforcement, if they cared enough to trace btc transactions.
I don't think it's appropriate to compare it to the existing banking system (whose featureset goes far beyond payments and managing account balances).
It's appropriate to compare it to existing payment and account systems. And on that front, compared to e.g. Mastercard, there's no way Bitcoin is more efficient. TXs/watt, $/watt, however you want to measure it.
Do you think cash transactions don't have even more detailed ledgers? The "tried and true fiat" has been used to catch criminals for centuries because banks keep very detailed records of withdraws and deposits.
> You are just repeating
You are just repeating. Obviously both are being used for crime
By using a prepaid (debit|gift) card bought for cash in a convenience store? Much better anonymity that way. And much less volatility.
The risk doesn't increase with the number of transactions on a channel, that was a wrong statement from my side. What I was thinking of is that the risk increases the more your transact through Lightning instead of regular BTC. Basically, the more of your BTC is caught up in Lightning channels, the higher the value of attacking you with a double spend attempt.
No idea where I'm supposedly making "wild leaps" here. You on the other hand...
And guess where "the hell" I am getting the idea that early adopters would need to be cashed out at a profit many times exceeding inflation: reality. As cashing out at a large profit is exactly what has been happening for over a decade. It is the sole reason for virtually all participants joining the scheme in the first place.
Ransomware would still work just fine using regular bank transfers. Especially given that the payor has no incentive to stop that money from arriving at it's destination.
But sure, using crypto the criminals get to keep the 20-30% they'd pay for payment processing otherwise. I'm not sure that really makes a difference though.
The paper voting system is extremely simple, it takes maybe an hour or two at most to explain in any detail you want to anyone who wants to understand it. People can, and many do, register to participate and see it working first hand. The US presidential election system is slightly more complex because of its legal nature, but I am discussing paper based voting in general; and all of the legal complexity would persist even if each state moved to a blockchain or digital based voting system.
In contrast, understanding zero-knowledge proofs requires college-level mathematics knowledge, probably requiring some months or even years to teach to someone who works in a non-mathematical domain, and at least a day or two to really get it even for someone with enough math knowledge who hasn't seen it before. And this is only the theory - the practical parts are in fact MUCH MUCH more complex - to the point that it is almost certain that there isn't a single person in the whole world who could actually confirm for himself that an electronic voting system actually implements the algorithms promised. Establishing that a CPU is executing the code you think it is is extraordinarily difficult, and doing so for the many such systems that would compose an electronic voting system is way past any human.
I was very young and had been "in the space" for a couple years. The concept of "decentralization" in general appealed to me as someone frustrated with the abuses of centralized power. I liked the idea of a transparent ledger and wanted to apply it to non-profit initiatives. I even spoke about this at the European Central Bank as a 20 year old (got there via anonymous paper submission -- imagine the surprise).
But very quickly I grew frustrated with how much of the space was scams, people looking to get rich quick, etc. I had been more interested in the applications of blockchain that went beyond crypto but even stopped paying attention to cryptos altogether as a speculative investment. Funny enough, a few people who were "evangelized" by me made a fair bit of money.
I'm thankful though because I got into programming at 18 to write smart contracts, and that actually changed the course of my life quite drastically.
I suspect authoritarian regimes would be the first to close this loophole. This is not theoretical - Russia did this in 2022 to stop people from offloading their rubles and/or fleeing the country with their money.
Depends on the crimes, and up to certain values/volumes.
For 'consensual' transactional things for goods/services it could be useful (e.g., drug deals). But for ransom-like stuff, where one end of the 'transaction' is not thrilled with the 'deal', having to physically pick up the cash puts the perp at risk.
> There's no difference. You can't formulate that distinction coherently.
The historian Timothy Snyder just wrote a book on the difference between Freedom from and Freedom to:
> Freedom is the great American commitment, but as Snyder argues, we have lost sight of what it means—and this is leading us into crisis. Too many of us look at freedom as the absence of state power: We think we’re free if we can do and say as we please, and protect ourselves from government overreach. But true freedom isn’t so much freedom from as freedom to—the freedom to thrive, to take risks for futures we choose by working together. Freedom is the value that makes all other values possible.
* https://timothysnyder.org/on-freedom
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Snyder
(The book was published in 2024, and there are a number of talks he gave on the subject online made during his book tour.)
You can't make blanket statements about "the current election system" in the US because of this; you're going to have to talk about things in more specifics, or people in states with well-designed systems are just going to keep popping up explaining why their system genuinely is good.
Likewise, there's no law saying "don't accept payment in Monero" but you may be jailed for money laundering if the government notices you.
It's honestly kind of amazing, I never thought a person could be so intellectually condescending and smug while trying to sell you their shit at the same time.
Non-deflationary currencies encourage hoarding which leads to wild swings in value. Deflationary currencies do much better. Look at the price chart of BTC vs XMR.
Cryptocurrency doesn't need to do everything for everyone at all times to be a useful thing to have in the world. It only needs to be helpful to a subset of people, in a subset of situations, some of the time.
I'm happy paying by card for ~100% of my daily transactions, but I want cryptocurrency to exist should the need arise. The rise of authoritarian governments and policies across the world should've made that obvious by now. What's legal and perfectly moral today can become a crime tomorrow.
and to break it down lawfully or/and morally bad:
lawfully bad, morally bad = bad and crypto is one of the major tools in your arsenal
lawfully bad, morally good = neutral, but you are a prosecuted criminal, crypto is helpful for you but there are alternatives
lawfully good, morally bad = bad, but not a prosecuted criminal, crypto is not that useful for you
lawfully good, morally good = you are not a criminal, crypto is not that useful for youHowever, with a lot of BTC trading sites, you get money from real people's accounts, so its not that crazy as long as the amounts are low.
Is there any possibility the presence of the people who are there just for fun still encourages/increases the size of the first group?
Bitcoin came about to solve the trustless component and provides weak anonymity.
Then Monero, ZCash, etc built on that to add privacy and anonymity.
If you use bitcoin nowadays and expect anonymity or privacy you are clearly mistaken but there are plenty of platforms built for privacy and anonymity on extensions of that same underlying technology.
Like basically every vendor that accepts cryptocurrency and values privacy/anonymity is going to offer monero as an option.
The domain registrar is required to have valid contact information for you. Sure, you could lie to them, but then you risk having your account terminated.
So I'm not sure this is a real use case for crypto.
However, the US having a strategic reserve of a currency makes it a lot like other currencies. The next logical step is that banks can use it (already in the works - also Trump). If you can get a bank account it bitcoin, the next logical step is towards a fractional reserve system (loans, banks effectively "printing money"). The strategic reserve can cover a run on banks - think interbank lending, bailouts. Then the fed can offer bonds and IOUs (fiat).
All the things q lot of bitcoin advocates say bitcoin should stop, but you can't stop the government writing an IOU and demanding everyone treat it as currency.
Most exchanges, etc won't really touch accounts or UTxO that are messing with mixers.
Because of that it's generally just better to use "properly" private and anonymous blockchains instead. If they are fully opaque then tracing becomes effectively impossible.
Since when? We merely vote for politicians who promise to enact laws and regulations that are beneficial for us but they almost universally fail to do that, succumbing to self-interests and corruption.
If a government implements authoritarian measures that curb our freedom in an unpopular manner, "we the people" can't do anything about it. In a few years we may or may not vote them out, and the people who replace them may (or may not) do what we, the people, want.
Perhaps they're the new incarnation of audiophiles.
You can call them a dystopic theocracy, which is a bit true, but you can literally just fly over and buy a condo in a neighborhood with basically zero violent crime, with 2 bitcoins with essentially no questions asked.
Bottom line is no one takes responsibility in the world of bitcoin.
I would argue that Lightning's biggest security issue is having to store your private keys on an Internet connected device. I don't know if further improvements can be made in this area, for example allowing for some kind of 2FA, like multi-sig on the base layer.
Basically all web shops in Brazil require you to give a government ID to buy anything (usually your CPF number).
To stay with your example, one is bascically the absence of limitations (negative freedom), ie. the freedom to walk the street. The other is the presence of possibilities (positive freedom), ie. there needs to be a street to walk it.
The contract can hold the money in escrow such that it can only be sent either to the seller or returned to buyer.
The seller and buyer can then both walk the contract through a state machine on agreement (i.e. confirm shipping, confirm delivery, potentially also confirmation for a return process) and when the buyer and seller come to a disagreement (ex: seller attests they've shipped the product and it should be delivered but the buyer asserts they havent/the tracking on shipping is invalid) or one of the participants is non-responsive for a certain amount of time then the contract moves into arbitration.
In arbitration one or more third parties then step in to serve as arbiters/oracles that decide in the favor of one party or the other and commit those decisions to the contract and the contract then derives consensus from those decisions and proceeds to the corresponding state/action of the contract (i.e. refund vs close).
Now your arbiters/oracles/third parties have reputations and you can reason about how trustworthy they are before you enter into the contract.
This means all parties can evaluate their risk tolerance and trust levels before entering the contract/on agreement.
-------
TLDR: Trust is inherent to any system reliant on the physical world. The point of smart contracts, etc is to formally encode those trust assumptions and the procedures of the contract in as trustless of a way as possible and to allow distribution of that trust across parties with most of the coordination overhead being automated/abstracted away.
And importantly smart contracts provide an extremely low friction happy path. In the happy path where all parties are satisfied, it's extremely efficient and responsive. But in every other path, the conflicts, incentives, and resolution procedures are clearly defined for all parties involved.
Let's take Bitcoin. It has a predefined limited supply. That is, it already has an artificial deficit built-in. On top of that, obtaining bitcoin becomes exponentially more expensive over time (until it becomes impossible once all the bitcoin has been "mined"). Now you have to spend many magnitudes more resources to obtain even a tiny fraction of a bitcoin.
So even in the absence of any external world to compare to (e.g. without denominating Bitcoin in USD) why would anyone spend a limited resource they obtained? Especially considering that even today getting even a single bitcoin through traditional mining is nearly impossible except for the filthy rich miners running industrial-scale data centers.
As a counterexample, El Salvador adopted bitcoin as an official currency, provided state-subsidized infrastructure for citizens to adopt it, and still achieved only minimal usage:
> The October 2022 “Encuesta Dinámica Empresarial” from FUSADES registered that 97¾ percent of business have not made even one sale in Bitcoin. NBER and Chamber of Commerce and Industry surveys show similar results.
https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/002/2025/068/arti...
* It's becoming more common for sites to ask for ID, I've gotten prompted for it buying a cellphone online, to access an old Facebook account and even Hetzner (Before ever using it) because I got flagged as high risk
You didn't waste time, you just spent eight years removing your rose colored glasses.
The short explanation is that every major currency goes through a cycle; and what you're seeing is the late stage in a currency.
You are taking all the implicit trust, lowering it into explicit trust assumptions, and formalising who is allowed to make what decisions when, what happens when they do, and how the other parties are permitted to respond.
You are moving all of those implicit assumptions about how a contract, interaction, or relationship work and formalising them into something explicit and upfront so that all participants can evaluate their risk tolerance and trust levels prior to agreeing to a given contract or interaction.
And of course you are also sprinkling in a heavy dose of automation to smooth out the complexities of these explicit, mechanised contracts such that the happy paths are buttery smooth and the unhappy paths are at the least bearable and correspond to the contract you signed on to at the beginning of your interaction.
TLDR: It's low trust automation + formalising implicit assumptions into explicit ones.
I feel that's the lesson anyone who toyed with libertarians ideals ultimately come to. It just takes a bit longer for some than others. It's also harder to realize if you're making mad bank on it, rather than be part of the idiots who blew their hard-earned money on some technical misunderstanding, scam, or retro-active regulation.
As it matures and gets close to it's ultimate value, volatility will naturally reduce.
Once it is used as the unit of account, everything else will fluctuate in value relative to bitcoin, which has more stable fundamentals than anything else on earth (fixed/zero issuance, liquidity etc), but this will be decades in the future when it's dollar value will be 8 or 9 figures in today's money
The problem of BTC was at the same time overabundance of imagination in one area and a big gap in imagination how the world actually works. They only saw simple isolated scenarios and never a globalized economy.
> That problem already has solutions
The solution to that problem is "the court orders the bank to send the funds back to my account", including all the way up to clawing back any funds the scammer spent. This is possible when the government controls the currency. It is not possible with crypto.
The only remaining purpose of crypto is funding crime. Some crime you might approve of (buying subversive literature), but that's dwarfed 100000:1 by ransomware, scams, and much more nefarious activity (drugs, sex trafficking, etc.)
A truly democratic leadership with stringent limitations on how they can meddle with financial transactions would be preferable, but that's just a dream at this point.
AI & crypto may end up in a similar bucket. It is a paradoxical enabler of both freedom and imprisonment. No one gets to build a technology a declare a problem solved. Alfred Nobel made nitroglycerin safe and thus paradoxically ended up being called the Merchant of Death.
Freedom is not free. It is an eternal struggle.
I am grateful for the builders who try to build something for freedom. I do not spurn them when their invention gets corrupted. It is now our job and the job of future generations to fight the corruption.
1. Payments which you can't make today inside a legal system are two types. And if you enable system you automatically enable both types. For libertarians that is a clear 100% positive. For regular centrist citizens, not so much. At minimum it's a topic for debate.
2. BTC and a few other tokens actually make this problem worse. Since blockchain is public, you can always trace "bad" or real bad payment to the source wallet. That i one issue, and another is that since BTCs are non-fungible, the tokens used in such payments are forever tainted. Even in the current anarchic and almost unregulated environment some exchanges are blacklisting some of the tokens, to limit own exposure.
Care to elaborate? I have been using Bitcoin now 10+ to store my wealth and make payments, and it has been very convenient - not much time needed to use it, and I think I've gotten plenty of value for my time-investment.
What kind of database would you recommend to make it more convenient? Maybe you can write a guide how to implement decentralized value transfer and storage system on top of PostgreSQL, so that the amount of tokens is limited to 21 Million, with similar security guarantees?
The only useful application of crypto/blockchain tech I've ever seen simply takes advantage of the transparent ledger as a way of tracking receipts.
One of the perfect applications is in shipping and logistics where receipt validation, transparency, and certification, is an essential part of the business.
A judge can order a lien or seizure of their assets. I presume people that deal in crypto still want a car, a place to stay, some nice chairs or maybe to stay out of a cage when a judge determines they are willfully avoiding a court order to pay the money back.
Of course if they have no tangible assets or the entire operation is out of jurisdiction then that's an issue, but for a random joe are you really that worse off than trying to get the Chinese government to refund you for that knockoff you bought on aliexpress?
Still, I would argue that crypto with things like njal.la and orangehosting etc. kind of allow it to be a real-use
Personally,So this reduces the "use-case" to basically a bank account for teenagers with (no?) limits and less KYC overall
Is also something author should have applied to Randians and Libertarians from day 1.
Because it's a cult, like the "AGI is coming in 2027" cult thinks we're on the brink of skynet level world destruction, it'll come and go and 99% of the people who fell for it will tell you they never really truly actually believed
I don't think people really need it. We're used to using and trusting systems we don't understand. So, I think if the system is open, people will readily accept it. They'll be content with knowing that all the experts say the system is reliable, and they themselves, theoretically, can, if they want, understand its structure and confirm its reliability.
And the real reason for its non-use is somewhat different: The elites believe that the introduction of such a system would almost immediately lead to demands for real direct democracy, and the stupid masses, using this democracy, would make decisions that would destroy society and civilization.
As a technical experiment, I love bitcoin, and I have thoroughly enjoyed wasting some of my own time on it. But it's not mainstream, and it never will be.
If we take from the government the ability to freeze bank accounts of protestors, we can't just also remove the ability to freeze the accounts of criminals, enemies, or even terrorists.
It seems like a clear non-starter, yet many proponents of crypto seem to think it would be an obvious improvement.
Before you could make transactions online, if your infrastructure was hacked, it was your fault and your responsibility to implement better security. But once money was involved, you could complain to the police about a hack and involve the authorities - because now actual property was involved. This changed everything.
This was also about the time we started seeing spam, scams, and other negativity suddenly spring up. It's hard to believe that we used to post to usenet with our email addresses publicly exposed... and never worry about being added to a spam list.
Money attracted bad actors to the Internet. Bitcoin was money from the start. So of course the whole cryptocurrency scene is a magnet for bad actors - like we've never seen before. This was inevitable. And 95% of the cryptocurrency scene are some flavor of bad actors.
But Bitcoin mostly sits outside of the legal frameworks of the world. So it's much harder to call the authorities when your cryptocurrency is stolen. You can. It happens. But not much. And for this reason, the only path forward for this new technology/money is right through the middle of the hoard of bad actors. That means we have to create technological and social solutions for security instead of relying on the monopoly of violence (the police) to protect us.
The bad acts and just general greed in the scene are holding it back. But this is, unfortunately, necessary. This is a wall of resistance that has to be pushed through for a better tomorrow. It's part of the process.
The future that decentralized technology will bring us will be different from whatever we are imagining now. But we still have to keep imagining and building. Because even though it will be different than the fantasy, its still the right direction.
How did you first obtain your crypto? What level of anonymity was available for that tx?
Where do you store your crypto short and long term? How do you make it available for spending on online platforms? What percentage of your income and expenditures is in crypto? How do you balance between fiat and crypto anonymously?
What are you buying with the crypto? Why does it need to be purchased with crypto?
Where are you having it shipped? Are you faking all contact details when making the purchase?
Are you completely obscuring yourself physically while collecting said package? Are you obscuring your movements along the way as well to prevent leading back to your home?
Often, proponents love to portray citizens in economically ruinous governments in SAmerica as ideal usecases. Why do they need to use your specific crypto coin? Why can’t they use a locally invented (read: forked) one? It feels much more useful to regulate supply/demand where all said economic activity will take place, instead of replacing your entire net worth from a dying currency to a speculative one mostly propped up by foreigners like you who have zero skin in their local game.
I could go on and on, but it is exhausting to reiterate common sense - no one ever thinks this through fully from the comfort of their air conditioned first world white collar desk job office. How are you ensuring perfect info and op sec in your crypto journey?
Immigrants can request a CPF (the 'national ID'). I don't think being in the country 'legally' is a requirement, that isn't enforced the way it is in the US.
> people living in Favela who essentially don't even recognize the state
Most people get assigned an ID at birth. And people who live in a favela often have to work outside it, and they interact with most companies/state services that aren't utilities as usual.
Utilities OTOH often get MITM'd by militia/narcos these days though.
> I assume it's something like the US where 10 illegals work under one social security number or a tax ID
No need for anything fancy like that. The poorest people are willing to work based on verbal agreements, as the alternative is either starving, or hoping the public social security network has your back. And in case your employer requires one, that's a non-issue because, except for rare circumstances, everyone has one.
Digital banking, install payments and general smartphone usage is widely popular, including favelas.
People will only hoard hard money until they need to buy things after they've run out of the state's fiat tokens to try and sell.
Look up Gresham's and Thier's Laws
That's what people involved in the creation of the stock market must have thought.
Aren't all financial systems about this one thing? Buying and selling risk for profit?
If you want to work on something else than a casino you should probably steer clear of any finance.
Note: I hate using the word "blockchain" to describe these decentralized networks hosting distributed ledgers, but it seem to be the word most people recognize. With that in mind:
Bitcoin was a first generation blockchain technology. It's the gold backed standard that supports the rest of the ecosystem and it always will be. That network should never do anything but be money.
Ethereum and all of the networks that replicate what it does are second generation blockchain technologies. They generalize what blockchain does to the degree that we can write arbitrary programs. It is a global decentralized computer, albeit a rather limited one. People use them mostly for finance because people have no idea what else to do with them.
Third generation networks are on the way. My favorite example is Polkadot and what Gavin is doing with JAM. This brings us a bit closer to what "Web3" was supposed to be about. JAM is something new, something different, upon which you can run all kinds of blockchain networks. Very few people understand how Ethereum works or how to use it. JAM is even more difficult to get your head around. But it is a radical paradigm changing technology.
The noise of altcoins and NFTs is the result of hype and greed. It overshadows Web3. It makes it nearly impossible for anyone working on Web3 tech to get any kind of coherent messaging out to the masses. And it will be that way for a while. But not forever.
All this to say that it's not wasted effort and it's not a dead end. It's just that what is valuable in the scene is almost impossible to see due to the overwhelming hype and nonsense.
Also people in my country Venezuela, use usdt as a way for paying for things and saving money as the currency it's inestable.
It's the cost of it being out of control of any single party. Efficiency and convenience are worth nothing if you have a system someone can just wipe out or manipulate.
Have you experienced hyperinflation in your lifetime? Have the generational assets of your family been seized by totalitarian government? I think you'd understand better if you lived through events where your wealth very painfully was just an "entry" in the efficient system someone else controls (badly).
I live in a city where I can be fairly certain that I will not be the victim of a robbery. I don't need to carry a weapon or otherwise appear defensible. This type of crime simply does not exist here (or only to a very limited extent). That is “freedom from.” If I had the right to carry a firearm to defend myself in the event of a robbery, that would be “freedom to.” These two forms of freedom can be distinguished in a very clear-cut way. One allows you to do certain things. The other ensures that negative events do not occur. In North America, the cultural focus seems to be primarily on “freedom to.” But I would consider it a massive restriction of my freedom if I could not walk through my neighborhood at night without worry, even if I had the right to carry a firearm for protection.
Your semantic sleight of hand cannot reflect the difference between someone who feels safe because they believe they can and are allowed to defend themselves against danger (freedom to defend oneself) and someone who feels safe because they believe there is no danger (freedom from danger). However, there is a clearly discernible qualitative difference between these two freedoms. Otherwise, there would be no difference in terms of freedom between walking through Caracas, Tijuana, Port-au-Prince, or Pietermaritzburg with a firearm in your pocket and walking completely unarmed through Abu Dhabi, The Hague, or Trondheim.
Indeed. For example: Chia is arguably decent tech (better than Bitcoin), built by Bram Cohen (of BitTorrent fame), innovative PoSpace+Time. But nobody cares, it's at #450 in market cap, way down below Doge (#10), $TRUMP (#72), Fartcoin (#144), Melania (#375).
That's the entire point when the goal is to achieve a public, immutable, decentralized ledger that prevents double-payments without needing to trust a third-party to adjudicate properly. It being inconvenient makes it exceptionally difficult to edit history.
Whether that's a useful goal is less clear when nearly all of modern society relies on trusting parties at some point along the way (will the thing you bought be delivered to you? Will the service you purchased actually be rendered? etc).
> Maybe it goes to show how few people understand economics and anthropology
A financial process being unwieldy hasn't really been an issue historically. Why are most publicly issued stocks in the US owned by Cede and Company for example? No one that has stocks really thinks about the underlying system (the fact that they have contractual rights to stocks rather than actually owning stocks), as long as it ultimately works.
Where things have broken down in my opinion is how centralized the systems have become with massive exchanges being the only realistic way to interact with them. In the same way that a bicycle wasn't designed to be a moving van, these systems weren't designed to be centralized. With that being the reality though, the entire blockchain backbone is mostly useless, and at that point it really is an inconvenient database.
https://www.economist.com/audio/podcasts/scam-inc
https://www.economistgroup.com/press-centre/the-economist/fr...
It really makes the value of my holdings rise.
That's really the crux of the issue here: Having to choose one over the other, would you rather some criminals go free, or some innocents be imprisoned?
I suspect anyone's position to this depends heavily on which sides they've been on more on their lives: Victimized by criminals or unjustly punished.
And yet when they want to actually buy a Lambo they need hard currency...
Crypto is entirely dispensable. It is pseudonymous, by design resists regulation, and has no enforcement. Some chains are deliberately opaque (Monero, Zcash), and there are tumblers to obscure flows even further. Its approach to money laundering is "sure, bring it on".
Fiat is indispensable, and better for legitimate purposes than crime. Crypto is dispensable, and better for crime than legitimate purposes. We should dispense with it.
(See also: https://xkcd.com/1827/)
A fitting quote for the moment:
"Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other." (c) George Orwell
Also regarding India and tokens, sure they are officially banned. But they are still a key link a in trade chain, that' why I mentioned Dubai and its neighbors. They act as a laundromat and a tumbler, obscuring financial flows. And one part of the Russia-India trade or Russia-Iran trade or even Russia-China trade involves tethers (USDT), without which exchanging rubles to rupee or to yuan directly would be highly problematic and risky. Tokens mitigate some of the risk by hiding financial flows through multiple jurisdictions.
Invest in stocks and bonds to maintain purchasing power.
Other online payment methods (Visa, PayPal, Stripe, your bank's ACH, etc.) do. These policies start by disallowing illegal transactions (crime). Then they disallow unfair transactions (buyer claims not to like the quality of the item, etc.). Then they disallow immoral transactions (gambling, pornography, etc.). Then they disallow anything... unseemly? (2022 Freedom Convoy protests, Stripe briefly banning certain legal, non-adult LGBTQ+ transactions in 2025, etc.).
Is it a problem that your currency-transfer system enforces policy? Many people don't care, but to some, yes, it is a problem. They don't want PayPal telling them what they can and can't do with their hard-earned money, because that's the job of their government, their religion, and their conscience. They want their online cash to behave like offline cash.
If you were designing a system architecture for value transfer, would your low-level primitives throw policy exceptions, or would you delegate that responsibility higher in the system?
Indeed. Good paper driving the point home:
Irrationality, Extortion, or Trusted Third-parties: Why it is Impossible to Buy and Sell Physical Goods Securely on the Blockchain
But realistically we're not seriously going to entertain stripping all controls from the financial system because we don't trust the government to do a reasonable job. Perhaps you'll agree that this is a very unlikely thing to happen.
Now my issue here is that many proponents of crypto, among other fallacies, use this exact scenario as a justification for why eg. Bitcoin will go to $1M, and why they should deserve to cash out at a 10x return in the future.
It's not going to happen, and even if it was, there's still no reason for early adopters to profit in what has so far been a zero sum wealth redistribution scheme with negligible value generated.
> What is being fixed?
A small group of people decide how much currency is circulated and can be used as debt, which creates inflation or deflation. Also there is no democratic process that can be used to control this small group of people, other than a repeal of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.
> How does an algorithm fix that?
As an example, Bitcoin's algorithm has a fixed schedule in which new BTC is created. People can voluntarily use or not use BTC as a currency based on this currency creation schedule (vs. arbitrary creation that comes with fiat currency). This algorithm can only change by actors that take hashing majority on the Bitcoin network.
you mean the purchase deed isn't registered anyplace?
or you mean that the mortgage company didn't do a credit/background check on the buyer before granting the mortgage? Which includes some level of providing a state-backed identity card?
Or do you mean it's easy to buy a house for cash without hassle in the US? Just a suitcase of $100 bills? I'm assuming you've tried this recently?? (and the house cost more than 150K?
But, you are mischaracterizing me, I AM a South American migrant that did scape and has benefited from crypto for what little economic interaction I do have with my ruinous home country
On the same idea, I don't need/care for perfect opsec because my threat model doesn't need it, what little I've directly bought with crypto has always been digital, so that's whay I've cared to figure out
Still details on income/transactions and such, all feel a bit unnecessary for public display, but a small percentage, and my first crypto came from mining and selling back when it wasn't taken that seriously specially not in Venezuela of all places
They made money with it. More and more, spending significant amounts on hosters to run their bots more often and on more markets.
It was an interesting presentation even if only for the technical details on how they implemented it all.
It took one whole hour. Somewhere near the end, about 5 seconds was spent on 'anyway I lost it all due to the fall of FTX', and then another 5 minutes on how they want to get back into it and what they're looking at, because an individual can no longer play the arbitrage game today.
I had to ask some fairly blunt questions to disillusion the audience. At the end of all that, and with all that effort, *they lost quite a bit of money in the endeavour*. And they wanted to get back into it.
What. the. heck.
I've always been a bit of a fan of Adam Curtis' documentary style, and "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" (named after the Brautigan poem) is worth watching. I'm not sure how much of his narrative of Rand is accurate, but it's well presented:
(ofc thats not the 100% correct description of bitcoin which depreciated against most other assets ytd but the idea still stands)
Bitcoin failed as a currency, and as that became realized, institutional investors pivoted to the "digital gold" scam, to keep people long, while they divest or hedge. The two reasons why it failed as a currency are transaction latency, and lack of fungibility. Transaction privacy is necessary for fungibility. Both of those are just technical problems; I predict that a distributed ledger currency with private transactions like Monero, but a faster consensus algorithm like Avalanche or Hedera will become popular in the next decade. It's likely to be an Ethereum L2.
That is just the currency aspect of distributed ledgers. It's just one use case that we don't yet have the technology to properly address. The exciting thing that distributed ledgers enable is cryptographic institutions. These technologies allow us to solve coordination problems more easily than ever before. Democracies, businesses, communities, projects can all be coordinated better and more honestly using distributed ledgers. It's not an overstatement to say that distributed ledgers are as big of an advancement for human coordination as democracy was.
If you've been soured on these technologies because most of the currencies built with them are scams, I would encourage you to learn about them as if they were just incredibly robust databases that even governments would struggle to take down. Surely you can think of something cool to build with that, which doesn't involve money.
The externalities of the crappy US banking system are so vast though. Musk, crypto, ...
It's also the source of at least one great new global public institution (Ethereum) and is likely to run much of the global economy in the coming decades.
If you hate or are skeptical about crypto, it is crucial to at least understand the difference between three things:
1. Casino/scams/hacks
2. Crypto/on-chain technology
3. Ethereum as a decentralized chain and global public institution
I've been a full-time Ethereum person for many years. I hate the casino. I hate the scams and hacks. But I see something very special going on here. So let me try to describe it
The casino is just terrible and it'll likely get much worse. The steady stream of scam shit tokens sold to unsuspecting investors shows no sign of slowing down. And wait until r/wallstreetbets discovers perps (perpetual futures). Perps for equities are already live and scaling up.
The scams will get much, much worse. Crypto (on-chain) lets you send bearer assets over the internet, it's scam fuel. The bad guys will have access to a sophisticated internet financial system, too.
Hacks in mature protocols should get much better over time due to improved bug-finding techniques, including AI/tool-assisted auditing and formal verification.
The technology of crypto offers the world a number of benefits, including inherently globalized payments and instant settlement.
Centralized deployments of crypto technology are a big segment of the future. For example, Stripe is actively working on a centralized chain named Tempo that's optimized for payments. It is basically fintech 2.0 on the blockchain, but entirely centralized.
The last and most important part of crypto is the rise of decentralized chains. There are only two chains that are remotely decentralized, Bitcoin and Ethereum. Bitcoin has no programmable app layer, so its utility is limited beyond the whatever value the world assigns to BTC.
Ethereum is a decentralized programmable chain, a new kind global public institution. Ethereum can make a highly credible commitment that the rules of the programming environment will be followed in all cases. This makes Ethereum a uniquely excellent neutral hub for global commerce.
Ethereum's decentralization (what we sometimes call "credible neutrality") is driving massive grassroots adoption among corporations and institutions. This is the #1 thing in crypto to keep an eye on because if Ethereum gets large enough it will become a de facto global economic backbone.
I understand you hate crypto. I've lived since 2018 full-time in the industry, and it's been often soul-sucking and harrowing. Many days I hate it. But Ethereum as a platform is benevolent, virtuous, productive, and probably a key part of humanity's future.
Was this more or less risky than buying $1000 in scratch offs, or lottery tickets, or spending $1000 in Vegas?
In my opinion, crypto when I bought it had a lot more "potential" than any of those more "traditional" forms of gambling which is why I was willing to give it a try with a sum of less than 1% of my yearly income...
I am not saying it was a smart choice, just that I don't think it was a particularly stupid choice.
An attempt to pass off a lie as truth would be much more damaging to a company's reputation than would be just not addressing an issue. By addressing the issue and introducing a channel for transparency, the company is demonstrating that they are willing to put their reputation on the line.
I would agree that as a regulatory measure, this would not solve any problem. But as a self-imposed measure, it builds consumer trust.
Even Bitcoin though is not a panacea though, as without REAL transactional use-cases, it is also prone to sudden major drops. Until people in your home state can buy a car, house, and groceries using bitcoin directly (WITHOUT a Visa bridge), the real value will be highly subjective to the whims of the market.
I made the choice basically saying OK this $1000 I am putting in will either be worthless in 10+ years or it will be worth a lot.
I am not continuing to buy, I am not dumping loads of money into it. I spent less than 1% of my yearly salary one time knowing full well it could go to 0. The potential seemed well worth the tiny risk.
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
It has nothing about the collapse of the banking system.
The definition of both may vary depending on where you are. Being not controlled by governments is the original purpose of cryptocurrencies.
The post mentioned the idea of casually sending a billion dollars. Was that ever possible with Bitcoin? AFAIK it's less ergonomic to send money using Bitcoin than it is using traditional banking.
If you forget your bank card pin code they would post you a new card and pin, if you phone them up. I've done this a couple times in the past pre-smartphone banks.
If you forget your bitcoin password you are never getting access back.
I made a singular choice once to put less than 1% of my yearly income into 1 thing that seemed to have some potential.
Back then it was the only crypto. I put in knowing full well it could go to 0, but the potential of where it could possibly go seemed well worth the tiny risk to an essentially insignificant sum of money to me.
There are other cryptos but they aren't the original or anywhere near the biggest, so they are not the same in my eyes. So those are actual legitimate reasons why I would not choose to perform that same risk again with a different crypto.
Unless you think Todo list apps cause Ethnic Cleansing.
>realistically we're not seriously going to entertain stripping all controls from the financial system because we don't trust the government to do a reasonable job
I kind of am. What I'm seeing happen is the opposite: The government stripping more and more agency from the individual because it does not trust its citizens do do a reasonable job(of anything). Every sector freed from the Leviathan, every tiny bit of life that can proceed without being subject to gov't interference is a huge win for me. Again, this is essentially a position born from my seeing what happens when "safety over liberty" goes too far.
>negligible value generated
Depends on what you value. I happen to like drugs and gambling. On the other hand, giving someone who falls for a hustle the ability to get their money back is something that I personally do not value at all.
A blockchain that allowed you store one song per second would be hundreds of TB before long. There are other architectures for that sort of thing for a reason.
I believe what I said is a fairly accurate summary of Proof of work / Proof of stake mechanisms and Core developer's influence on the protocol.
I bought in fully knowing it could go to 0, or maybe it could be worth a ton in 10+ years. To me it seemed like the chance it would blow up was well worth the tiny risk of losing a pretty meaningless amount of money to me.
I am not even otherwise a gambler. I have never gambled at a casino or on sports or anything like that. And my stock investing is all index funds. This was the only singular "crazy gamble" I had ever made and I knew full well it was crazy. But the potential in my mind around the tech and the potential hype around it seemed to greatly outweigh the tiny risk.
If you pay AWS to host Postgres for you, are you being scammed? You might be if someone convinces you to invest in Postgres credits that you never use. But if you actually use Postgres, and it's cheap, and you are glad to pay for it, then it's not really a scam.
I think more of the promise of these technologies is in private ledgers, where the traffic is confined and the system could even be run altruistically. For example, a university club or a town could coordinate elections using this technology. They don't have to pay to use a public ledger if enough people in the group can run nodes themselves. Everyone who cares about the result of the election is incentivized to participate in the network just to know the result and ensure its authenticity. They aren't processing transactions for random users, they are coordinating using the latest technology with people who they want to coordinate with.
It's funny, people speak as if decentralisation was a good thing, but very few bother to explain why. Typically, if you dig into it, they cite advantages that you can already get from good old permissioned distributed tech. The only thing that decentralisation gets you (at enormous cost) is that it's harder to regulate.
I had a ton of bitcoins and ethereum. I even bought ethereum in the presale. Present day value would have been around 5 million euros. But I sold it all back then, because I saw that crypto was never going to make a significant impact.
It turned out, I was right. Most of the bitcoin ATMs disappeared, most webshops stopped accepting it, it plays almost no role at all in the financial world. But I overlooked one major factor: the value of these cryptos isn't based on anything else than thin air. People are willing to pump anything as long as they can personally profit from it. And yes, the famous saying applies here: the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. I saw the fundamentals correctly, but the sentiment wrong.
Only a trustworthy network can replace the current system, it must be something public, immutable and participatory , otherwise it will just centralize back to the above scenario, regardless of any intent. Essentially crypto is network code, it creates the primitives on transmission. And thus anyone (really anyone) can run a node and get a reward for supporting this security model. That's not a scam or even just pragmatic, its literally how money operates, as a incentive/disincentive mechanism.
People forget the early stock market was filled to the brim with scams, the original intent was good, but it attracted bad actors piggy backing in its lack of regulations, and it took years to clean-up, one can make an easy argument that's its still filled with fraud.
I wish I got funded to make a Coinbase bitcoin wallet competitor or Dropbox competitor leveraging blockchain for storage.
Pivoting to AI has better unit economics and I have a handcrafted app architecture because of my crypto venture aspirations.
Doing nothing for years and trying to vibe code an equivalent AI app now wouldn’t be fun.
I'm not saying it. It is literally what Bitcoin is, and other deflationary "currencies".
> And mayhaps in that case the holders might decide to exchange it for some other assets they desire?
Keyword is "some".
In 2010 when bitcoin was novelty and had no value at all, someone paid 10 000 (yes, that's ten thousand) bitcoins for two pizzas. Now imagine bitcoin becomes a currency, as some cryptobros still prophesize. You have a constant pool of money for all "assets", and no way to get more money.
The hard part is that for day to day things you still need an on ramp and off ramp, but that is changing as merchants accept crypto directly.
>Proceeds to provide their opinion.
At this point you are wayyyy behind schedule, even if you hold an anti-crypto position like me, you recognize the benefits of Bitcoin, otherwise you would claim that even the most popular/first/best coin is completely useless.
I'd invite you to seek to understand the initial arguments on Bitcoin instead of trying to convince us of your views on Bitcoin. Like, the topic is very deep and you are stuck in the first step.
The problems with the technologies is that the "robust database" guarantee is often highly dependent on the currency mechanisms. They unfortunately go hand-in-hand.
Remove the currency from a blockchain and you have a merkle tree. (To be even further unfair, considering currencies in aggregate, blockchains are always a merkle tree. How many forks of Bitcoin are we up to now?)
Merkle trees are incredibly useful, and yes a sort of robust database. I use git every day, but I have to respect that git branches and git forks are real phenomena and coordination of branches/forks always a real ongoing concern when working with git. Not a lot of institutions want a "robust database" which is easily branched/forked. You still need a coordination engine to keep the tree a "chain" somehow. The currencies for better and a lot worse (given how many seem isomorphic to scams) are the coordination engine that still seems most (distributed/transactional/"robust") useful to making a "blockchain" out of a merkle tree.
> This was the only singular "crazy gamble" I had ever made and I knew full well it was crazy.
The only thing that matters is whether it's positive EV (and whether your methodology of coming up with the EV itself is sound). If you didn't have any explicit or implicit notion of the EV at the time you made it... It was probably not a sound investment decision, despite being profitable.
What? Prompting AI is barely a skill, let alone a cybersecurity one.
> I wish I got funded to make a Coinbase bitcoin wallet competitor or Dropbox competitor leveraging blockchain for storage.
There's like 50000 of the former, and 1000 of the latter.
Is there some other failure mode waiting, or does it take off?
> I am going to buy $1000 in lottery tickets one time and leave it alone because there seems to be some potential here. > I made the choice basically saying OK this $1000 I am putting in will either be worthless in 10 hours or it will be worth a lot.
Indeed
> What a blockchain could enable is honest transparency.
Wat?
> An attempt to pass off a lie as truth would be much more damaging to a company's reputation than would be just not addressing an issue.
Do you perhaps live in reality? When was the last time "reputation" of a company was in any way shape or form damaged by any lies?
> I would agree that as a regulatory measure, this would not solve any problem. But as a self-imposed measure, it builds consumer trust.
Indeed, it solves no problems except imaginary ones from the land of fairy tales.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
If I can solve that problem with another simpler, older technology it doesn’t count as useful. I don’t care if you can pay for things using ethereum when I can just use my credit card instead.
I bought bitcoin because I perceived more potential around blockchain tech becoming either useful or at least drawing hype to explode the value. I wouldn't buy a lottery ticket because the odds of winning are astronomically low. I perceived there to be a far greater chance in bitcoin blowing up than winning the lottery, or even winning big at a casino.
Do you think I really over-estimated bitcoin's odds early on? At least with blockchain there were some potential real-world possibilities to it and that was a big factor in my choice to gamble on it. Is that kind of thought not at least somewhat more sound than buying a simple lottery ticket? To me it was.
if there was a real use case it would have manifested itself at this point
i think the abstraction needs to be much higher to end user for this stuff to have value. having to manage your own wallet doesn't make sense.
Its almost like you need some sort of power structure with the monopoly on violence to enforce agreed upon freedoms, they could be called the "government" which enforces "laws".
So literally 0.1% of the financial needs of the average person. What a revolution
At least WAY more of a chance than what I would get spending $1000 on a lottery ticket or at a casino.
I’m sure you can imagine a make believe world where no one has money and everyone cares and is tech savvy and yet no one can be trusted at the same time, and in this world somehow blockchains are useful.
But that’s not the world we live in.
I agree that economic incentives are important for robustness, but I don't agree with this use of the word "currency". The tokens have value in that they can be used to write to the ledger. That is the consumer aspect of the token, you can give it up in exchange for the ability to edit the ledger. The producer aspect of the token is that if you help participate in running the network, you can earn tokens, to edit the ledger yourself later. The tokens have to store value (ledger write access), and there needs to be a market for them, because the producers can't use them all themselves.
Just because something can store value, in this case the specific ability to write to the ledger, doesn't mean that thing is suitable as a currency. Copper ingots let you make cat6 cables, the are objectively valuable, but we don't use them as a currency. And as the world found out over the last decade, the distance from store of value to functioning currency is significant.
The store of value is sufficient to run the networks though, you don't need the tokens to work as a currency, and I think that has been empirically proven. The Ethereum mainnet is unlikely to disappear for a very long time, but Ethereum is also unlikely to ever be widely used as a currency.
The takeaway is that you should have as much of these tokens as you are likely to need for writing to the ledger. If you hold them in Coinbase and never use them to operate the ledger then you are participating in the speculative overvaluing of the tokens.
Of course it turned into a gambling scam filled cesspool like most human endeavours, but the initial dream was sound.
There's a reason people still use USD, EUR etc. and not fractional ETFs to pay and get paid.
Why is it so popular for someone in tech to assign everyone else the task of thinking up something useful to do with technology x they think is cool?
> It's not an overstatement to say that distributed ledgers are as big of an advancement for human coordination as democracy was.
Ok, if that's really your thinking then you need to lay out: here's an impossible-to-ignore thing we can do with this, and this is how, and this is why this wouldn't be possible without this thing.
They had started as yet another ICO and when that didn't work, pivoted into a financial space that actually was a great pitch for blockchain.
They were a small company and when I came aboard they had nothing viable, I helped them rearchitect it to something that could work, and the lead ops guy translated it back to the original broken architecture.
That guy was crazy, and claimed that everybody there was spook adjacent (ex NSA, etc) and that our tech was vital to some secret need. They all drank the koolaid.
I do like the concept of blockchain as a "commons" of data, but stil think that cryptocurrency is a colossal scam.
I bought 10 bitcoin for about $1000 in late 2013. It's currently worth about 900K and was a peak of about 1.2M.
$1000 in NVDA shares in late 2013 was about 35 cents per share, so about 2850 shares. That's currently worth 521K with a peak of 590K.
And why? Because in 2013 I thought there was a greater potential for bitcoin blowing up substantially due to the new concept of blockchain and what it could potentially do, or at least the hype around what people perceived that it could potentially do. Compared to what I thought the potential for NVDA to do.
That said, much of the feedback in this thread applies to working in it imo, as the other side of keeping these companies and their treasuries not hacked and capitalized is it exposes you to a lot.
That said, I’ve done big tech too, and the nonsense in crypto just has a couple less rungs of management insulation than the rest of tech. The rest of tech lives with the consequences of asinine decisions over 4-5x quarters and in crypto you live with it month to month. Pick your poison on preferred version of nonsensical tech instability.
There’s a twitter comment that covers what I’ve come to think - natural state of crypto is just a more direct instantiation of what’s going on everywhere else, crypto just doesn’t hide it (sort of). Hard not to believe that with tech selling “trade in your IRA!” as if that’s not offering a beer to my 20 yr sober Uncle Bob, in terms of products that are cancerous for “the people.” So I see nothing in crypto that’s not reflected everywhere in tech and civics right now.
The crypto tech or integrations to pay attention to - btc, atomic swaps cross-chain, trading firms, whatever finserv is testing for payment and settlement infra. All of these have deep building, are functional and funded. Wouldn’t bet against it over a career.
Yeah you are a software engineer. That means like 80% of your work will probably get minimal traction for a few years before burning into nothing. 8 years on crypto, probably a ton of people interacted with things he created and now it will dwindle to nothing and be replaced by the next hot thing. Sounds like a win imo.
Maybe the suitcase of anonymous cash bit is easier but only because you're doing that to dodge taxes... In which case feeling like a criminal might be a bit on point.
Disclaimer, I currently work at a zcash corp.
No way? You studied this personally and can prove it?
Transaction Fees On Bitcoin Lightning Network Are 1,000 Times Cheaper Than Visa And MasterCard
> haven't seen a use case but crypto yet.
BTC is up 500%+ since 2 years ago. This looks like a use case to me. It maintained purchasing power better than stocks and bonds.
This comment read to me like AI slop.
I was one of the earliest React/React Native developers before the industry shifted to it. Early Tailwind and Node.js adopter as well.
My AI apps are nothing new either but I do have subscriptions because of how I engineered them. Majority of apps in the app store make $0. You can compare yourself to those, not me.
They are speculative assets for gambling with. They have been since day 1.
Criminals don't really need strong anonymity as long as the payment system has strong censorship resistance and at least one counterparty won't mind accepting "tainted" funds.
Arguably, privacy is much more important to non-criminal individual users as they themselves can be targeted by criminals as a result of their income/holdings being globally visible, and unlike organized crime, they often have less means to protect themselves from $5 wrench attacks.
[1] Source: I watched many crime thrillers growing up
Distributed technologies have largely been useful to actors that wish to remain anonymous (Napster, Tor). Money transmission probably shouldn't be (if we want to avoid scams as a society).
Anonymous cash is good, but BTC is not really digital cash either - it doesn't work in a warzone without internet for example. Any real alternative to cash would have to work offline. And any real alternative to bank transfers would have to be regulated.
Does a government have the legitimate right to impose taxes on its people, and to sanction criminals (and criminal activity) via control of the Financial system?
Anti-crypto people say yes (and in fact the government has a responsibility to fight tax evasion).
Pro-crypto people seem (I’m not one of them) to say no, that people have the right to access to technology to evade these government functions.
To be fair, there is a significant amount of disagreement about what a "currency" is supposed to be, and there is a large subset of people who believe that the desirable traits in a currency are exactly those things that make it function well as a speculative asset (notably, on average over a long time, value with respect to goods is at least flat and preferrably increasing) while simultaneously not thinking the things that another large group of people sees as desirable for a currency (e.g., lack of extreme short-term volatility) are important.
I can't speak to the original designer of Bitcoin, but I wouldn't be surprised if it and most cryptocurrencies were designed to be currencies, just by people who have a very specific (and, IMV, wrong) idea of what a currency ought to be.
There are still some 0 gas fees innovations happening in stablecoin marketplaces which is going to be interesting to see how that pans out.
These technologies can be used by people to coordinate amongst themselves whether the outgroup likes it or not.
If you google "network state" you will find things that you might like, and things that you might not like. It's not up to you whether other people create these things. You can only control your own participation.
Cryptography is really the study of incredibly rigged games, games that one side almost always wins, even when both players play perfectly. If human society is a game where humans try to coordinate with other humans to be better off, sometimes at the expense of other humans, then distributed ledgers have totally changed the meta.
Also, the risk isn't zero, just way closer to zero than that of Bitcoin or other crypto, in my opinion.
Yeah, so that can't happen unless it's used for actual trade more than it's hoarded, which can't happen unless it's inflationary.
There was a period of ~1000 years where you could also make this argument against some high-minded guy advocating for democracy.
It's entirely an issue of what people can and cannot do with this technology. It's a game with sides, and the concern should be that the technology has made playing for one side much easier than playing for the other.
The technology has unlocked total freedom of association, and I don't see a way to reign that in, other than restricting access to computation and the network for the entire population. As long as the average voter wants personal computing to continue, I don't see a way that a government could get the necessary control to shutdown one of these systems.
Bitcoin lost 10.8%
Gold gained 60.0%
It's good that you were in a financial position such that you could easily spend $1000 on a dumb investment, but that doesn't make it less of a dumb investment.
Monero is still in this game but the entities listed above are doing everything they can to kill it so they can retain power. They claim we should think of the children and worry about crime, but they really only care about their power. The benefit to the economy if money could flow freely around the globe instantly would far outweigh any real harms.
So it’s an inefficient tech with a mess of problems and uneven adoption but if you want to send $1-$1mm anywhere in the globe you can. That’s very powerful tech and the implications are about as important as anything else from cryptography hitting public adoption. And all of those have been consequential.. see 30 year fight about e2ee.
But the restaurant is worried about you stealing their food and dashing off without paying.
Any transaction requires some level of trust to function. Crypto is a pipe dream for people who want to participate in society without confronting their pathological aversion to trusting and depending on others.
A hypothetical good use case: one can have a "science crypto" where the transaction fees go to funding science. By using the cryptos you want you can essentially pay taxes to causes you think are important
People have been saying this for nearly a decade and many people with a great deal of motivation have failed to find any that worked and couldn’t be done better with traditional databases. It’s past time to ask if there’s actually any gold in them hills.
It completely ignores the benefits of Monero. Crime exists. Its not going anywhere. It is not societies job to make the crime fighter's job a walk in the park. Crimninals use cars to commit crimes, we don't outlaw cars. They use masks, the store sells masks.
The benefits of a global, decentralized and truly private and free medium of value exchange would be massive to the average person, but deterimental to those in power so they must use FUD to squash it.
A separate issue is that both Monero and ZCash are not post-quantum secure, while many of the new zkSTARK VMs are. The ledger lives forever, and state actors will eventually decrypt the transactions if the cryptography can be broken. At that point it seems like it's better just to build the currency product in one of the zk VMs.
Make money from what?
Technically it was one of my "first" achievements that I can do a lot of things if I devote the time to tinkering.
I think a lot of zerotier customers atleast free users just want to host minecraft ngl, I think after trying out lots of custom solutions, I found a custom solution which I stuck with it for a long time: https://trulyfoss.mataroa.blog/blog/self-hosting-vanilla-min...
I didn't know why I shared this but just wanted to share I guess that human spirit can try to find ways around and tinkering and how its an indominatable spirit I guess (ps hackernews "hacking" community glorified it a lot to me as well and gave me confidence that I am sure I can find ways to do this so thanks to hackernews as well)
It uses (https://e4mc.link/), I have no skin in the game but its open source and maybe just wanted to give another open source software and its team if possible some leads on improvement
maybe you guys can look into hosting e4mc software on your infrastructure or similar. Minecraft hosting is one of the largest markets, maybe zerotier can look into it
I know my blog was really messy but if zerotier really does implement my idea, the only thing I wish if is if the team ever create a blog post about it, maybe I can be given the opportunity to write it if possible but even if you do not, I would respect it and I just wanted to give some leads because I "wished" to create a product in this market but I don't have the funds and/or I wouldn't have the proper ability to monetize it in my opinion.
Also, what are your thoughts on creating a zerotier alternative to pinggy, recently shown on hn (pinggy.io), Heck I have created a custom huggingface space + websockify/ssh solution in house (vibe coded) too and I would love to discuss more about it as I am truly passionate about these things and if it might align with zerotier (sorry if I am yapping and the overlap is none)
have a nice day and sorry for catching you off-guard I guess.
Also must admit, you have a really catchy name on hackernews and that was why I decided to click and found you made zerotier (and its infrastructure, I decided that the biggest hurdle for me was the infrastructure aspect of things and I am also curious how zerotier started its infrastructure and journey, I feel overwhelmed by these infrastructure side of things basically and like to focus on trying to create crafty solutions around them) :p
Public clouds have enabled thousands of companies to put their products into the world without having to build and maintain hardware. They've completely changed the landscape of computing.
- The rebellious teenager. The often 'outgrow' it.
- The self made man (who in a certain way also rebels against society). These are generally the entrepreneurial types. Their understand the essence of views put forth by AR. Their views do not change over time.
Most people fall into the first category.
In the case crypto, there are lots of things they could do to limit the impact. They can forbid government regulated banks (or any corporation) from engaging with it. They can limit all the points where could you, in volume, convert in and out of the normal currency system.
So, obviously, the use of crypto can't be forced to zero, but that's not really an interesting point.
The question is, does crypto have, on balance, a legitimate use in developed liberal democracies? Or should these states suppress it?
good tech is like 2% of a real answer
Here's a rant about a bunch of other layers of 'so you want to move money'
https://voidfox.com/blog/payment_processor_fun_2025_making_y...
and different parts of the blockchain ecosystem are working on some parts of that, and all together they're still a long ways off
How do you not realize you're literally describing government?
Personally I am really interested in stablecoins, I know there is nothing interesting about them fundamentally and I think people should have their money in banks but still there are coins like fusd if need be which are private
I hate crypto aside from stablecoins which feel "tolerable" to me, not too good not too bad either but what is the general consensus and is there some innovation happening in stablecoins as I see a lot of stablecoins exploding recently.
I have another interesting idea about stablecoins which I see literally noone or quite few people pick up but why is there literally no coin stable-pegged to a etf like vanguards world or similar, I know from a regulatory standpoint it can be hard to create from what I've heard but I've always wondered about it and I would love to know more.
Also just because I think stablecoins are a good-enough idea doesnt mean whole of crypto is and basically I actually want centralized finance to do what stablecoins do without the need of a chain and just be better in my opinion and If I ever work in crypto, it would be very related to stablecoin in my opinion (or I hope so) but I also dont see too much point in working on stablecoins when there are just so many and mostly its a regulatory issue but still stablecoins are definitely interesting to me honestly.
The use case I had for this is that I am a teenager and I had some crypto and currently its in gold but I wanted to invest it in stocks and I have seen that there are chains which are cheap too
Besides this, some privacy gains and some other small use cases personally I am not that big of a believer in crypto (I am one of the haters), I think the technology is cool but the whole industry tries to do unrealistic things which raises alarms as me as I am a index fund kind of guy.
Honestly in my opinion 90% of people dont ever need crypto, what we need are more services like privacy.com basically which can create virtual cards with limits so that shitty companies cant leak my data and lose it. Or if the world can implement something like UPI or even PIX, those seem to be the better option and I only consider something like stablecoin as a slow way to move towards something like UPI or PIX preferably at the world scale.
Simultaneously the only use case people have found for it are defrauding people, hiding illicit financial transactions and gambling that some line will go up. Which is something pro-crypto people rarely acknowledge.
One of the sensitive issue is the price of ETH it seems as it didn't perform well over the last 3-4 years. And staking it will only give you about 2.5% today.
So in a sense the Ethereum Foundation is the opposite of the criticism we usually hear about crypto: the "stock" doesn't perform well but real progress have been made with the technology and in the ecosystem.
One thing that is clear is that transactions are cheaper, more reliable and anybody can still participate and build on it.
Literally the only way anyone can see their wallet balance is by doing this.
The religion of the Social Graph/global connectivity, the religion of the Cryptocurrency, the religion of AI (and the separate religion of AGI). People's fixation on UBI leans religious too. All promised transformation into better lives for people around the world, but none have managed to achieve it. We'd really be better off shipping hundreds of containers of solar panels to the global south than pretending some quantity of code we write will have as big an impact.
If you are saying the global collapse of the financial system, crypto will be the first to fall in that case. Crypto like BTC is pretty much a more volatile market tracker.
Nano uses proof of work to counter scam from both sending and receiving side and it uses open representative voting.
Basically nano works from my understanding as like hey, we will host the servers for nano since its kinda cheap to do so but also that we can promote our services via the voting model, mostly done by exchanges like binance,kraken for free.
The model of nano lacks the idea of payment in the first place, its whole model is built around send/recieve proof of works and representative voting
I created a tool which did literally 10s of transactions on nano tokens I got from a faucet and they had 0 fees so I stored data like "hello world" lets say on the chains without losing a single coin (I had like 0.000001) or something
They still are sustainable and without spam by that much partially because of their proof of works and from what I know, it can get really hard to spam if one tries to do so.
Personally there is nanusd but its highly unregulated, just created by one guy, I wish if something like nano can be created at a stablecoin level but yea.
What are your thoughts now, I wish to not sell on nano (the coin) but ORV (the technology), I find it more interested than blockchain essentially, there are some minor differences like nano uses lattice structure etc.
Also please dont buy nano reading this, I find the coin still speculative and I wish if someone can create a more regulated version of a stablecoin combined with running basically a nano node internally, its all open source I guess.
Crypto has zero fundamental use case in the real world.
Yet after over a decade, the government explicitly did not regulate crypto despite significant overtures from the industry. Nothing other than enforcement actions, until very recently.
This, to me, implies that the government does not want to regulate it proactively because they don’t want to legitimize it.
Before you could just buy Pocky at any old Walmart in the US, I remember mailing Celga[1] a money order to purchase some directly from Japan…
If people lose faith in a currency's future, then it has no real value.
If people believe a currency (or the government/system which supports it) is unstable, then it has no real value. Real world global trade and investment is done on long timetables. You can't develop a product that won't start selling for 6+ years if you can't predict how currency will behave along that 6 years.
No one had a 'wrong' idea of what currency should be. They saw an opportunity to scam people out of all their money by convincing them that gambling was an investment and that they were much smarter and more clever, and sticking it against 'the man' or 'the system' when in fact they were just being used.
There were only two notable groups in crypto: The scammers and the suckers.
The US penny is a copper (plus specific additives) ingot. It's value as a currency has directly shifted with the cost of copper, to the point of a desire to end the production simply based on copper prices. Copper is still a commodity with commodity markets (and futures markets) and its fungibility to trading is sometimes currency-like.
(Plus we can get into deep weeds discussing things like the Gold Standard where the commodities in the not-so-distant past have been directly tied to currencies. Arguably that is a bad idea, but just because it is a bad idea doesn't mean that it isn't a common or recurring idea because the distinctions are so close to few differences. You can cross-reference the South American experiments with a "Bitcoin Standard" currency even.)
When I say "the currency mechanisms", I certainly mean "the token mechanisms". They are the same, from my perspective. The difference between "currency" and "token" in a cryptocurrency sense doesn't seem to mean anything to me (unless you are explicitly narrowing to "non-fungible token", but that's a different discussion and as far as I can tell you are not), it is a distinction without a difference. Especially in the context of how much cryptocurrencies are and are not isomorphic to scams. In my view Artificial Scarcity (inc., but esp. Premining tactics), Proof of Work, and Proof of Stake all have aspects that are isomorphic to scams, that can be indistinguishable from scams. With present technology/math I do not see a way to build tokens that have any value without those systems. Whether you call those "currency mechanisms" or "token mechanisms" isn't a meaningful distinction when talking about the parts of blockchain tech that are most problematically isomorphic to scams.
So yeah, of course you can frame it in your way and that would be valid. That was the original ideal of cryptocurrencies - to have a financial system not controlled by the governments. Of course it can be used for fraud and other things we probably both consider bad, by design. Just like gold.
I've talked to quite a few objectivists (at one point I lived near Austin, which has one of the only, maybe THE only university in the world that treats objectivism as a serious subject of study) and not a single one of them had read a page of her actual writing on metaphysics and epistemology. So for example, they generally can't articulate an answer as to how her ethics of self interest differ from simple hedonism.
They all liked her fiction because they, almost all being bright people on the spectrum, derive all their self worth from their intelligence rather than from their interactions with others. So a novel presenting such characters as moral champions under attack from leeching inferiors naturally appeals to someone with an ego driven worldview.
The author of the linked post never really addressed whether he thought about reconsidering his views on Randian self interest as a virtue, which is a perfect way to philosophically ground the kind of exploitative and useless effects of crypto that he described.
I feel like I learned all I needed to know about crypto from that experience and haven't touched it since then.
Or tbh you can just buy it with crypto card issued in Hong Kong / Singapore even if you buying it in the US.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Bitfinex_hack#Laundering
There are ways to decentralize that as well; and it probably wouldn't be a bad idea. Decentralization is empowerment, it innately builds a freedom of choice, forcing of transparency, AND a flexibility for more direct and meaningful checks and balances on both an individual level, and a collective level.
There’s still some risk short of a global financial collapse where the FDIC rules are weakened, perhaps by making the $250k limit per individual for example, and then there being some bank failures. Or changing to only covering a certain % of deposits etc.
I want to buy something and use BTC as a medium for exchange. I take $10,000, buy BTC, send BTC to the seller, the seller takes the BTC and exchanges it for $10,000
However, we are not the only buyers and sellers and it takes time for the transfer to go through. So you have a variable amount of $ being held against the fixed amount of BTC, albeit with a variable amount available for purchase.
so i buy some BTC to make my trade, the amount of BTC decreases, the cost to buy more goes up. another person buys for the same reason. they spend more $ per BTC, but it doesnt matter - the value of what they are buying is the same so they buy less BTC. this happens for many people all concurrently.
the seller receives my BTC and then one of two things happens.. if trading volume has increased since i sent it to them then the BTC is more valuable and they make extra money. or if the trading volume has decreased since i sent it to them then the make a little bit less money.
there is a minor gaming of the system that happens with people trying to buy while trading volume is on the rise and then sell back while trading volume starts to decrease. this is why it looks like an MLM / scam - because this obviously doesnt scale, it isnt objectively valuable to increase competition for the resource while its needed to then try to release all that was purchased back into the trading pool while no one needs it. It is just a situation that is gameable in small doses if only a few actors do it.
People buying BTC for no reason other than to sell it back creates a gap in value on the other side for the sellers who need to sell the BTC they received in exchange for goods they valued at a specific $ value. The burden will be distributed across all the late sellers as trading volume decreases.
However, they dont need to sell the BTC if they would take a loss. They could just hold it until trading volume goes back up again, assuming trading volume is just fluctuating with standard customer behavior and not a change in belief of the stability of the currency.
Ultimately, the burden only really needs to be felt by those people who are buying the coin near its peaks who are trying to flip it and then missing their sell window. Actual vendors have wiggle room, as they only lose their COGS - even though they have their Revenue tied up in BTC, so they are still making profit if they sell, just a little bit less. the traders trying to game the system short term, however, are the ones who have more at risk as they have bought the BTC with after-tax liquid funds and need to sell it at enough of a higher price so that they make more profit after transaction fees as compared to alternative investments. As the price of BTC drops, they are the ones who are forced to sell at a minor loss and move the funds to other investments they believe are gaining value to avoid keeping the value tied up beyond their investment window waiting for the price to come back up.
The value proposition for holding BTC long term is basically a claim that the use of digital currency as an exchange of value will be so much more common in the future and BTC will be used for it, such that even times of "low trading volume" then will make current all time highs (in active trading volume) look tiny, even when accounting for the increase in tradable BTC that will come with all the BTC not currently in circulation do to people holding and waiting for that time to come.
So the traders rug pulling each other is kind of just a subplot going on with crypto and completely avoidable while still investing in crypto.
Developers want to use Postgres, not a distributed ledger. And most end users don't really care about data-sovereignty. If I thought a significant percentage of my app's users did, I would much rather rewrite to conform to ATProto than touch anything on the blockchain.
There is a reason people still have things like checking and savings accounts and CDs.
Looking at the chart of Nepalese rupee I don't see any bull market going back to 2005 so what are you talking about?
"Everything is the same" is a bad thesis. Just look at the charts.
The US even dispatched some high ranking officials to Europe to stem the tide. It predictably had the opposite effect. So America had the option: stop printing money because gold reserves are finite or end the gold standard.
ICE grabbed a US citizen friend of mine and threw her on a bus and drove her hundreds of miles away and was about to toss her over the wall to Mexico last week.
Civil asset forfeiture is another.
Tax warrants, which have zero burden of proof to be issued, are another.
I don’t keep money in banks, personally, after the third one bit me some years ago and I realized that storing money in banks makes it more likely to be stolen, not less.
As the original article says:
> The cypherpunk ethos attracted me. I was enamored by the whole idea of Bitcoin being a private bank for wealthy individuals. Being able to walk across the border with a billion dollars in your head is and always will be a powerful idea to me.
People sure had a "cypherpunk ethos" but they built cryptocurrencies, not tor network or signal. The author's dream was to be rich and untouchable. Imo the author is not that far away from the ethos of modern crypto as they think they are.
Banking trojans were doing just that, and receiving that money is obviously far more challenging than ransom payments because the owner will tend to notice pretty quickly and want it back. Ransomware doesn't have this problem, they can just deliver the keys only after they actually have the money in their control.
BEC groups are stealing billions every year via bank transfers right now.
.ru crime forums are absolutely full of people who will handle the logistics for you. They'll provide you bank accounts to send the money to, and deliver you whatever is left after their cut. A regular customer with high volumes will get excellent rates. The logistics aren't a challenge because there is absolutely massive pre-existing infrastructure already available.
Ransomware isn't big because of crypto(currency), Winlockers were popularized well before crypto payments became common. Ransomware just happened to develop at the same time as crypto, not thanks to it.
I would urge you to look at where the voter fraud takes place, I can't think of a place that spends that much time, money and effort to fake votes that way. Russia, Georgia, turkey and zim just use good old fashioned violence and lies. Its far far simpler.
Look I get that you are worried about vote counting and fraud, but seriously thats not how the mid terms are going to be swayed (if they are) The people that want to do fraud are lasy and not very clever. They'll just gerrymander and lie. Its that simple. Just look at the 2020 elections. Fraud was pretty evenly split, but miniscule and easy to spot. Yet, here we are, all it took was a constant stream of bollocks to news outlets and useful idiots to propagate it on the web.
I mean sure you _could_ print 20 million IDs/SSN/Drivers license, then pay a few hundreds of thousands of people to go and vote illegally. But thats expensive, take time, and leaves a massive massive paper trail back to you. its much easier to buy access to a dipshit billionaire and get them to force the bullshit down their network.
> Decentralization is empowerment
In some instances yes, but for things that backstop identity, its an opportunity for fraud (just look at the state of the internets)
> it innately builds a freedom of choice, forcing of transparency,
transparency requires a stronger authority to enforce. Be that monetary or legal.
(The onion futures thing was a joke. Onion futures trading is specifically illegal in the US.)
Anarchy is not a stable system, you have no property rights or freedoms without a way to enforce them.
You provide no alternative, a government will form from a power vacuum made up of whoever has the most physical power around you.
Crypto rises harder and falls harder. For traders, this is very useful.
Of course I know you were just riffing, but the particular terrible nature of the assets you compared it to was worth pointing out. Since you did ask how they were any different.
Different asset classes have different uses. A thing that doesn't move around much for a long time is not so great to trade, maybe to invest. Crypto is a great sponge for liquidity.
Except that they serve you before collecting payment regardless of which payment method you use.
And even if they didn't, having the customer pay at the same time they receive the food isn't a trust problem for the restaurant or the customer, because the customer gets the food before the restaurant gets the money but the restaurant gets the money before the customer eats the food. And if someone comes into your kitchen to steal food without paying, that isn't really a payment system issue to begin with.
The deanonymization comes from tying any transaction performed by a particular wallet to your identity and thereby deanonymizing all of the other transactions. Which doesn't work if the wallet only ever has two transactions and neither of them are tied to your identity.
That's assuming traditional chains. Privacy coins also exist.
There are a lot of selling points around freedom, but in practice its just gambling and its impossible to build real products in the space. In-fact there is no demand for anything other than gambling.
And many of them aren't things that are illegal, they're false positives or limitations that the existing system doesn't care about because they affect minorities or disenfranchised people instead of anyone with significant political power. It's not illegal to have the same name as someone on a list. In the US it's not illegal to buy many things but people are still deterred from doing it if they know it won't be private. Prohibiting donations to Wikileaks was never claimed as an official government requirement -- probably because it would've been unconstitutional -- but the major payment networks still did it. Transferring money to someone in South America isn't inherently illegal, the existing system just makes it a pain through normal channels.
It does the things the existing system doesn't. Which isn't always because they're illegal. Sometimes it's just because the existing system sucks and doesn't care about you.
Gold stock above ground doubles every 40ish years, halving it's value each time. Think how difficult it is to safely move and assay billions of dollars worth.
The reason nations aren't publicly using bitcoin as a reserve is that it's still only the year 2025
There's a lot more on the line for first-world nations, financially and functionally. Also, you'll notice I conceded that point in the last sentence in that same paragraph: "And that's one of the less intuitive methods for bypassing current election systems."
>"Look I get that you are worried about vote counting and fraud, but seriously thats not how the mid terms are going to be swayed (if they are) The people that want to do fraud are lasy and not very clever. They'll just gerrymander and lie. Its that simple. Just look at the 2020 elections. Fraud was pretty evenly split, but miniscule and easy to spot. Yet, here we are, all it took was a constant stream of bollocks to news outlets and useful idiots to propagate it on the web."
I'm not actually that concerned about midterms, I'm concerned about the macro implications of the existing electoral process (and theory, but that's a separate discussion) when we have better tooling for decentralized transparency/accountability and leverage - both for an individual and the collective - than we did during its ratification. I'm concerned its ripe for abuse with a passionate actor in general (that may or may not include individuals within our current administration), and your dismissal isn't too assuring.
>"its an opportunity for fraud (just look at the state of the internets)"
A lot of initiatives are trying to fix deterministic identification in digital formats now, some with good intentions and others with not.
>"transparency requires a stronger authority to enforce. Be that monetary or legal."
This isn’t actually true; transparency always rests on some power structure that both has access to the relevant information and can punish non-disclosure. That power doesn’t have to be a single superior authority, though. You can design systems where transparency is enforced laterally - a network of entities with roughly symmetric power, each able to observe and sanction the others, so that the tension between them produces real transparency and accountability.
I live in EU for many years, but due to my birth country being sanctioned I can't use any financial instruments like investing or even simplest savings deposits. Getting mortgage or loan is also much more harder for me, even tho I have much better financial situation than average person in that country. Apart of that I need occasionally go to the bank in person to proof the bank that i'm good person with valid documents under the threat of freezing my funds and closing my accounts.
Funniest thing in that is all these sanctions are issued by EU and US, and not by the country I live, where i'm pretty welcomed.
I'd need to review the design details more to say for sure, but e.g. from what I recall Pedersen hashes are used in the commitment tree, but not for nullifiers. Those use blake hashes (which are plausibly post-quantum secure), IIRC.
There's also the underlying prover layer, but many proof systems actually have information-theoretic zero-knowledge properties (assuming a suitable source of randomness), even if their soundness guarantees are based on assumptions like DLP.
I see this as a very naive statement. A big story in Russia - popular singer sold her appartment, then told court she was scammed to sell appartment and have sent all money to scammers. Appartment returned to the singer, court suggested the buyer to get money from unidentified scammers.
So much for court orders :))) Poor buyer has lost > $1M. There are over 3000 similar cases all across Russia. Appartment sellers get their apartments back in court without compensating buyers. This madness is going to be resolved someday, next will appear immediately.
Another story - a prosecutor's office tells that largest pasta producer in Russia was actually illegally bought from the government some 20 years ago. Boom, entire business goes to government (to prosecutor friends, really). I can go on and on, there are literally hundreds such stories just in Russia just in the past couple of years.
The point is - having certain independence from the government is good. For the majority of world population (China, Middle Wast, all Africa) government is not a friend but either an unpredictable force of nature or a foe.
Suppose you mined it or received it as payment for selling something to a stranger who doesn't know your identity.
> Where do you store your crypto short and long term?
If you're using it as a payment method you don't store it long-term. You either spend it promptly or convert it into some ordinary form of investment.
> What are you buying with the crypto? Why does it need to be purchased with crypto?
Whatever you want to buy with it. Suppose you want a VPN subscription. Suppose you want to make an anonymous donation. Suppose you're just eating at a restaurant and don't want a record of that on your bank statement.
> Where are you having it shipped?
There are lots of things you can buy that don't need to be shipped.
Also, that's a separate problem. If you actually had such requirements then you would have to deal with them, but first you'd need to solve the problem of not having a charge for the thing you want to be private appearing on your credit card statement tied to your government ID.
> Why do they need to use your specific crypto coin? Why can’t they use a locally invented (read: forked) one?
Because a major benefit is to be able to make transfers between countries.
It's also worth noting the framing of the article: "I wasted years of my life in crypto." It's not contrition for the harms inflicted, it's pure self-pity.
Edit: This post is now second in "/best". This is the best of HN? What a depressing thought.
The problem with this argument is that cryptocurrency now exists whether it's legal or not and using it for illegal things is already illegal. Drug dealers are committing a felony by selling drugs and if that hasn't deterred them then neither will making something else they're doing a crime too.
So all of the negative uses are going to happen regardless of whether you also ban the positive uses. At which point, what are you gaining by making it illegal or inconvenient for innocent people to use it for something that isn't otherwise illegal?
> Since blockchain is public, you can always trace "bad" or real bad payment to the source wallet. That i one issue, and another is that since BTCs are non-fungible, the tokens used in such payments are forever tainted.
People keep making this claim and it keeps not making sense.
You don't need someone's permission to send them Bitcoin. Meanwhile large exchanges keep billions of dollars in a single wallet and have single wallets that do billions of dollars in transactions over a short period of time.
So let's consider the two possible ways this can work: First, if you get coins directly from a tainted wallet then you get in trouble, but if it was several steps back then it doesn't matter. This is, of course, useless, because then people would just transfer the coins through a couple of other wallets first.
Second, any wallets that receive any tainted coins become tainted forever. Then immediately the vast majority of the chain is tainted because the coins have made the rounds through a large exchange at some point. Worse, it's pointless to try to defend against it by refusing tainted funds, because you can't actually refuse funds. Your billion dollar wallet or freshly mined Bitcoin can be tainted by any troll who sends you a dollar from a tainted wallet without your permission, and trying to treat coins as non-fungible is probably a good way to get someone to troll you like that.
Which gives you two alternatives again. The first is that all coins can be tainted by trolls, which will in practice cause exactly that to happen and thereby make the premise meaningless. The second is that you can try to say that it doesn't count if someone sent them without your permission, but now you can't tell if something is tainted by looking at the chain because it can't tell you which transactions were unauthorized by the recipient, and moreover you would then have a mechanism for getting dirty coins into a clean wallet.
In other words, when anyone can send you money without your permission, your options are "everything is dirty" or "everything is clean".
"Thing that solves some problems for some people doesn't solve all problems for all people" is not a very useful criticism.
> Finally, assuming that the parties are rational agents and the smart contract language is Turing complete, we argue that it is impossible to implement the basic sales escrow as a smart contract without trusted third-parties or vulnerability to extortion. In other words, any escrow smart contract has one of the following three demerits:
> – Assuming irrational agents who are willing to punish the other side, even if it is not in their own interest; or
> – Relying on a third-party; or
> – Enabling at least one of the two parties to extort the other.
> In summary, we illustrate that the smart contract and Dapp community is wrong in assuming that the current implementations of two-party escrows have a well-designed mechanism that incentivizes rational actors to be truthful. More shockingly, we show that the smart contracts on programmable blockchains have inherent limitations that make it impossible to implement such a contract. In a sense, this can be considered the first incontractability result on programmable blockchains.
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This is exactly what I was arguing.
I never claimed that two party escrow is ideal. I was explicitly saying that two party escrow is an intractable problem and that you must formalise your trust assumptions instead and either accept some level of trusted third parties OR without third parties accept some level of risk of exploitation by one party or the other. Even with third parties there is still risk for exploitation but depending how it is implemented that risk is lesser.
Again this is a matter of formalising trust assumptions and explicitly outlining who you are trusting, what you are trusting them to do, and how much you trust them to do it. And in doing so up front both parties can evaluate their risk tolerance based on the agreed upon contract before progressing.
Also, you should be careful of the sources you get info about Justice Thomas, as you are propagating racist coded tropes.
Of course, Amex deals with small instances of fraud all the time and has built that into the cost, and that’s why I or the merchant pay for the privilege.
For larger things, like actual large international theft, the government absolutely does step in and seize assets.
None of this is possible with crypto, despite what you say.
You can’t seize assets if the destination wallet key is only in someone’s head. You can wrench attack them, but that’s the only option. You better not torture too hard because once the key is gone, the coins are unrecoverable.
The only way it’s possible for there to be recourse even if the scammer is noncompliant, is for there to be a fiat money system. The only way around this is for there to be protections on top of crypto, which is antithetical to it: sure, you can have exchanges where the exchange gets a copy of every key, in case of government order, but then you’re talking the same government orders you’re trying to avoid. You can have the government order everyone to consider certain wallets “stolen” and compel everyone to not accept them, but that’s more government interaction that crypto was entirely designed to avoid.
You can either have decentralized currency, or government protection, but not both.
Congrats on making money though.
You just proved his point. In this example, bitcoin's volatility is closer to zero than gold's. Thus, by the quoted definition of "store of value", then in this particular time frame (it would be very different going back 5, 10, 15 years), bitcoin is the better store of value.
Quite the opposite: the marketing was always about more "pure", "unrestricted" capitalism without all the "evil" restrictions and red tape that the governments set up and (depending on the cryptocurrency) no option for the governments to turn on the money printing press to devalue the currency by their will.
> I see this as a very naive statement. [words]
Ok, you clearly have a lower opinion on the ability of your government to help than I do, but it doesn’t matter one bit: credit card chargebacks, escrow, and fraud departments exist and work every day without requiring a perfect government. It doesn’t matter at all that there exists cases of government abuse.
What does matter, is that crypto was designed to avoid needing any of the above, and with it, you have absolutely no recourse whatsoever if things go wrong. The only recourse you have is the government you’re supposedly trying to distance yourself from.
Imagine if the same house buyer bought the house from the scammer using crypto: There would be zero ability, even in principle, to get anything back. Those coins are gone. Even a perfect government with unlimited power could not recover them.
I’m sorry your country has shit courts and never helps you. Mine does. My credit card company’s fraud department does.
Things like banks and governments. Or incentives and heirarchy.
Nope, chargebacks in Russia do not work the way they do in US, not even close. The reason - government does not represent consumers, it represent bank owners. Also primary reason why scams in Russia are so widespread (and why internet is so cheap) is telecoms freely selling personal data (again, government representing telecoms).
Majority of world population live under a shitty government. Primary method a government uses to control population is monetary. First thing happening to a blogger opposing war in Russia is foreign agent status primarily limiting their ability to make money advertising. Government prints money to fund stupid war slowly extracting from population via inflation. Think of China or Iran where the only asset one can invest is real estate. In Iran leaders seriously discussing moving capital to a new city because they ruined local ecology. In China property prices aren’t doing well primary because of government mismanagement. This puts life savings of millions at risk without reasonable hedge. Coming back to Russia - devaluation in 1991, then again in 1998, then again in 2008, then in 2014, then expropriating private pension funds, then the war with western countries making it very hard to move assets out of the country while also freezing assets of tens of thousands Russians in EuroClear. How am I supposed to save for retirement?
Having alternative monetary system is the hedge from a shitty government. If stock market tokenization ever happens I expect a huge influx of funds into US/EU markets from people of China, India and Russia in an attempt to save their life savings from government greed and stupidity.
In this context your point about irreversibility is a desirable property making system independent from a shitty government. Don’t get me wrong, I’m well aware of all crypto shortcomings and would love to have something in between current chaos and more orderly system.
A smart contract is a shitty alternative to a good government but a decent alternative to a shitty government. At the end of the day I don’t need sorry, I need a solution.
This is why constitutional guarantees of rights, the world round, are generally completely meaningless.
Sounds like index futures. I understand wanting to buy fresh corn in one year at a constant price, so you get corn contracts for december 2016 and it gets delivered at that price when the contract expires. You know the cost beforehand and you plan for it.
Index futures? They just dump the equivalent dollar amount to your account when it expires. Who benefited? What happened? No physical commodity got exchanged. You've played with numbers, paid commissions, probably some spread and had around 6x leverage. Pretty much checks every box for gambling.
The architecture which I heard described or hypothesized was more akin to Amazon deep storage. More frequently accessed data would be more accessible on "hot" nodes.
Full nodes would effectively, under this paradigm, become cloud storage providers. As a bonus, the problem of how to charge for access is basically already solved, and does not require a complex corporate payment scheme.
500 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube per minute which is... If my napkin math is right, about a petabyte a day.
So you should instead compare bitcoin to APL stock. How much energy is APL (and APL alone) stock using? This is hard to measure, but probably a fraction of a fraction of the bitcoin energy use.
What about cases of private abuse? Suppose you're using Paypal or Stripe and they lock your account for no apparent reason. Money you were paid for goods you've already shipped is now locked up, stolen from you, with no explanation or recourse.
> Imagine if the same house buyer bought the house from the scammer using crypto: There would be zero ability, even in principle, to get anything back. Those coins are gone. Even a perfect government with unlimited power could not recover them.
Suppose someone commits fraud by having you send them $50,000 in computer hardware or precious metals or bearer bonds. What happens? The government arrests them, seizes the goods and ultimately returns them to the owner. It's not any different when it's a hard drive with a private key on it instead of a bag of expensive rocks. But then they can't just take your stuff, i.e. reverse a transaction, without due process -- which is good.
Meanwhile the scammer in that case is the property owner in cahoots with the government. If the government isn't corrupt then there is no scam, because then either the person you're paying actually owns the property and having paid them the agreed upon price that is now your real estate, or they don't own it and then when you go to confirm that they actually own the property the non-corrupt government says that they don't and then you don't pay them.
> I’m sorry your country has shit courts and never helps you. Mine does. My credit card company’s fraud department does.
Except when they don't. US banks are not exactly known for their customer support, and their fraud departments don't have the investigative resources of a government. If Alice says she sent the goods and Bob says he didn't receive them, how's the bank supposed to know who's lying without sending them both to court? But every time they get it wrong they're a party to a theft.
That's not the only option for a government. You don't need those specific coins, you only need anything of value. Their car, their house, the wages their employer would have paid them, anything else they'd already bought with the money, etc. And they're criminals, they're going to jail, and they're staying there a lot longer if they don't give back the money, which has a way of making non-compliant people more compliant without hitting them with a wrench.
> The only way it’s possible for there to be recourse even if the scammer is noncompliant, is for there to be a fiat money system.
That doesn't give you recourse either because they can spend the money right away. Which transaction are you going to reverse if they use it to buy a physical commodity or foreign asset? Then the scammer has the asset, not the money, so the only thing a fiat money system can do is cause the victim to be the innocent asset seller instead of the potentially negligent or actually in on it person claiming to be the original victim.
Another way of looking at this is that the main players have a vested interest in keep it as a casino. Therefore it'll never become a currency, because casinos and monetary systems have fundamentally different requirements when it comes to stability.
Instability in cryptocurrency is a feature. It'll never go away unless it gets regulated to the point that all the things that differentiate it from the fiat monetary system are gone.
I also wonder if the author has partly himself to blame. From his post, it looks like he worked for the seedier players in the space (because the pay was better) and is angry at the whole space. Its like a developer who worked for Oracle on MySql swearing off the entire open-source community.
edit: >nobody cares about good tech'
True. That's a big part of why you need [token-holders], "Build it and they will come" is more of a hope than a strategy.
Speculators fall in a gray area and need to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. many of them are straight up scams, Some are legit, and the rest are in between. Stratton Oakmont was a scam. Does that mean your index-fund is also one? Or the stock market and financial system as a whole?
But if Alice just gives private key to her address to Bob, then Bob generates new address (which we won't know is his) and transfers the coins there when we won't know for sure that the ownership of the coins changed. If we didn't see Alice passing the private key to Bob we have absolutely no reason to think that Bob owns any coins. We see that his known public address is still empty.
BTC isn't really adding value to the society, except the shady parts of it. I can't assess the part of luck in BTC gambling. Many lost money, many betted on the wrong coin. Did you bet on it because of the impact on dark economy or because you believed in unlocking the economy, blockchain everything which didn't happen?
→ “AI generates slop, false info, deepfakes make ppl look bad, therefore AI = bad.”
Same vibes.
You can wake up with your bank / broker / PayPal balance = 0, and there is nothing you can do to protect yourself from that scenario. Only replicated state machines (or L2s built correctly on top of them) even attempt to close that attack surface — and they’re still not finished.
In 10–20 years the world will run on government-run CBDCs, and your relationship with your bank/broker will finally be protected by actual cryptography and replicated state: xln.finance. That’s when crypto reaches its real bloom. Right now it’s nowhere close to being mature enough to judge.
If you’re a trader, jokes on you — you were never “in crypto.” You were just passing through.
The only people who are actually in crypto are the ones who build: smart contracts, consensus, p2p layers, replicated state machines.
Everyone else is just cheering from the sidelines (usually for the wrong team).
this is correct and wide way to look at replicated machines.
Many on HN just lack vision and love to hate on things. "Infamous dropbox comment".png
When you apply these programming concepts like atomic operations to something that control moneys it becomes security engineering.
Atomicity is literally the foundation of preventing double spending in a financial system. If people can spend bitcoin twice the price crashes to $0. Understanding atomicity is very important for cybersecurity/integrity of the system.
With more programming experience you’ll understand the mapping of studying crypto smart contract vulnerabilities and applying lessons to a non-blockchain database.
Programmers like you make me never feel threaten that my apps would be cloned, too many gaps in knowledge of system design.
Your fallacy is in saying “government isn’t perfect therefore crypto is better”. This makes no sense. Crypto dials down the protections to zero. It’s worse than any possible government can be, even in principal. Sorry your government is so bad that crypto’s flaws seem minor.
What about it?
Your entire point boils down to “fiat has flaws therefore crypto is better”, while completely ignoring that crypto is worse at the very things fiat is flawed at. Fiat sometimes doesn’t protect you, but crypto NEVER does, and CAN’T, even in principle.
None of your CONSTANT whataboutism across this entire thread is going to change this, so please, just stop posting.
>>First grade math skills are enough to understand it: we just count the votes in every precinct, and sum up the votes later up. No hashes, no smart group theory schemes, nothing complex.
-people are bad at counting
-some people might be bad at counting on purpose
-some people might try to influence the results
This happens all the time as proven by multiple recounts. I am not talking about USA here but about EU countries but I imagine it's the same in USA. You just hope those swings are small enough to not influence the end results. I am sure this is usually true but sometimes it's close and then the odds are at least some of those elections went the wrong way.
Mistakes happen and I am human so sorry about the misclarifications I suppose.
But basically the coin's structure/data structure doesn't have a gas fees data in it and its always 0, the network might take some work function which can take some time to process and there have been some attempts at spamming it but the recent network from what I have heard is spam resistant and it can happen to any such coin but honestly I do like 0.0000001 faucet transactions and they happen for free and instantly the last time I tried it.
I am still not shilling nano coin, I think the technology is cool and something similar but with more stablecoin-esque asthetic could be built and I am kinda interested in building something like it just out of curiosity ngl and I am worried what can be the idea or is it even worth it but yea...
> The point of trustless architectures (of which blockchain and smart contracts are one) is that you are eliminating implicit trust.
That is also the point of laws and contracts as we have them today. How does, explicitly, blockchain improve on that?
> You are moving all of those implicit assumptions about how a contract, interaction, or relationship work and formalising them into something explicit and upfront so that all participants can evaluate their risk tolerance and trust levels prior to agreeing to a given contract or interaction.
What implicit assumptions aren't removed by laws and contracts as we have them today that are removed by blockchain and smart contracts?
> And of course you are also sprinkling in a heavy dose of automation to smooth out the complexities of these explicit, mechanised contracts such that the happy paths are buttery smooth and the unhappy paths are at the least bearable and correspond to the contract you signed on to at the beginning of your interaction.
Without any examples of what is being automated, how and what it is that is made buttery smooth... you really aren't saying anything here. Can you expound on any of those claims?
TLDR: By what you said the only thing that blockchains and smart contracts bring is a new medium to write contracts on.
- At the bar is almost always a single direction: customer pays the bar. Lightning is both directions - sending money between friends and sometimes to shops.
- In this (bad) analogy bitcoin would not be Visa, but bitcoin would be "dollars". Both the bartender and customer would say that they are using dollars for the tab.
- The tab analogy doesn't really match the fact that you establish a "channel" (e.g. both you and the bartender would put some bitcoin into this channel and then you can pay your grandmother in another country with bitcoin in this channel... see the analogy doesn't work here), you can resize ("splice") the channel if you want, you can swap in and swap out...
In most solutions your wallet monitors the chain and it automatically resolves any of the dispute (e.g. Phoenix wallet, or Zeus). The time scale is also different, so even if power goes out for multiple days and you are running your own very private wallet without any associated service (LSP), then you still have on the order of weeks for your wallet to automatically resolve any issue.
The reality is that crypto became a lifeline in places where the traditional financial system collapsed or simply abandoned people: Venezuela, Argentina, Lebanon, Nigeria are good examples of people dealing with real crises, using whatever tools actually work, including crypto currencies.
Credit card fees are a great deal for consumers even when they are added as a surcharge or there is a cash discount. Not having to deal with cash AND being able to dispute transactions are significant benefits.
In my mind it seemed cheap enough to try a $1000 gamble and just hold long, long term ignoring the fluctuations and either this will be worth 0 or it will maybe be worth a boatload in the far future. That was always my idea and goal from day 1.
I mean I invest tens of thousands in the stock market and real-estate every year. This was just a tiny and wild gamble, but I don't think it was a dumb or foolish decision at the time given my financial position at the time and the amount involved.
Are you confusing me with someone else?
> For a basic example of the latter, every US citizen by birth has the freedom to become President some day, yet of course it is literally impossible for more than 0.000006% of people to achieve that within their expected lifetimes
I have no idea what this has to do with my point and you have not adequately explained the relevancy either.
Yup! My issue with the current system is that The Powers That Be pretend to act in the interest of their subjects(or, actually my issue is that people believe it) instead of being a gang of thugs imposing their will.
While it is possible for the state to inflict violence, it's relatively difficult to scale. The state can freeze your USD accounts with the stroke of a key (as they did for Russian accounts recently). Whereas rounding up and torturing all those account-holders is just obviously infeasible.
There is a little bit of real value in having a rail that is hard to block, so you can move money across borders or around account freezes, sanctions, or runaway inflation. But that probably only justifies a tiny slice of the current price.
Most of the rest is speculation.
Fiat is different. A national currency is tied to the economy that uses it. Wages, rent, groceries, taxes, all live in that unit. Even if it crashes on FX markets you can still use it inside that country to buy local goods and services, and over time prices and wages shift along with it. The currency may fall against the dollar, but the local cost of living in that currency moves with it too.
The dream was that crypto gets adopted economically in a similar fashion, and even globally, that simply didn't happen, so it ended up just being gambling.
Specifically, there is value in a global peer to peer and agreed upon standard of exchange of a guaranteed scarce resource that can't be double spent, such as gold and some cryptos.
Imagine a war, a natural catastrophe, societal collapse or upheaval.
You have to pack up, go elsewhere, or you're suddenly occupied.
Basically you have to ask yourself, what's more likely to be worth something in the future or elsewhere that I can park my money into until I need it?
Since Gold has such a history of being accepted by various cultures and people around the world, and it is very resilient, it doesn't require power, infra, computers, nodes, won't get easily destroyed to environmental incidents, can be stashed away for centuries without degrading, etc. It is arguably more likely to still be used as an exchange of value in the future.
Crypto, well, you have to be specific, let's say Bitcoin BTC, how likely is it that your wallet on your hard drive if you migrate from a war and find yourself in a new world order at the other end of the world, you can still use them to trade for goods/services and they're worth close too or more of what they were before?
It's hard to predict, but arguably it seems less resilient than Gold and therefore less likely for it to hold its value over time. That said, it may still appear better than USD, Euros, or shares in some company, etc.
That's why people say BTC is a "store of value", like gold. You use it to stow away value for when you need it later (even generations later), because it appears to be good at holding value even through geopolitical shifts, passage of time, and so on.
But, if people aren't actually using it for storing value, but instead for speculative bets, it means they are taking money out of it and not leaving it in, it becomes volatile, and volatility is a bad "store of value", because when you might need the value if it's at a "low" it's gone, and it failed at the use case.
If you go outside BTC, it becomes even less likely the other cryptos are good stores of value, and more and more they become speculative bets and a game of chicken.
And even BTC has high volatility and is used for speculative bets a lot. And gold isn't immune to his either.
There's no good answer here, nobody knows the future for sure, but that's the idea.
When people defend crypto as a store of value, now you know what they mean. They're basically hoping it'll hold value through borders, time, and so on.
I think that's where OP might have realized that, the ideal hasn't happened and it's use case is just a game of chicken.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46192445
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> That is also the point of laws and contracts as we have them today. How does, explicitly, blockchain improve on that?
It's essentially automated tooling. The happy path (i.e. buyer and seller are in agreement) "just works" but when there's a disagreement you can rely on the contract to walk through all of the conflict resolution paths with whatever level of complexity the contract builds in for consensus from multiple third parties, etc.
i.e. It's tooling that replaces manual bureaucratic arbitration with state machines and consensus algorithms.
For two party smart contracts this means there's no third party but there's an inherent risk of exploitation by one party or the other by the design of the contract. It's inherent to two party contracts relying on any physical exchange but if you trust the party the contract is weighted in favor of, it cuts out any opportunity for arbitration and the complexity that comes with that. Now the only trust assumption is the two parties trust in each other.
For contracts with some arbitration process however things get more complicated. Who all is involved in arbitration. Who does the buyer trust. Who does the seller trust. What's the reputation of one of these arbiters? This reputation can be loosely represented as a set of markets for the arbiter with demand from sellers and demand from buyers. If those two markets are out of sync from each other that suggests an impartial arbiter and both parties can reason about that.
> What implicit assumptions aren't removed by laws and contracts as we have them today that are removed by blockchain and smart contracts?
Well. Part of it is that laws are an inherently fuzzy thing and how they are upheld is entirely dependent on a long running and constantly evolving chain of interpretations from past court decisions. And of course how they are upheld in a specific case comes down to how well lawyers are able to convince a judge or a collection of jurors who were more or less selected at random with anyone semi-literate about the law thrown out ahead of time. So it boils down to "who is best able to sway the opinions of this random collection of people who are as illiterate about the law as the lawyers could manage to get them". Which mostly just boils down to feelings.
Of course contracts often go to arbitration instead of to court proper so it's a different case there but arbiters are single authorities that almost universally side with the bigger entity (i.e. whoever is paying them to handle arbitration). So unless you are two large orgs, arbitration is inherently biased.
So an alternative is a largely automated system where multiple third parties who are selected ahead of time by the buyer and seller can be relied upon for arbitration and where their decision is for all intents and purpose final. The buyer and the seller have equal decision making power in the selection of these third parties and they can evaluate the reputations of these third parties prior to entering the contract.
i.e. you are moving away from trust in a large system with a thousand moving parts all performed by infallible people swayed by emotions and an endless process of appeals OR a single arbiter almost always paid by the larger party who will always rule in their favor. Instead putting your trust into a strict set of automated rules with a formal analysis of outcomes backing it + some optional assortment of selected third parties + a consensus mechanism for those third parties.
> TLDR: By what you said the only thing that blockchains and smart contracts bring is a new medium to write contracts on.
Yes. It is exactly that. A new medium to write contracts on. Manual bureaucratic systems and thousands upon thousands of people working in a complex legal system are replaced by a machine. Humans are still in the loop of course but only for making specific decisions at specific times in the process.
And at the time of agreeing to the contract the relevant parties can ideally rely on tooling to explicitly outline at what points each party is taking on a degree of risk, the likelihood of that risk, and the process for moving forward in those cases.
An extremely reductive TLDR is that the goal is to take a system that relies on an army of lawyers and legal analysts and reduce it down into something digestible and navigable by a single lawyer (or even a well educated layperson) with all the existing complexity abstracted away by formal methods tooling.
You're selling your old PC. The buyer pays you with Paypal or a check or some other digital fiat transfer, you give them possession of the PC, then they reverse the charge and steal your money.
That's the thing cryptocurrency protects you from, in the same way and for the same reason as cash does. And if the fiat system would provide that over the internet -- irreversible anonymous cash transfers -- then cryptocurrency would be a lot less useful. But it doesn't, so it's not.
Everything started making sense. The first and foremost use of crypto is gambling. Everything else is a rather side effect of it (like me being 17 being able to pay via crypto)
I feel like some/most crypto might prey on the weak and gullible who can be going through things financially maybe by gambling as in trading or literal gambling... and then make their lives even more bad too and now I understand what the author actually meant, I think I was interested to see if its an industry worth working in but in my honest opinion right now not really...
Unless, I can work with something which can make me more traditional finance and give me regulations, maybe having stablecoin then can be fine but even then I genuinely do not think so that I am a guy who wants to work in or create a place and then create all these regulations and similar... I find this whole thing pointless from my perspective as a developer.
Most crypto can be used to be unregulated, gambling, piracy etc. and I think have a very high abuse factor too...
It was very interesting but I was just trying to spend some time I guess just seeing how people made chains but nope, I do not know but I am deeply offended by these gambling companies and exchanges too who are for traders who most likely lose their money in this weird shit show most of the times.
I think um the solution personally is that I always liked the idea of paying for servers anonymously, hosting anonymous contact so that you can say things against govt lets say if govt becomes too authoritative etc. but the problem is that this is also an side product and I doubt how many things need it. France actively went against grapheneos but couldnt do nothing I guess except have them move their servers and there are many many server providers who can even understand situations and maybe having a better connection or understanding with server providers can help out more.
The problem is scale. The more widespread is such system, the lower is the barrier to entry and the higher is cost to actually prosecute users to their amount and rate of usage (which we already see today).
Also this whole legal/illegal divide is often presented as if there was approximately same order of magnitude of both users. While I guess that actually the illegal use is way way larger than the legal use, simply because it is so crude and slow and buggy and unsafe by design. (excluding gambling, since that use is kinda derivative, depending on the all other uses making up a base on which to gamble)
And this is why token systems by rights should be heavily restricted, since they are so disproportionate in impact. We can all legally buy a knife in any shop, despite the fact that if used for attack a knife almost inevitably produces at least one body. Small arms are also available almost anywhere but with a lot of restrictions. Big arms are almost never available for purchase, just like explosives. And then the stuff like a canister of zarin is totally out of the question. That's because of the disproportionate effect. Same with financial instruments. Tokens are an Abrams of the finance world, and currently we let anyone have one, which is mindboggling to me.
> In other words, when anyone can send you money without your permission, your options are "everything is dirty" or "everything is clean".
You are correct. Afaik all tries to ban Tornado laundered tokens were eventually dropped. But the mechanism and potential still remains.
Also, please correct me if I'm wrong, in the case of BTC specifically we can track tokens from the "dust" attack and separate them from the legal and nice tokens, since they will stay in the different UTXO in the same wallet. Though I'm not very familiar with that, if it possible to pick which UTXO to transfer selectively.
Because the entire point of a reserve currency is to spend it in emergencies. Store of value is second to liquidity.
You can also usually recover some of that loss depending on how you are holding it.
> Gold stock above ground doubles every 40ish years, halving it's value each time. Think how difficult it is to safely move and assay billions of dollars worth.
Sure, that's a potential issue (although you are overstating it a bit). The main point is that due to historical reasons it is generally really easy to sell gold even if the world is falling apart their will always be a buyer.
> The reason nations aren't publicly using bitcoin as a reserve is that it's still only the year 2025
Sure, and part of the reason is that bitcoin doesn't have a track record of providing the properties countries need in a reserve currency. Reserve currencies aren't the place to try radical experiments. A lack of track record makes bitcoin a poor choice in and of itself.
Otherwise it's too late.
Totally plausible.
With the exception of rate limiting, those are indeed security techniques.
The generic programming concepts, like Atomicity and rate limiting are generic because, although maybe relevant to security, they would exist even without malicious actors. Atomicity for example is used on disk and database writes to avoid ilegal states in the case of power outages or crashes. Rate limiting on the other hand would still exist without malicious actors, to distribute limited resources when demand exceeds supply. And it often is used in the context of paid apis with different pricings based on different limits.
So in essence some concepts strictly exist to protect against malicious actors, while others protect against random conditions or good faith actors.
>With more programming experience you’ll understand the mapping of studying crypto smart contract vulnerabilities and applying lessons to a non-blockchain database.
If I'm not mistaken you started learning about programming and security very recently (which is why you can't distinguish between the two) and mostly through chatgpt? Might pay off to be less cocky, or maybe it's a good strategy so that veterans correct you, either way, all the best.
If anything it just shows how the leadership and allegedly well-meaning leadership chooses to ignore the issue.
Isn't it very likely that the malicious actors are part of the ecosystem and they contribute with funding? I'm not convinced that the scams and the casinos are an entirely separate fifth group (as opposed to a spectrum pyramid which might place say the Eth or Sol devs at the top). But even if they were, it's possible that the whole ecosystem and developers are benefitting from it?
It seems that the very nature of banks is associating and trading deposits and debts, so if more than half of the ecosystem consists of scams and theft, the other 'good' half is both benefitting and enabling the 'bad' half. Legislation is very clear on this, which is why we have KYC, money laundering laws, which are curiously enough the very social features that the supposedly "technological" innovations seem to do without.
In any case just ignoring the issue as a whole is a bit damning by itself, ignorance at best.
Guess what both fall under umbrella of cybersecurity. Please consult with your favorite LLM to break it down to you.
I can't continue having a conversation with a beginner posturing as a security veteran, who thinks rate limiting and having atomic operations in things that involve money is not cybersecurity.
blockchain smart contracts I wrote 8 years ago: https://github.com/Slidebits/ethereum-smart-contracts
iOS app, that "good faith" hackers try to constantly abuse through what you call "random conditions": https://apps.apple.com/us/app/slidebits-ai-playground/id1138...
Maybe you can share some of things that form your opinion?
the core theme of establish trust in a trustless environment will truly remain the potential we are yet to fully achieve in a usable way, but i hope it comes.
Day-to-day transactions at the street level may not be dominated by crypto or even a majority, but it is a growing nontrivial minority in a lot of places especially emerging markets.
[1] https://www.trmlabs.com/reports-and-whitepapers/2025-crypto-...
[2] https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/2025-global-crypto-adoption...
[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1362104/cryptocurrency-a...
I just don't see the equivalence in comparing it to buying a lottery ticket.
There are way way way more bitcoin winners than there are lottery winners.
Regardless of anything else, it's money I can email. Without having to rely on almighty permission from whatever country or company controls the currency or platform (and all the corresponding bullshit that often entails, like user-hostile terms of service which nobody in their right mind would agree to if they actually read, overreaching indemnities, arbitrary limits, and in some places risks arising from which way the political winds happen to be blowing).
I've used it to buy real things (that aren't drugs or contraband) where it offered less friction than competing forms of payment, and still feel the magic of that.
Have the finance leeches clawed their fangs into it? Yes of course!
But they did the same thing to regular currency and stocks decades ago (eg. with tangled webs of Nth order derivatives eventually crashing entire economies). Does that mean you don't use cash or credit cards or stocks?
I share the tweeter's frustration with the accretion of scams and other illegal actors, but not their surprise. Technology can't fix human nature.
(Although personally I see regulation catching up - for better or worse - and over time I expect feature improvements will mitigate more of the toxicity, eg. baked-in decentralized dispute resolution mechanisms that are less costly than the traditional judicial system but fairer and more efficient than arbitration alternatives you see today).
ransomware would beg to differ.
I am saying that yes they choose intentionally by having buckets of higher value transactions earlier than later but the transactions happens instantly even lower amounts
That being said, there have been points in past where I have seen in its history where it got spammed and yea it can have an impact but even that, they say that they have mitigated it now
But even then, the premise is in all honesty you were mentioning how every crypto has fees but even if it may have spam which might delay an transaction from its default literally 1 second to lets say something like a minute...
Even then it will take 0 gas fees. So I think I still gave an solution to you no?
That being said, I think its tech is cool but the way its implemented in stablecoins whatever could've been nice but its all just regulatory gimmick. Personally I am not that interested in any of these things but still I feel like it was worth mentioning.
I think nano has more potential whatever that means than bitcoin but I am not gonna be foolish and invest in nano because I dont think its something like investing, it would still be speculation and the traders and everyone is irrational because its sort of gambling and I think that what nano can be good for is, instead is people working on it to create their own stablecoins or tokenomics but as I have said, I personally think most if not everything in crypto is kinda about regulations so I have mixed opinions honestly about crypto in general but the technology behind nano was cool tho which is what I wanted to share (still please do not invest in nano, I think its highly speculative and irrational market and tech literally doesnt matter and if you like the tech, build something similar but with which can have more financial sense I suppose and usecases etc. too I suppose)