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I've been deep into crypto for years and I was a big stablecoin supporter. I was fascinated by the tech and I still am. But everything outside the tech itself is just trash, scams, and gambling. I've come to believe that "pure" decentralization is neither practical nor particularly convenient. The only real use case that makes sense to me is giving people in developing countries access to a stable currency they can actually hold, trade, and invest in, meaning USDT or USDC. Outside of that, as an EU/US citizen I don't see why I'd hold stablecoins instead of fiat. It's actually riskier in every meaningful way, and I already have access to every form of investment I could want. It's genuinely fascinating to think about a technology that can empower people who otherwise have no access to financial tools. But that comes at the cost of millions of people around the world gambling with money they can't afford to lose, convinced they're investing their way to wealth.
Crypto was initially interesting to me because scarcity based economics is failing us and crypto give us a way to explore alternatives. But so far, nearly everything we've built with it has just been a clone of some scarcity-based thing that already exists outside of crypto.

Since then I've come to the conclusion that it's never worthwhile to buy crypto with fiat. Any scheme which asks that of its users creates too much continuity between the old way and the new way--it allows the illegitimately rich to continue to be illegitimately rich even after switching to the new system. Anything with that property doesn't deserve to be the new system.

What we need is a discontinuity. A system that wants not your money, but your participation, and which doesn't acknowledge the value of your old money. Today's crypto isn't it.

I got into crypto in 2017 when I came across the phrase "money is a technology". That idea fascinated me. But fast forward several years later, and it's obvious that money might be a technology in the sense that it's a tool, but more importantly, money is a culture.
I live in less developed countries so it is actually useful for me but I see it the same way as you wrote here.

Low-life businessmen ruined the technology outside of some spaces where there is strong tech leadership. They did too much damage to reputation of the whole industry

They did the same butchering to LLM/AI tech.

Technological solutions to social problems only tend to work when the problems are of the type "I wish it were easier to rid people of their money".
> The only real use case that makes sense to me is giving people in developing countries access to a stable currency they can actually hold, trade, and invest in, meaning USDT or USDC. Outside of that, as an EU/US citizen I don't see why I'd hold stablecoins instead of fiat

The logical conclusion of this train of thought (which I agree with) is that people who heavily invested in crypto may significantly benefit from weakening strong currencies and institutions. Make of that what you will.

When people in a developing country cannot hold foreign currency it is a result of a deliberate decision by their government. That creates a number of issues. They may well be breaking the law holding stable coins. It means practical difficulties in buying stable coins (they need someone who will sell stablecoins in their currency).
Exactly. Cryptocurrency is useful as as a backup system against failing/weak institutions. Just that. Like insurance, it was not there to make anyone's lives better but simply to become a safeguard to avoid complete collapse.
> neither practical nor particularly convenient

My only take away with crypto is, think of that one movie "In Time" but instead of the whole time = currency concept and the arm clock, what if crypto could be applied to a physical piece of e-paper like thing, where it says what its worth, and its worth what it says, you can transfer it on a whim from the paper to your phone (to a wallet) and back and forth.

If anyone figured that out, fully seamlessly, fault tolerant, that alone imho would be worth investing time and attention into.

Basically make the crypto real and physical, something fluidly tangible to where everyone can hold it and understand it.

No one can hack your wallet if all your "crypto" is not in it. You can spin up new wallet on a whim.

The only real way I can think is something like how monero works, where whoever owns a coin can "decrypt" said coin (or that's my limited understanding of how monero works).

>the only real use case that makes sense to me is giving people in developing countries...

The markets hasnt accepted that. In gaza the cost of using crypto for foreign exchange far exceeded the cost of using cash, or prederably a US bill.

People just simply trust paper bills in developing areas

Two things can be true at the same time:

- Bitcoin was and is a massive, historic accomplishment in creating digital scarcity for the first time and the long term effects are still playing out.

- Virtually all of the "crypto" or Bitcoin 2.0 schemes in the 15 years since have been scams. Essentially a way for a tech founder to mint tokens out of thin air, and then try to convince others to treat them as money so he can get a huge (fiat-denominated) exit. Stablecoins are basically the only crypto innovation of note that have achieved PMF.

Don't confuse the former for the latter!

Cryptocurrency is very much a double edged sword, on one hand it enables people to transact monetary value bypassing for-profit operators such as western union and paypal as well as hinders corrupt government institutions from confiscating or otherwise devaluing what you own. Of course this also allows people with harmful intentions to do the same, bypass centralized systems that keep fraud in check, mitigate theft and whatnot.

But all I know is that the only reason why some of my friends are able to work remotely from their country is crypto currency as that is the only way they're able to get paid without 30% to 40% being lost in fees as well as being stored in a currency that might lose a majority of its value overnight. They work real, productive swe jobs and earn enough to support not only themselves, but everyone around them as well making the place they live in a tiny bit better.

Having worked in crypto analytics briefly, normal people have no clue how much fraud and scams are happening in crypto at the exchange level.

FTX collapsed and was caught but more conservative crypto exchanges continue to use customer funds, trade against their own customers, use insider information, etc.

Even a supposedly "legitimate" exchange like Coinbase is allowing unregistered securities to trade on its platform.

Agree re. prediction markets and predatory marketing but disagree so hard with this

> The private interest is genuine, a global market's appetite for a frictionless way to hold dollars, captured by the saver who holds the token and the issuer who books the reserves. The cost is paid by everyone outside that transaction. What looks rational for the individual Nigerian saver is corrosive for Nigeria.

The way this is framed by the author is something like "poor $COUNTRY central bank has its citizens best interests at heart but evil stablecoins are tying the poor central bank's hands". The reality could not be farther from truth. In countries mentioned in the article like Argentina, Turkey or Nigeria the governments are incredibly corrupt and they use monetary policy and capital controls to make loads of cheap financing available to the ultra rich while inflating their debts away. The net effect is that in these countries the combination of inflation and currency debasement is used as a direct wealth siphon from the middle/upper middle class to the ultra rich (the poor have no savings and therefore are less affected). As a result the middle and upper middle classes of these countries entirely evaporated in the last 10-15 years.

Stablecoins are not the issue here, the governments are.

>Meet Mike. Mike is a college freshman who is exposed to crypto through social media. He downloads Coinbase, buys ten dollars of CumRocket because his friend group is in on it, watches the price move, and feels for the first time the dopamine rush of gambling on non-economic random walks. By his sophomore year he is onto harder drugs: 0DTE options on triple-leveraged single-stock ETFs he does not understand, traded on a gamified brokerage built to look like a video game. By twenty-two he has a Kalshi account, because betting on the outcome of a presidential primary or a reality television show winner has been reframed as participation in financial markets. By twenty-four he has hit rock bottom in the sportsbook, firing off ten-leg parlays on Tibetan ping-pong and third-division water polo at two in the morning because the games he has actually heard of no longer move fast enough to feel like anything. Mike believes he is investing. Mike is gambling. Mike is on the express train to a gambling addiction, and he is meaningfully poorer at every stop along the way.

tbh that reads a bit like the war on drugs propaganda we got in school back then. You don't want to try the devil's lettuce cause in 2 years you will be a homeless heroin addict in San Francisco, or worse!

Actually, this industry routinely runs what you'd call "hero marketing," and what makes it especially dangerous for young people is that they're being sold success stories by actors playing people who don't exist, fictional characters who supposedly got rich through crypto.

1.A tiny handful of success stories are pushed to the front.

2.The vast majority who lost money are made invisible.

3.It manufactures the expectation that this time, you could be the one.

4.The price movement itself becomes the reward stimulus.

5.The platform, the exchange, the issuer, and the early investors all hold an advantage in fees or liquidity.

The problem is that this is identical to gambling. But it's dressed up as "finance." The industry obscures the fact that crypto functions as gambling by making people think of it as a new kind of financial asset.

Of course, crypto is technology. It's true that there are technological components, blockchains, smart contracts, and the like. But just because something contains technology doesn't mean the mass marketing around it qualifies as technology investment. Anti-counterfeiting technology is also technology. That doesn't make putting money into circulating counterfeit bills an "investment in currency security technology." By the same logic, the fact that crypto contains technological elements is being used to justify the marketing structure built on top of it, and that, precisely, is the deception.

And for all the talk of decentralization, the reality that USDT and similar tokens end up tethered to a single dominant exchange, heavily coupled to nation states, essentially proves that true decentralization is impossible in practice. This is only natural. Decentralization makes trading inconvenient, so people gravitate toward a single centralized exchange. And at that point, what exactly is the difference between that exchange and a government?

I've been sharing author's view for quite a while now, namely that there must exist a market of goods to give a currency real value.

But I must contradict the author, because there is a market of goods, and bitcoin is indirectly involved in it. Namely the dark web market of drugs.

People love drugs, and they use a lot of them, drugs turnover a huge amount of value. And right now people are buying bitcoin, because it's often safe to buy, and exchanging it for monero, that they then use to buy drugs.

I'm very much interested in this market, and how it affects crypto.

I do agree that there's a huge amount of fraud and scams, and obviously that's only got worse since the President of the US started being part of that ecosystem.

But at the same time there is also finally real finance happening on-chain too. Backpack launched a SpaceX token at IPO that can be moved between on-chain and your brokerage. I think Coinbase announced their on-chain equity offering will have the same capability. Just yesterday Bailie Gifford launched a tokenised fund where the actual register of record is on-chain. I still think crypto has significant potential as financial rails, and that does seem to be being explored by real financial players now too.

Isn’t this related to financial nihilism where normal people can’t invest or earn enough to grow money for basic life costs like housing and college with standard investments or jobs. They need a moonshot, hence gambling has become normalized. It isn’t even about the White House or crypto per se, it’s a desperate embrace of risk to catch up.
Note that this post includes a major spoiler for the show The Good Place. The show is fantastic, so I'd suggest not reading unless you've already finished season 1, or have decided it's not for you.
> "A platform that the federal regulatory apparatus has agreed to treat as adjacent to a derivatives market listed, ran, settled, and paid out a binary contract on the eschatological return of the Christian messiah."

How is this not the coolest shit ever?

I wish I could just read the prompt rather then the very long article full of tiny mistakes that was generated from it.
I think the problem of crypto for mainstream usage was that it had no real purchasing power on its own. Every time you want to buy a good with crypto you have to pay the current market value of the coin in the local currency. There is usually no way to buy something for a fixed bitcoin value because at the end everyone want to exchange it for "real" money.

Without this it's always just a something to speculate on and shift "real" money with.

Crypto has been the bad place for almost 10 years. It lost it's shot at being mainstream when Steam stopped accepting Bitcoin payments due to price instability.
We definitely live in depressing times where all decency has long been lost.

Just yesterday the US president has Tweeted the he "loves bombing the shit out of Iran".

The language is disgusting, what's happening is disgusting, from prediction markets and their disgusting shills/cultists trying to sell you that price discovery has positive social impact, politicians and administrations blatantly involved in scams and corruption, the US threatening its allies, civil liberties and privacy more and more dying around the world, the US kidnapping foreign leaders and half the world clapping and pretending it's not happening.

Every day there's more animosity, nationalism, protectionism, people blaming globalism ignoring the huge benefits and prosperity it brought, computer algorithms (AI) quickly eroding the only positive and creative edge humans really had.

It's just sad to see the state of the affairs and the increasingly selfish direction the world is taking.

This guy has been preaching against crypto for years, to the point of leaving the Haskell ecosystem just because the language was being used by Cardano. At some point you have to wonder what's going on with him...
> A shadow dollar system, newly blessed by federal statute, is quietly migrating the savings of the global poor onto the balance sheets of a handful of opaque private companies.

I'm out of the loop on this one. Is he talking about some crypto thing?

I read "that is not worth reporting on anymore because it's barely the craziest thing this week" and just immediately thought that this is all just part of the plan to flood the zone. So much corruption, crimes, lies, insanity is coming out of this admin, it's impossible to keep track of, the depravity of it all is still unrealized as we just go numb to it all.
> A defender will say that gold is no different, a price that refers only to itself, and that we do not call gold a fraud; but gold carries a floor of industrial demand and a monetary role thousands of years old, and Bitcoin has neither.

I'm always interested to see how anti-crypto people try to differentiate gold from crypto, and so far I've never seen anything convincing. Gold's industrial utility as a good electrical conductor could not have begun before electricity was discovered, but it was valued just as highly for millennia before that. The "monetary role thousands of years old" claim has no force at all, because it does not even attempt to explain what it is about gold that caused it to acquire this role -- and identifying some relevant property of gold that crypto lacks is a prerequisite of any argument that attempts to differentiate the two.

> At no point in this pipeline does Mike's capital touch productive enterprise.

This is an interesting economic/philosophical angle. What is the logical conclusion of this? What happens as a higher fraction of people deploy their capital in zero-sum games? Is "deployment" even the right framing? A bet doesn't necessarily "tie up" capital in the same way as a real investment (you could place your bet moments before it's settled). Buying crypto does tie up capital, sort of, although in theory you could invest crypto-denominated assets into something productive.

My capital is in real estate and (mostly US tech) company equity. Is society actually better off because I put my capital there instead of letting it sit in a bank account or crypto wallet?

> A market, she says, is a price discovery mechanism for goods and services whose value comes from outside the market itself. The price of wheat reflects something about the world. The price of a share in a public company reflects expectations about real cash flows. The price of an interest rate future reflects collective views about real monetary conditions. In every case the market is a measuring instrument for an underlying reality, and the participants take positions on that reality.

> The price of Bitcoin measures only the price of Bitcoin.

I worked in Web3 for 2 years after getting poached from a very vanilla non-crypto tech role. Everyone here is talking about the scams and crime but I haven’t seen anyone mention how disinterested everyone is in the tech. Talking about it is a game, how long can they keep the conversation going before you hit the BS bedrock. Once you do its masks off, no it’s not decentralised, no it can’t scale, no it will never be fixed.
I think anyone who has dealt with SWIFT transfers into higher-risk jurisdictions is thankful for stablecoins.(Also you save a ton in fees)
Has been since 2017 IMO...
> The price of a meme coin reflects only the collective belief of meme coin holders that they will be able to sell to a greater fool

Author is at times a little too emphatic, but he has some sentences like this one that are really efficient in conveying the idea.

1. A looong skim before it's revealed which type of "crypto" this is about. Because quantum computers, real crypto is also having a challenging year.

2. 2026? Cryptocurrency was always just hell. Well, before it was hell it was LARP.

> The business is sucker farming: manufacturing a product whose counterparty is a retail customer who does not understand that he is the one being farmed. It could have played by the existing rules. It has decisively chosen not to.

Bingo.

This is such a boring take. Everyone was writing the same things in 2008.
I appreciate the analysis here, but the prose is giving me serious LLM vibes, and perhaps not coincidentally is verbose and repetitive. Sad if a talented author chose to give up his human voice.
Iran has been using bitcoin to pay its oil and got payed tolls in it.

OTOH i think it damaged the ecosystem that US president decided to be "the most pro-crypto president". Obviously nobody wants that.

If you don't know the Taler project, it's a very good idea as an alternative to crypto https://taler.net
So much capital has exited even the dominant coins. Is it another low to be inflated up again in a year or two? This has happened every single time The End was declared.
Two of many things to answer:

1. Why must an industry provide public good? How do you define public good? If it must, can your claim be proved objectively without relying on feels? All these articles decrying gambling, crypto and prediction markets are begging this one simple question.

2. Why must exchanges be split up? The whole trading industry is based on trading against each other for estimated personal gain. This is the definition of trading, whether cows, binary crypto options or bets on an orange man’s Xs. Exchanges’ trading against the client isn’t endemic only to crypto. Look at all the CFD and spread betting brokers. There are all sorts of techniques.

This author is way too wordy and spends too much time with flowery prose when he should be getting to his weird, highly idiosyncratic point
> The public's trust in markets is finite. Every dollar lost on a self-referential game labeled a market consumes a small piece of that finite trust, and the consumption over fifteen years has been considerable

Yes, and not just in crypto. People have started to view a high-trust society like a rainforest: a natural resource that has lots of life-sustaining positive externalities, but you can just burn it down to make a quick buck instead. This has been bad since the GFC, and accelerated by the modern rightwing influence sphere.

There's a very real tendency to people to go "I don't trust mainstream source <X> for <slightly valid reason in one case>", and then immediately jump to totally trusting some random youtube or tiktok conspiracy theorist.

> gold carries a floor of industrial demand

I can’t help but think Bitcoin carries a floor for criminal activity. It will always be valuable.

The fun ahead will probably be capable LLMs + smart contracts. There are probably a lot of issues that can be discovered.
Once the finance guys and gambling addicts arrived it was "game over" for the geeky side of crypto.
For me, the price of bitcoin represents some kind of index for how gullible retail investors currently are.