Crypto has become the ultimate swamp asset (opens in new tab)

Crypto is the way it is because there are behaviors that are driven by perceived anonymity. We’ve seen it time and time again and fail to learn or understand the lessons.

I’m a child of the 90s. The exuberant promise of the wonders of free access to information really fell short and transformed the world in odious ways. We gave access to a vast swath of human knowledge, but instead consume gambling, porn and think the world is flat.

Crypto is no different. We created a means to transfer wealth like the modern financial system without any controls… and shocking… we created a fertile environment for cons and criminals of all stripes to operate at greater scale than ever before.

Because the people who control the narrative are _redistributors_, not _builders_.

Broadly speaking, I divide people into builders and redistributors according to their primary approach to life - not just their job but their belief system - both how they seek to keep themselves fed and what they enjoy doing.

The thing is, builders are driven by the need to create and that's what occupied most of their time and energy. Sure, they publish their stuff but that's not their primary driver.

Then redistributors notice what they've built and see ways to make money off of it. And because good advertising is way more effective at convincing people to give you their money than simply having a good product, in the end it's them who end up building the narrative because it's them who invest way more time into publicizing the thing.

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(Note I am not saying all redistributors are bad, there are plenty of honest and socially positive jobs which don't build stuff but have a positive outcome for everyone involved. But I feel like increasingly more and more of the population is preoccupied by how to make the most money with the least effort.

Maybe I need better terminology and split redistributors into two categories.)

I'm not so sure that cyberpunk is dead, it's just that Billy Idol has better things to do with his time than try to co-opt something his manager read about in WIRED. The broken-circuit-boards-and-leather NiN aesthetic lasted for so long that it can't really be revived, which is 100% fine. I think now that a ten year old laptop that can run Linux, tor, and i2p is worth $20 means that now is more cyberpunk than ever.

> The history of crypto is pretty much a story of technical people creating something interesting with a cyberpunk/ open ethos - then the financial industry realizing it can be exploited to make money in ethically dubious ways, while simultaneously destroying the philosophy behind it

This is not 1995 anymore, when there was an air of naive optimism about technology, and everyone thought that would only be a force for progress and good.

When crypto was on the rise, many people warned against it. There were many who were skeptical.

Those who were building it were in on the grift. Gesturing to some shadowy cabal of people that subverted crypto into something it was not meant to be is just giving a pat on the head to people that were willingly building something very destructive for their own damn benefit.

"I was just summoning demons because they look cool, I didn't expect those evil cultists to sacrifice a child in a pentagram" is not a valid line of defense.

Ideological capture is something that any system inevitably faces once it becomes large enough. But the point is to evolve and grow, not stagnate on a fixed concept.

Personally, I think Solana does the best at balancing the original cypherpunk ethos while ultimately driving towards the future with crypto being the rails for natively programmatic global commerce.

> the media is largely dominated by institutional players

and also tech journalism as a whole is pretty abysmal to begin with

I'm not sure the evolution you're describing is as much of a change as it might superficially appear to be. The modern crypto participants may look different than the original enthusiasts, but the philosophy of being free from authority and regulations is still 100% there. It's just that instead of it being about scrappy cypherpunk rebels, it's about billionaires who want to use their wealth to supplant governments and usher in a techno-feudalism future or whatever. Of course some folks are just in it for the get rich quick scams, but there is an obvious ideology around the cryptocurrency space today that is still anti-authority but for all the wrong reasons.

It’s the natural result of the technology’s original goal to be “unstoppable” and beyond regulation or laws.

Makes it a perfect place to run investment frauds, scams, Ponzi schemes and other activities that would be illegal in the regular financial sector. Also attracts criminals, tax evaders and money launderers.

Meanwhile it’s slow and cumbersome enough that anyone not seriously motivated to operate beyond the reach of the law stick with existing systems for convenience.

The irreversible transfer is a large part of the attraction isn't it? Your business policy may be "no refunds", but customers paying with credit cards have a decent chance of a refund from Visa or MasterCard. Now your "no refunds" business, which might be on the scammy side, has to deal with Visa's lawyers per charge backs.

Irreversible transactions make scammy businesses more profitable.

Kidnapping and ransom existed before crypto

That's sort of the point, I think. It's like buying an index tracker in the underground economy.

That's the thing, fighting against kings and monarchs with a stranglehold on the colonies means you get invaded by a world superpower, right? Who would tolerate fighting for freedom if it means getting murdered? Such a short sighted pursuit that won't lead to anything better, it is foolish. Clearly we should bow down before the supreme authority and accept their benevolent ruling. /s

History has this way of repeating itself. And it seems the blind will never see. Those who can see, just keep working. Talk is cheap. We will drag humanity into the future kicking and screaming if needed, because we know what waits for us on the other side.

Kidnapping for ransom was a thing in human history even before money was invented. And money could be lost in many other irreversible scenarios, like fire, government confiscation or devaluation.

So was speculation.

Crypto is just another value carrier. Password is just a risk factor, like trust in govt is.

Sure, but a) this doesn't require blockchain, and b) there's no incentive for the various players to make credits portable.

So you're saying cryptocurrency remains a solution in search of a problem?

Apparently one of the old school decentralized RPC providers (pocket network) has pivoted into being a way to access open data sources in a permissionless way. I think this is what you’re talking about?

https://pocket.network/case-study-building-a-decentralized-d...

I don’t disagree that it would be nice to be able to do this, but barring some black swan-esque event that changes how people see these things, it’ll probably always be somewhat niche compared to more permissioned or centralized systems. That or the decentralized systems will need to be VERY competitively priced to make the value-prop a bit more of a slam dunk for making this more widespread outside of philosophically-aligned hardliners and idealists

> Crypto should be taking off in use in the AI age. Right now I have credits I paid open AI for so I can use their API. I have anthropic credits, I have some credits in a video generator app.

Sounds like things are working just fine without the extra cryptocurrency step.

You can do this using OpenRouter; they accept USDC I think

Yeah lets combine two technologies that need lots of energy. Climate change is still a problem

Why? Probably the easiest and quickest way to get a read on everything that’s going on outside of tech and therefore understand the global context our industry sits in…

My local libarary has a subscription, I can access articles through their app.

There are some sites that sell them at a discount.

I don't. It's not that hard to read anyway. You can use the archive.ph version https://archive.ph/HpY1R

or the bypass paywalls extension, or probably a number of other ways.

Sending money without government interference to relatives living in countries with strict foreign exchange controls (Argentina, Lebanon, Turkey...) is one quite legit use case.

> I have yet to see a use case that doesn’t amount to buying drugs or defrauding rubes

Russian here. My forgotten Bitcoin stash saved my ass multiple times by providing a way to transfer money to a friend abroad who then paid for my western expenses (hosting, VPNs etc.) using his Visa / MC cards.

Also, a lot of programmers who emigrated from Russia to countries such as Georgia in 2022 were using USDT as a way to receive their salaries.

Buying drugs doesn’t have to be an illegitimate use case. Depends on the person, the drugs, the safety of the marketplace, etc.

WikiLeaks was persecuted. Their credit cards processing was turned OFF. Bitcoin saved them. There have been free speech social media sites BLOCKED by Stripe and all credit cards, and debanked. They switched to crypto. Marc Andressen on Joe Rogan personally knows many dozens of people personally debanked because they were persecured by the government & debanked. Not for drugs or fraud.

Today's society cannot protect people that are easily influenced. Social media has brought remote fraudsters right into your aunt/uncles inbox. Some people are going to get fleeced unless their money is put into something that only dispenses PEZ amounts at a time. This increases if dementia occurs.

Who should regulate it? Due to its nature it is inherently extremely hard to regulate.

There is lots of porn that credit card companies and proccessors don't want to touch. Plenty of kink sites have had problems with them, porn sites have blanket restrictions on keywords like hypnosis and shadow ban certain kinds of legal content in order to not get hamstrung by financial restrictions.

Also there are plenty of blackmarket goods that are heavily restricted and legally punished without good cause, and I do not believe just because something is "illegal" that it is automatically bad.

One of ours biggest customers is mainly used by Ukrainian refugees as easy way to pay abroad. USDC/USDT is simply cheaper and more available to them than regular USD.

It prevents centralized entities being the gatekeepers to the modern financial world. The US maintaining their own digital version of cash would also work, but the government is slow, and does not want to compete against these centralized entities due to being advantaged as the government controls the currency itself.

Payment processors essentially get to dictate what is and is not allowed to be financially viable which is a very powerful form of control over culture.

If you can be objective enough to consider that not everyone likes keeping fiat currency, it was an interesting alternative.

Bitcoin generally appreciated, where fiat had inflation.

While the transaction costs/speed have eliminated this, there was a few years of my life that I both sent money to friends and used a Bitcoin debit card.

You don't think 1000% returns over the last 5 years is useful to anyone? During the height of inflation?

It's useful for evading illegal US sanctions, and sometimes also works just as a payment method. I paid a hosting provider with it earlier this year, and that actually worked well.

- repatriating and distributing cartel drug money

- paying/receiving bribes

- bypassing international sanctions to finance wars

There's a lot of uses for cryptocurrency and only a very small fraction are good for individuals.

You can buy drugs and defraud rubes with USD too.

Crypto has many different useful applications. One of the main ones: limited supply (I am aware not all crypto has a cap).

> I have yet to see a use case that doesn’t amount to buying drugs or defrauding rubes.

Hey now. There's also trading child pornography.

> I have yet to see a use case that doesn’t amount to buying drugs

Society has been struggling for decades to overcome prohibition via political channels, and watching as multiple generations have been damaged by its impact on local economies, civil liberties, and the boon to criminal cartels.

Then, a mathematical solution arises which unambiguously undermines this regime, and somehow that's a bad thing?!

Dont forget the “murder for hire” user story

Speculation is a legitimate use case.

There is substantially more to it than that but I will let you chew that over just to point out how blatantly incorrect your prior is.

Money laundering is also a pretty large use case (https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/additional-12-defendants-...)

Let's regulate mathematics. No, it isn't enough...let's regulate physics itself. If we could just control when molecules are allowed to form, we could make it so mean molecules don't exist unless they're allowed to exist by our Council of Very Good People Who Have The Most Money. Since they have the most money, they know better than everyone else. /s

Did you know in some countries, a good loan for someone with perfect credit is 20% apr? Do you know in some countries police can confiscate all the money you have and never give it back? Have you ever heard of civil asset forfeiture? Did you know in some countries, just protesting can have your accounts frozen? Did you know in some countries, sending money can take over 3 days with no knowledge of what is happening to your money during that time? Did you know that Debit and Wire transfer often cost well over $20 to perform?

This list could go on for days. Only fools would speak about crypto so confidently without doing a minimal investigation into its utility.

The inevitable bailouts will be breathtaking. We’re in a quadratic adoption phase to legitimize a currency faster than the public discovers its downsides. The first bailout will be in this administration and won’t look like an inflection point. It’ll look like printing fiat into a dark, lucrative, inaccessible hole.

Among average Americans, the biggest advantage for promoters is the widespread susceptibility to scams. FartCoin, $TRUMP, and BitCoin are equally buoyant unless you know just a little about the technology and culture. Demographics might change this before education does. That’s the second inflection point.

The third inflection point is how the politically-connected holders will manipulate hard forks, say due to a quantum breakthrough in Grover. Once we start seeing forged signatures, will we roll Ethereum back to last June? Or back to Tuesday?

With the speed up of climate change coming due to trump administration policies Florida might not be very attractive in the future…