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.
- 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.
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.
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?
>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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
> 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?
> 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 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."
> 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.
It is really striking how technologists keep disregarding any aspect of ethics, philosophy, proper usage, etc. and just focus entirely on the technology itself. Cryptocurrency, AI, social media, on and on.
I used to think it was merely an innocent ignorance, just a soft subject that technologists weren’t familiar with. But anymore it seems like actively hostile to me, a kind of blind belief in the idea that technological problems will just be magically solved by adding more technology.
At this point, cryptocurrency is just a distributed cult. I genuinely feel bad for my handful of friends who remain under the influence of these gambling chip protocols. Somehow they still can't manage to read the room when awkwardly bringing up cryptocurrency at social gatherings and casual conversation.
Thankfully, the rampant fraud and scams have made it obvious to most people, with LLM hype now drowning out the siren song that captivates people vulnerable to FOMO of the week.
> 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.
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.
I stopped reading at "The policy correlate of the vocabulary theft is equally clean." Please write your own blog posts; if I wanted to listen to Claude ponder about the crypto market I would have prompted it myself.
> Each one, taken alone, would have been a bleak, dystopian fever dream ripped from the pages of a William Gibson cyberpunk novel.
Gibson isn't really that kind of dystopian. And the Good Place reference makes no sense. The article reads like those old Time Magazine pieces by some baby boomer breathlessly trying to scare other old people.
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.
> Each one, taken alone, would have been a bleak, dystopian fever dream ripped from the pages of a William Gibson cyberpunk novel.
Or rather, a totally outrageous parody of a William Gibson cyberpunk novel. If this wasn't real, I probably couldn't stop laughing about it. But unfortunately, it is...
The weird thing about it to me is that it lumbers on. There was that time I’d dread going to parties because that crypto guy was there. That time Bloomberg got its best writer to write a whole issue of Businessweek about it a week before the SBF fraud broke. Then there was that weird time between when crypro brown jumped on the AI bandwagon before Ezra Klein did.
And now the crypto bros are still talking… to each other. Still looking at the price of Bitcoin obsessively. And the rest of us hardly ever hear about it.
> 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.
Really wish we could go back to saying "cryptocurrency", it is incredibly depressing that the world has decided that "cryptocurrency" is more relevant than "cryptography"...
Surprised to see him writing about this again. He spent years completely consumed by his hate for crypto, tweeting around the clock, before suddenly rage-quitting social media. I assumed he had permanently unplugged for his own peace of mind.
The irony is his background as a former "blockchain" startup founder, right during that mid-2010s era when people who missed the early Bitcoin boat desperately tried to make "enterprise blockchain" happen. It reads like a severe case of cognitive dissonance reduction. Having spent years trying to make the wrong iteration of the tech happen while missing the actual wave, he embarked on an endless crusade to manifest a collapse just to retroactively validate his own poor decisions.
I think we have a clear idea on what sort of crypto is useful (stablecoins) and which ones are not (memecoins, Bitcoin).
As we have seen with Stripe [0], Shopify [1], PayPal [2] and many others have all figured out its utility is in stablecoins like USDC, which you can send them worldwide, same day, 24/7 in seconds close to $0 with no room for speculation and pay for things and soon agents will do the same. [3]
We get that the author is still upset about Cardano ruining his own crypto startup (Adjoint Inc.) in 2017, but I think we are way past the "crypto is scam" chantings and the companies that I mentioned would agree.
Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place
(stephendiehl.com)363 points by ibobev 10 hours ago | 456 comments
Comments
- 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!
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
Without this it's always just a something to speculate on and shift "real" money with.
Bingo.
I'm out of the loop on this one. Is he talking about some crypto thing?
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?
How is this not the coolest shit ever?
> The price of Bitcoin measures only the price of Bitcoin.
OTOH i think it damaged the ecosystem that US president decided to be "the most pro-crypto president". Obviously nobody wants that.
I used to think it was merely an innocent ignorance, just a soft subject that technologists weren’t familiar with. But anymore it seems like actively hostile to me, a kind of blind belief in the idea that technological problems will just be magically solved by adding more technology.
2. 2026? Cryptocurrency was always just hell. Well, before it was hell it was LARP.
I can’t help but think Bitcoin carries a floor for criminal activity. It will always be valuable.
Thankfully, the rampant fraud and scams have made it obvious to most people, with LLM hype now drowning out the siren song that captivates people vulnerable to FOMO of the week.
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.
Gibson isn't really that kind of dystopian. And the Good Place reference makes no sense. The article reads like those old Time Magazine pieces by some baby boomer breathlessly trying to scare other old people.
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.
Or rather, a totally outrageous parody of a William Gibson cyberpunk novel. If this wasn't real, I probably couldn't stop laughing about it. But unfortunately, it is...
More news at 11!
And now the crypto bros are still talking… to each other. Still looking at the price of Bitcoin obsessively. And the rest of us hardly ever hear about it.
Author is at times a little too emphatic, but he has some sentences like this one that are really efficient in conveying the idea.
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.
The irony is his background as a former "blockchain" startup founder, right during that mid-2010s era when people who missed the early Bitcoin boat desperately tried to make "enterprise blockchain" happen. It reads like a severe case of cognitive dissonance reduction. Having spent years trying to make the wrong iteration of the tech happen while missing the actual wave, he embarked on an endless crusade to manifest a collapse just to retroactively validate his own poor decisions.
As we have seen with Stripe [0], Shopify [1], PayPal [2] and many others have all figured out its utility is in stablecoins like USDC, which you can send them worldwide, same day, 24/7 in seconds close to $0 with no room for speculation and pay for things and soon agents will do the same. [3]
We get that the author is still upset about Cardano ruining his own crypto startup (Adjoint Inc.) in 2017, but I think we are way past the "crypto is scam" chantings and the companies that I mentioned would agree.
[0] https://stripe.com/en-es/payment-method/stablecoins-and-cryp...
[1] https://www.shopify.com/news/stablecoins-on-shopify
[2] https://www.paypal.com/us/digital-wallet/manage-money/crypto...
[3] https://tempo.xyz/