Crypto has become the ultimate swamp asset

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/05/15/crypto-has-become-the-ultimate-swamp-asset

by vnorilo • 1 year ago

90 150 1 year ago

sigwinch10• 1 year ago

rimbo7893• 1 year ago

Crypto was a huge mistake. It should have been rigorously regulated right out of the gate to the point of being unusable for anyone. I have yet to see a use case that doesn’t amount to buying drugs or defrauding rubes.

polygamous_bat• 1 year ago

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

cherryteastain3• 1 year ago

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

BillinghamJ• 1 year ago

Legit from whose perspective though? Around an authoritarian government maybe widely viewed as reasonable/justified, but doesn't sound legitimate to those governments

mannycalavera42• 1 year ago

Let's not assume foreign exchange controls are always bad. Not saying they are not ... in some cases

helsinkiandrew• 1 year ago

Unfortunately to governments and law enforcements that looks identical to organised crime and terrorists sending money.

All three of those countries have restrictions/regulations on converting crypto currencies into local currencies - doesn't crypto just move the the problem to converting it to local currency?

Eddy_Viscosity2• 1 year ago

is one quite legit use case.

While it is useful for this case, it is not 'legit', in that its purpose is to by-pass (break even) laws of the country with the capital controls. In that sense, money laundering is also a legit use-case.

ecocentrik3• 1 year ago

Cryptocurrency also empowers kleptocrats, dictators and warmongers to bypass sanctions and international banking controls, making it more likely that politically and economically oppressive states will thrive and persist for longer. The benefit to the individual is marginal compared to the benefits to actors that might limit that individual's other freedoms. Also, foreign exchange controls aren't the only form of taxation and there's nothing stopping governments from increasing taxation on something else to make up the difference.

Most arguments for cryptocurrency are just as weak as this one.

topranks7• 1 year ago

Breaking the law in other words.

tazjin2• 1 year ago

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.

sgt• 1 year ago

Not sure why you're being downvoted. Most of us don't live in Russia, but if we did, I am totally sure that may HN-ers would come up with ways to evade sanctions. It's either that or leave the country, which I am sure many aren't willing to do.

tacker20002• 1 year ago

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

jsheard2• 1 year ago

The technology is hard to regulate, but the exchanges where the overwhelming majority of fiat-crypto trades happen are regular old businesses which can be regulated or sanctioned just like anything else. Blockchain magic wouldn't stop the feds from seizing Coinbase's assets and hauling Brian Armstrong off to prison if they wanted to.

resource_waste• 1 year ago

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.

dr_dshiv2• 1 year ago

It’s funny, because the inflation of crypto comes not from the increase in the supply of individual coins (that’s controlled mathematically) but by increasing the number of cryptocurrencies themselves.

ddimitrov• 1 year ago

If you don't like fiat there is always gold. If you really care about value, independent from the monetary system (post-apocalyptic safety), buy tools, grain, generators and oil, though many of these things are perishable and storage comes at a cost.

One must ask whether the Bitcoin valuation has raised 1000% because the fiat has inflated as much, or is it mostly driven by speculation. For reference point, the buying power of fiat currency has not changed dramatically during the same period.

BriggyDwiggs422• 1 year ago

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

jMyles• 1 year ago

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?!

rollcat5• 1 year ago

It's not a "mathematical" solution. The maths are cryptographic hashes and consensus protocols, means to some end - exchanging value.

You're proposing that it's a technological solution to a societal problem. These only last as long as a particular regulatory body / regime allows them to.

Mining. It has long been infeasible for anyone without prior capital and investment. Ban that - you can easily get a lead through the electricity bill - viola.

Private key custody. Even technologically-inclined individuals mess it up from time to time. Hence the proliferation of centralised services to keep the keys ("wallets") for you. Block the exchange. QED.

seaourfreed• 1 year ago

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.

elif2• 1 year ago

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

rimbo7893• 1 year ago

Returns gained entirely from fleecing rubes.

Fraud generally has good returns for the fraudsters.

ohyes• 1 year ago

Dont forget the “murder for hire” user story

phyalow2• 1 year ago

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.

h27822• 1 year ago

Speculation is as much valuable use case as my nails are to be chewed. Sure, it works, doesn't mean it's a good thing.

dzikimarian• 1 year ago

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.

charcircuit3• 1 year ago

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.

rimbo7893• 1 year ago

What’s wrong with centralized entities? There should be financial gatekeepers. They are much better than whatever crime syndicates benefit from crypto

Crypto is just speed running the 19th century and making us re learn all the reasons why we made the pre crypto regulations.

Zanfa2• 1 year ago

It prevents centralized entities being the gatekeepers to the modern financial world.

In theory, but it doesn’t in practice. Most crypto transfers never make it to the blockchain, they happen entirely in SQL databases of exchanges.

Also, Tether has complete control over USDT and can block or reverse any payment or freeze any account it wants. No bank or payment processor in the world has such centralized control over the traditional financial system.

If anything, crypto is more centralized by comparison. Both in terms of payment processors as well as wealth distribution.

Hilift2• 1 year ago

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.

MrDisposable• 1 year ago

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.

hkpack• 1 year ago

And also it helps your government to transact with Iran, India, and China in convenient currencies, bypassing US-imposed sanctions and prolonging current war and planning for the future ones.

survirtual3• 1 year ago

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.

rollcat5• 1 year ago

Only fools would speak about crypto so confidently without doing a minimal investigation into its utility.

Only fools would speak about a technological solution without understating the reality, that technology still leans on society, power structures, and ability to enforce laws.

Civil disobedience works as a means to shift the rules, the balance of power; you can't maintain it perpetually. P2P eventually shifted the attention of the recording industry to online distribution. People jumped to Netflix and iTunes, because they became more convenient, while providing good value for the money.

ecocentrik3• 1 year ago

- 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.

AngryData• 1 year ago

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.

bufferoverflow• 1 year ago

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).

mvdtnz2• 1 year ago

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.

simonw3• 1 year ago

That's the thing where if you have significant assets your family members get kidnapped until you irreversibly transfer those assets to criminals, right?

I'm not sure how crypto continues to gain mainstream adoption in the face of that, no matter how much excitement there is for it in the current US administration.

My previous argument was that a technology where losing your password means you lose your net worth was incompatible with how human beings actually work. This kidnapping thing appears to be getting a whole lot more media coverage than that.

pawelduda3• 1 year ago

Kidnapping and ransom existed before crypto

jsheard2• 1 year ago

So did pump and dump scams, but crypto brought in a new golden age of pumping and dumping. It's a matter of scale and ease of execution.

sigwinch10• 1 year ago

That’s not his argument. You must ensure the anonymity of criminals in order to also protect the anonymity of your innocent relatives.

simonw3• 1 year ago

Reducing the barrier to successfully executing a kidnapping-for-cash turns out to make that crime more common.

topranks7• 1 year ago

Yeah but “being your own bank”, keeping all your savings under the mattress, makes your house a lot more inviting target.

Likewise being able to ransom people half way across the world and knowing there is an irreversible way you can get them to transfer the money across borders makes ransomware possible.

pydry2• 1 year ago

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

qqqult• 1 year ago

eh, it was fair to say that 8 years ago...

now it's way easier to track public blockchain transaction chains on Bitcoin, Ethereum and the like than it is to track bank transfers across countries

imhoguy2• 1 year ago

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.

hkt• 1 year ago

Banks can potentially act as gateways that prevent large transactions that are otherwise possible with crypto. They can do this simply by saying that for any amount above a certain level, you need to attend in person.

The whole "time immemorial" argument is a little silly when we put it in the context of modernity: we have safeguards people didn't have "before money was invented" because we're the beneficiaries of a sophisticated set of social rules intended to protect people. Getting rid of those safeguards because they're recent is fairly likely to make our lives worse.

survirtual3• 1 year ago

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.

sigwinch10• 1 year ago

Well, this article is about the difference between USA (with its first businessman president) and the rest of the world. The businessman president offers the cheapest talk, and the greatest return on investment for those who can afford a private audience. The accelerationist future — is this what you mean by kicking and screaming?

bediger40002• 1 year ago

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.

simonw3• 1 year ago

Sure, that's attractive to vendors. It's not attractive to consumers.

swalsh6• 1 year ago

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.

A2A is becoming a thing, and now it's a realistic thing to potentially expose an agent on a public endpoint to do useful work. Agents working with agents is a very clear future direction.

But everything is a closed ecosystem. But with the addition of a few extra fields to an Agent card (chain name, accepted tokens, cost) and perhaps a transaction addition to the task/send interface. We could build a network of agents working for agents. Compatible with each other. It doesn't have to be all on-chain. It's just the economic layer. You host the agent, the agent accepts payments. The agent makes payments. All the crypto tech we need already exists.

Use USDC, don't have to worry about speculation driving up costs. Use a network like SOL, AVAX, SUI and the transaction will be finalized in seconds.

Credits should be transferable, and not locked in little ecosystem.

We could take it one stop further. Prices could be dynamic. If GPU usage is high, cost should be high. If demand low, price should be low. Outages are a pricing issue, not a technical issue.

rcxdude• 1 year ago

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

swalsh6• 1 year ago

I'm tired of the "this doesn't require blockchain" argument. The alternative is a centralized entity that controls payments. Is that REALLY your preferred solution?

podnami• 1 year ago

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

swalsh6• 1 year ago

I want a protocol, not a company that will act as a proxy.

rollcat5• 1 year ago

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

swalsh6• 1 year ago

clearly, that is not what I said. What I said is there is a very big problem (closed ecosystem of incompatible credit systems) that can be solved using this technology that does payments really well.

croes3• 1 year ago

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

swalsh6• 1 year ago

A tired old debate devoid of facts. The chains I advocated for are proof of stake, and AI is a useful system worth the energy it uses. Should we not consume energy at all?

pondemic• 1 year ago

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

mvdtnz2• 1 year ago

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.

keiferski2• 1 year ago

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. The bitcoin paper is still one of the most elegant technical documents I’ve ever read, a decade+ since it was published.

I’m not sure why this simple narrative isn’t more common, but one guess is that the media is largely dominated by institutional players (deeply plugged into finance) and the simultaneous “death” of cyberpunk & cypherpunk as original culture, rather than just a video game aesthetic. Makes me wish that Satoshi had released bitcoin in 1995 or 2005, when that culture was still alive.

repler• 1 year ago

the media is largely dominated by institutional players

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

safety1st2• 1 year ago

Speaking as someone who had a passion for journalism and wanted to become a journalist when I was in high school at the end of the '90s, these days I am comfortable with that industry being completely eradicated.

How did we get here? The Telecom Act of 1996 legalized cross-media ownership and an unprecedented degree of consolidation across all forms of media, news and otherwise. Those rules existed to promote local journalism and independent voices. We now have no local journalism and no independent voices that are staffed and budgeted for doing real, investigative journalism.

Now journalists say what their corporate parent tells them to say; the ones who refused were fired years ago. The ones who stuck around work really hard to obscure this fact because they're clinging to their jobs in a declining industry. We went from a press that was the envy of the world to a cartel of decaying shills. Either reform the industry and break up the monopolies or just terminate it and fire everyone.

surgical_fire3• 1 year ago

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.

trustsafe2• 1 year ago

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.

keiferski2• 1 year ago

Maybe a better way to rephrase my point: money won and took over other sources of value. Technology became the biggest section of the economy.

Case in point: this site is called Hacker News and it’s run by a venture capital investment firm. Those two things (hacker/cyberpunk culture and VCs) would probably have seemed almost antithetical in the 90s.

martin-t• 1 year ago

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.

---

(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.)

Spooky23• 1 year ago

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.

throw0101b• 1 year ago

Crypto is the way it is because there are behaviors that are driven by perceived anonymity.

See Penny Arcade comic from 2004:

* https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...

topranks7• 1 year ago

Further crypto is slower, less efficient and a way less convenient to use than centralised systems powered by traditional databases.

So while the regular internet might be host to Wikipedia as well as social media, the ONLY people switching to crypto payments are those who are willing to take the hit to evade the authorities.

lawrenceyan2• 1 year ago

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.

tromp• 1 year ago

There is no cypherpunk ethos in a 100% premine.

hengheng3• 1 year ago

What I'm always missing with these takes is the "what if" component. Nobody really dares to paint the whole picture in articles like this. Authors seem to go as far as to find the moral infraction, and then stop. But that doesn't do what is happening justice.

No, crypto does not need regulation. Law-based order needs crypto regulation. That's a big difference already. But we can go further than that. What if we don't get crypto regulation, what happens to law-based order exactly?

Trump is not the kind of guy to build businesses and create wealth. He more like kinda goes through them. He's not the guy to invest, he's the guy to cash out. Right now, he's cashing out of the US economy. Lots of real value is there for him to extract that is completely unprotected.

Trump is right. All those assets exist, and he can take them, destroy them, and liquidate them. He has that power. He is permitted. It is a programme, and his execution is successful. There's no point saying "but he can't do that, it would be unethical". Sure it's unethical, dumb, and nonsensical, but at face value, he can do all of that. No point in saying "but he can't do that, America would never be the same". That argument is reactionary, of course everything was going to change anyways.

So, let's face it. A president that is not going to miss his chance to join the true billionaires club (10+ b), a ruling class of industry leaders like it existed 120 years ago. Whether he stays president doesn't even matter. Government programmes are going down the drain, America's influence in the world deteriorates, trade volume breaking down, a less smart military will have to deal with more conflicts.

The only question in that turmoil is going to be what constitues a winner. Right now, everybody is buying crypto like lottery tickets, and it becomes self-fulfilling. Mid-term it might be Florida real estate. Long term? Who knows.

I'd actually like for somebody to really paint this picture and fill in the details. Stopping at the first inflection point that is somewhat scary is unproductive, we've been reading those takes for a year now.

olelele• 1 year ago

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

hengheng3• 1 year ago

Hence 'mid-term'. Lots of new money taking refuge there, but it won't be for long. Harder and harder to be on the winning side in this overall.

sigwinch10• 1 year ago

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?

hengheng3• 1 year ago

I am still wondering what money it was that predominantly went into crypto. Lots of retail investors lucked out between Tesla stock and BTC, but that can't account for all of it. I suspect a lot of shady money coming in from outside the US that raised the water level. Yet people talk about it like it's a co-op pension fund.

National bailouts going into an international fund are going to be a global power readjustment. Fun times.

My personal guess for an inflection point is civil unrest. Doge are already tightening the belts for the lower class. Nobody has really figured out how far they can take it. Police has been arming itself for the last decade or two, that started way before Trump, and they have been ready to thwart any uprising. But I am wondering if something is going to happen regardless. Civil war is only a bad idea as long as there are other options.

marcosdumay• 1 year ago

There won't be crypto bailouts. The goal of crypto is to disperse it into the masses where it can lose all value. It losing value won't lead to any reaction, except for pumping some new crypto.

noisy_boy• 1 year ago

I would be interested to know from a developer working in Crypto about how is the day-to-day work experience compared to working in a similar role in, say, a hedge fund. The latter is fast paced and I have heard that the former is too but would be interesting to hear from people actually in the seats.

ionwake3• 1 year ago

I just think its wild you all have subscriptions to the economist

rimeice2• 1 year ago

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…

ionwake3• 1 year ago

I prefer my own curated news sources that never required me to pay. I dont think Ive ever paid for an online newspaper.

hiatus• 1 year ago

There are some sites that sell them at a discount.

tim333• 1 year ago

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.

concrete_head• 1 year ago

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

zkmon• 1 year ago

Where would the crypto millionaires spend their money? They have to chase some real world assets such as homes, jacking up prices for those. So, for someone who invested in the real world assets, they see their asset value going up. It hardly matters where you invest. It's all in the same pond.

TrackerFF• 1 year ago

I've followed crypto since late 2011, and the ideology today is completely detached from what it used to be. Back in the day you had crypto maximalists that mainly viewed it as freedom from authority, regulations, and traditional banking. No more expensive fees for sending cash, no more third parties like PayPal to charge fees and potentially freeze your money. Detaching your wealth from political systems.

Yes, a lot of techno anarchist and ancaps were part of the scene - with grand dreams of defi taking over the world.

These days it has just evolved into play money for finance bros and hedge funds, and more lately, a mechanism for circumventing corruption for the powerful and wealthy.

rainsford• 1 year ago

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.

topranks7• 1 year ago

Yeah. It reveals the basic truth that if we have no government, laws or regulation we ultimately end up with the rich and powerful controlling things and doing what they want.

topranks7• 1 year ago

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.

Hilift2• 1 year ago

The next logical step is US Treasury Bonds to be redeemed in Crypto. The current administration is proposing a 2026 budget that adds $5 trillion in new debt (more spending than revenue). Jerome can't print money that fast.

Even the Fed is counting on the "economy to grow faster than the debt". It's like a fiction world. I fully expect a "crypto equivalence" executive order for things where the US can muscle trade partners.

Crypto has become the ultimate swamp asset

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