I am a regular guy but I just never understood the point of Crypto other than for scams and get rich quick schemes. Not to mention it still is tied to the dollar for value which defeats the entire purpose doesn't it ? I thought it was supposed to be an independent currency. And then you have companies like coinbase which are centralizing something that was supposed to be decentralized ? I just don't get it.
The decentralised mode never interested general public, even though it was mildly interesting as an idea to skip hierarchical trust. The established use of crypto is exclusively money laundering and investment scams, made usable for general public though use of centralised exchanges. The crypto isn’t important, it is just an excuse.
You are not wrong that secret ingredient is crime, but I think the single largest use of crypto out there is tax evasion. When traveling Asia in 2025 I've met several people who worked for western companies and got paid in tether. Western companies pay flat consulting that avoids payroll taxes / etc and employees skip taxation from whatever country they are in. On the trading side we have ETH wrapping everything and enabling trading of most financial assets.
Yea I just don't see any real benefit and it has been almost 20 years. This is why I immediately lose respect for anyone who still peddles crypto even though there were some well meaningful people in early days.
People in countries with crazy inflation can use usdc wallets to avoid the inflation. Plus pay for US goods like a Netflix subscription without losing 30% on the exchange.
As the decentralised crypto experiment shown us, hierarchical trust has its benefits.
Well as I got older I understood that what anarchy-libertarians are saying is not what they think.
When I was younger I thought they really are against hierarchy and that society should be equal in all aspects.
But as it turns out, they are against current hierarchy as they don’t have much to say in this setup. But once they would get to be “in” and calling shots that’s where their world views change.
dont forget buying drugs ;)
Most people just buy drugs with regular money.
The one class of purchases that you really don’t want immortalised in a public ledger, right?
My wealth may be decentralized, but my body is in one location and pretty vulnerable to the 5 dollar wrench. Putting some emergency money in a foreign bank account and a bag is a much better option if I wanted to flee a country.
these randoms assuming foreign banks accept every human is really funny, enjoy your bubble and ignorance. There are normal people that cant even have a bank account in their homeland.
"There are normal people that cant even have a bank account in their homeland"
And I feel for them but 2 wrongs don't make a right. Crypto is not the answer for that problem.
> There are normal people that cant even have a bank account in their homeland.
And approximately none of these people's problems have been actually solved with cryptocurrency.
Indeed. They have instead been solved by mobile-phone-based systems like Mpesa in Kenya and neighbouring countries.
And, how, do these disenfranchised / persecuted people turn their not-in-the-bank money into WhateverCoin ?
By giving cash to a shady backstreet exchange guy? Or maybe using a payment kiosk to top up a mobile phone / whatever other service the P2P seller can get the money out of.
But more likely scenario is they have friends who let them use their bank accounts (but don’t have friends who let them use their good overseas bank accounts, so not that useful).
> these randoms assuming foreign banks accept every human is really funny,
Did I imply that? Creating a bank account in my country is an adventure on its own. If I got 50 USD in my wallet, I can exchange it somewhere and pay for food and whatever. My crypto account requires a computer, an internet connection, and someone willing to take it (no one around here).
Crypto was originally born during the Great Financial Crisis. It's not surprising that the idea of: "Hey, wouldn't it be neat if we didn't need any of that," seemed attractive back then, even though that is obviously far too simplistic a view of what the financial system actually does.
But the end result is that crypto currencies never really delivered on their promise, because they barely work in practice, and the only reason to engage with them is for gambling or crime. Anything else is just too slow, too expensive, too cumbersome, too error-prone, and just generally far too inconvenient. What's the point of a digital currency that is best stored on an air-gapped device that must never connect to any network?
Bitcoin was launched in 2008 way before the Dodd Frank act was passed
The Bitcoin genesis block literally contains the message:
> The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks
I would've thought the implication was kind of obvious? And I'm not sure why you mention Dodd-Frank -- there were many bailouts throughout 2007-2010 and the point of Dodd-Frank was to put an end to that scheme.
At least initially, much of the "point" was to bypass Chinese currency controls. Buy mining hardware and electricity in yuan funny money. Mine cryptocurrency. Sell it for real fiat currency. Buy real estate in Vancouver.
It was easier than that. There was a premium for Bitcoin in China and South Korea (the "kimchi premium") for quite some time due to capital controls. People in those countries would buy Bitcoin domestically (driving up the price there), send them to exchanges abroad, and sell them there, thus having taken their money out.
If you wanted to run the arbitrage, you'd buy Bitcoin cheap abroad, send them to China or Korea, sell them expensive, and now you're stuck with fiat in China or Korea which you can't take out, either. BitMEX founder Arthur Hayes was closing the loop in the early days by frequently crossing the border from China to Hong Kong with a backpack full of cash. SBF and Alameda claimed to have made their early money similarly by finding a way to close the loop on the kimchi premium.
I’ve always shared this skepticism. First, crypto can be a poor store of value when its price is highly volatile and most goods and services are still priced in currencies like the U.S. dollar. Second, some crypto networks can make transfers slow or expensive, which limits their usefulness for everyday transactions. That said, it varies by asset and network—some are designed to make transfers faster or cheaper.
I’m also uneasy about the investment case. When you own crypto, you have a reason to want others to buy it too. That can create a cycle where demand pushes the price up, and the rising price attracts more buyers. That happens in other markets too, but productive businesses can also generate revenue and cash flow that help support their value. Many crypto assets don’t have that same kind of foundation, although some are tied to specific services or network activity.
Regular currencies have a more obvious role in everyday life (pay taxes, settle debts, and buy things). Their value is influenced by factors like monetary policy, confidence in the issuer, and the strength of the underlying economy. That doesn’t make them stable or valuable in the same way as productive assets, but it does give them a practical purpose that many crypto assets don’t have.
Crypto was more fun back in the day imho. I remember Bitcoin pre-fork. I bought some in 2016 and was using it to buy stuff online from overstock. It was kinda fun and different, you got discounts and at the time Bitcoin was going up so it was cool to spend money and then see balance increase. I also used Bitcoin ATM back then when I was in the pitch. These days I don't really care much for it.
Gray-market operations usually use crypto for transactions, e.g. distributors of estradiol for trans HRT. Gray market is cheap and doesn't depend on the political climate. Quality control is a problem, though.
I realize the morality of such a thing is subjective, so I'll just say that I've known a number of individuals, especially minors, who have relied on gray market sources.
It's not tied to the dollar and yes, the purpose is to have a neutral currency.
It is tied to the dollar. If 1 bitcoin was not worth a gazillion dollars, no one would be buying or selling it.
I would.
That's not what "tied to the dollar" means.
The yuan is not tied to the dollar, but can be traded for dollars. Same for Euros, gold, and bricks of heroin.
OK, that last one has to be converted to bitcoin first....
It's for payments for illegal activity. Of course they can't say that in public.
I know what’s going to happen. I will explain what crypto is for and then it will get downvoted just because it says anything positive about crypto.
The point is to NOT have a single place with access to all the money, votes, etc. Every participant should be acting as themselves, and there should be no way to do things on behalf of others without their consent.
The point of smart contracts is to have code you can actually trust. Your bank or openAI can change their website, APIs and even their models tomorrow. That’s not great for trust. Trust is what enables things to scale.
The same way you trust other internet protocols to just “route around problems” and not have one single point of failure, that is the substrate for Web3.
Imagine a Web2 website such as a student-teacher marketplace NOT handling millions of dollars, accepting money from students and paying them out to teachers. Imagine it being simply an interface while the actual transactions are approved by the students themselves, and instead of the central site signing payouts with some keys, the teachers get paid through smart contracts and code on the blockchain. The site can still take 10% commission from everything, it would be above board, and it can never change it without the consent of the people. The business logic is in the smart contract.
(Since this comment has the keywords “crypto” and “web3”, I know what will happen in advance already.)
Isn't this incident a case study in how immutable smart contracts are exactly what you don't want in a trustworthy financial system?
The stolen USDT will likely be returned because Tether can do manual freezes like a traditional financial institution.
Where code is law the funds are just gone.
Like even in your example of the marketplace I don't see the benefits over having a central authority. Who determines who is a student or teacher? Who kicks out bad actors? Who resolves disputed transactions?
You misunderstand. The very reason that this Binance hack is a huge issue is that $5B was concentrated in specific wallets under specific keys.
A decentralized network of wallets and balances doesn’t present an attractive target for hackers specifically because the payoff per wallet is so small!
It is exactly the centralization you are defending, which is at the root of the problem. In the decentralized case, no one has to determine who is a student or a teacher. If a teacher needs to pass KYC with a marketplace, they do it once, and from then on can permissionlessly receive their small payouts.
I'm not so sure.
Centralization (on Binance) made the attack appealing, but decentralization (of crypto broadly) is the only reason it's possible, and centralization (of USDT et al) is the only path to recovery.
Re: the marketplace: we'd want to be able to revoke teacher access too, and sometimes we may need to roll back transactions (Goods not delivered? Wrong goods delivered? Wrong goods purchased?), and then I have to ask... why involve a blockchain at all?
The only compelling real world use case I've seen is helping people navigate hostile governments or dysfunctional economies.
Most evonomies in the global south are dysfunctional. Once you are talking about billions of people, you may as well just say “economies”
The number of scams perpetrated against traditional bank account holders doesn't seem to support the suggestion that scammers aren't interested in regular person-sized targets.
"The point of smart contracts is to have code you can actually trust."
That’s very naive thing to expect from code.
Indeed, very shortly after live smart contracts were introduced, someone exploited a bug to steal a pile of pseudo-money, and the humans in charge decided to fork the blockchain to undo it. So the whole idea of “autonomous” smart contracts was revealed as the nonsense it always was. (Actually IIRC only some of the humans agreed to do that, so the chain was duplicated, and what does that even mean from a currency perspective?)
Indeed, very shortly since digital computers were invented, there was corruption. For years, until the voltage could be controlled better and until IEEE standardized things.
Indeed, very shortly since modems were invented, there was need for error correction. They were slow and clunky. The only reasonable conclusion is that the Internet is a fad and not worth discussing. Same as this newfangled decentralized cryptography stuff.
Indeed, very shortly after the Web came out, regular script kiddies could write php websites with blink tags. Credit card numbers were sent in the clear with http. This “e-commerce” thing was a dangerous joke, only idiots would send their credit cards over the Internet. It would never catch on!
None of those invalidated the entire premise of the underlying technology, though. (That being: you can’t trust people, but you can trust code.)
That is a very naive take. First, the trust in crypto is extraordinarily expensive, as Budish's famous "The economic limits of Bitcoin" paper shows.
Second, the crypto bros running Bitcoin have reverted 20+ blocks on at least two occasions when it suited them to do so, and Ethereum has famously undone the DAO hack. Oh, and then of course you have all the bugs in smart contracts that can't be fixed. So the notion that "code is law" is laughable, and the notion that it's desirable is misguided, too.
Third, there's the oracle problem. Keeping track of bits in a ledger is a solved problem and has been a solved problem for a long time. The issue is correlating it with the real world. In your example, what if the student pays, then the teacher doesn't teach? How is the money flow reverted? If the student can just revert it, what happens if the student pays, the teacher teaches, and the student then reverts the payment? You need the legal system, and external adjudication, one way or the other.
Crypto adds nothing but idle speculation and the circumvention of (largely sensible) rules and regulations.
Yes, but as someone who worked in the cryptocurrency industry for a few years: that's not how it actually works. Smart contracts have bugs, it isn't peer to peer so someone has to run and pay for big servers, humans are sometimes criminals or Faustian bargain takers.
Where are the bugs in Uniswap? Aave marketplace?
I miss the old days of decentralized networks, and smart contracts that were audited. Forget the shitcoin memecoins and zero sum games mania, the NFTs and the prediction markets. There is so much positive sum that can be done:
https://intercoin.org/applications
https://community.intercoin.app/t/fund-for-refugees/2688
https://rekt.news/aave-rekt
I broadly understand this as the utopian vision of what crypto could theoretically be, but it's not playing out this way in the real world and I have a hard time seeing it ever succeeding this way.
Being able to leverage crypto on this scale requires everyone to either A) be technical enough to understand and use smart contracts directly or B) delegate a party that handles this for you. This is where the utopian case usually falls apart, because most people are B and this requires trusting a third party, which kinda defeats the entire point of the vision.
Because most people don't want to do the work of learning and managing crypto directly, a huge industry flourished to service these people, full of its own interests, corruption and various levels of criminality. And well-intentioned crypto people have no way to reign this industry in because the entire point is to operate in a deregulated way.
Ironically, the piece that makes crypto fundamentally unworkable 20 years in is capitalism.
Once upon a time, pancakeswap staking stole my money. The conditions under which they'd steal my money were spelled out in clear in the code but not mentioned anywhere on the web app.
Specifically, you had to claim your rewards in a certain time window or they'd disappear.
I am hardly a crypto fundamentalist, but it sounds like LLMs help with a lot of the problems you identified
Maybe for people who have the means to afford LLMs, but then who really wants that? That's a hard pass for me and I use LLMs every day. I suspect that asking society to trust in a digital middle-man between themselves and their money will be a very hard sell.
> suspect that asking society to trust in a digital middle-man between themselves and their money will be a very hard sell.
Very hard sell? This is effectively how the vast vast majority of people in the US have their money handled.
The means to afford LLMs? These are services that cost pennies.
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The argument for crypto is that all other methods of exchange have an arbitor that can use their arbitration powers to their own advantage.
There are defenses of traditional currencies that don't hold up to scrutiny, for instance the intrinsic value of gold is way lower than it's traded value. The ability to pay taxes in a currency is only valid while the arbitor allows it to be.
The Blockchain is an impressive design to allow multiple arbitors where you can't know in advance who it is going to be so no single actor can act in advance of that knowledge nor act as if they had sustained control.
The public record combined with an international Comms network means noone is disallowed.
So the good parts are, 1. a mechanism where everyone can use it. 2. No one actor can control monetary policy.
The bad parts are, 1. Uses a lot of power (but less than often reported) 2. lack of understanding and unrealistic expectations allow fraudsters to exploit people.
It is not a stick-it-to-the-man scheme, nor is it a way to perpetually make wealth (it can create and lose wealth over varying time frames but only by guessing how people in the future will value it compared to today)
The dangers of theft of a scale like this are an artifact of there being no single arbitor saying "no you can't do that" there is actually a solution to this, but it is not really being done. It is designed to have no do single arbitor, but if you have a majority of people reaching a consensus on any issue the entire system can change rules to any paradigm they wished. You could theoretically have a majority agree to reverse all of the digits in everyone's balance and then update the system to make it so.
To prevent cases like these huge heists you could have a majority consensus to support an independent regulator that makes decisions that can involve arbitrary changes to balances. While there is a majority consensus to agree with the rulings of that regulator they could adjudicate cases like this. If the regulator started acting in the interests of any particular party that consensus would be lost and miners who disagree would not incorporate their rulings into the chain.
I think there is potential for there to be a better system there. It would likely involve governments becoming miners (or at the very least having some influence on the miners in their duristiction)
I don't think there is enough public opinion in support of doing that though.
Tldr; I can see a way in which it works, but we are not there. We might get there over a long duration (if crypto does not go away for another few decades). To get there quickly would require significant changes in public perception.
I've never owned crypto.
But, what I liked about the idea of crypto is for the many poor and weaker countries that realistically can't afford to float their own currency in a stable way.
Many countries have never-ending sliding currencies or highly volatile currencies. And the locals don't have a lot of choice but to hold the local currency and watch their hard-earned savings evaporate.
Or worse they can't even do business with other countries because their banking system is highly restricted (because of maybe illegal activity taking place in the country by a minority or their local government being out of favor with the rest of the world) and that prevents legitimate businesses from easily transacting.
There are so many countries in which the national currency is a daily nightmare. And individuals in those countries that are unbanked.
Crypto in the rich industrialized countries never really made sense to me. And even less so as an asset for speculation.
In rich countries, I think it's more for those who are of the criminal or conspiracy theorist variety.
Further, in the rich, industrialized countries, the ability to have a stable national currency and a national currency that is easy to transact with around the world is taken for granted.
And, for those poor weaker countries, dollar access is weaponized as we've seen in many cases. Even if a country is wealthy enough to hold significant dollar deposits, those can be frozen at any time.
In fact even within a country that wants to use the international banking system, that country's access can be frozen at any time, at the stroke of a pen, by a government far away.
And it's naive to believe that this power is consistently used in a just manner.
North Korea is a case in point regarding the value of crypto for a poor or sidelined country.
I won't get into a debate regarding whether that's a good thing or bad thing in the case of North Korea, but it does illustrate why crypto has value for countries that are extremely poor and lack access to global finance. It's not always because the country is run by an evil dictator.
Sometimes it's because the country is just run by an incompetent government.
And in an increasingly hostile world with increasing great power rivalry, crypto has usefulness for countries that want to stay out of the crossfire and transact business without having to kowtow (become subservient) to one of the great powers just to transact payments.
But yeah crypto in the industrialized world is mostly for speculators, conspiracy theorists, and criminals. That I agree with. But I do think crypto has a powerful use case in a lot of the world where the payment system isn't as developed and isn't as well integrated into global finance.