[alehrs]

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.

[danielvaughn]

I got into crypto in 2017 when I came across the phrase "money is a technology". That idea fascinated me. But fast forward several years later, and it's obvious that money might be a technology in the sense that it's a tool, but more importantly, money is a culture.

[over_bridge]

Or if you read Sapiens you'll know money is a story we tell each other. You can't literally do much with a coin or bank note or numbers on a screen but as long as we all believe it has value, it does. It becomes part of the culture, as you say.

Crypto also has to tell a story about why it's valuable. There was a lot of anti government rhetoric and fear mongering (from libertarians) but the public never really believed the story was true. It was a lot of FOMO.

NFTs failed completely to sell their story but crypto is still hanging on among its supporters. AI is telling a similar story about the value of tokens which is being well received

[ozgrakkurt]

I live in less developed countries so it is actually useful for me but I see it the same way as you wrote here.

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

They did the same butchering to LLM/AI tech.

[netsharc]

Silicon Valley was a place of engineering invention, and then the money-people saw, "Oh, there's riches to be made here!"...

[mrhottakes]

They explicitly built cryptocurrency as a way to hoard more wealth. It was the "engineers" not just the money people.

[dghlsakjg]

Silicon Valley came up as a result of the military industrial complex in the Cold War.

Money was always the point.

[Sharlin]

Technological solutions to social problems only tend to work when the problems are of the type "I wish it were easier to rid people of their money".

[akoboldfrying]

Agriculture. Plumbing. The printing press. Electricity. Vaccines. Fiat money itself, which is a technology that is better than the technology of barter, which is better than each person having to grow or make every material thing they need.

[jakelazaroff]

"How do we remove feces from our living spaces" and "how do we stop dying from pathogens" are not social problems.

[john_strinlai]

if you do not consider public health a social issue, what do you consider to be one?

[mrhottakes]

Those are perhaps the biggest social problems that humanity has ever faced.

[dghlsakjg]

I can’t think of many better examples of social problems than sanitation and public health.

[jakelazaroff]

In that case, what are examples of non-social problems you can think of?

[neonstatic]

I think the point that is missed is all of these solved real problems that needed solving. I feel over the last decade we have exhausted the obvious benefits of the Internet revolution and more often than not we were seeing clever technology being developed, that wouldn't solve any problems. Then long and painful search for applications of that technology would ensue. Cases in point: crypto, llms.

[rglullis]

Exactly. Cryptocurrency is useful as as a backup system against failing/weak institutions. Just that. Like insurance, it was not there to make anyone's lives better but simply to become a safeguard to avoid complete collapse.

[astoor]

If it was just a backup against failing/weak institutions it would be relavively benign, but the problem is that it incentivises machiavellian types to undermine society and nation states for their own personal profit - see e.g. The Sovereign Individual[0].

Combined with effective accelerationism[1] you can see why we could be heading towards somewhere a whole lot worse than The Bad Place.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sovereign_Individual

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_accelerationism

[mrhottakes]

It's not even useful for that, it's controlled by those same institutions now.

[pjc50]

However, I think there's an argument that the existence of that backup, or at least its marketing, might of itself encourage people to make the institutions fail so they can profit from it.

[rglullis]

That's a weak argument. If the institutions can collapse because a few powerful people can work against it, then the institution has already failed in the first place.

Trump and the general rise of Populism is not the cause of the fall of Western democracies, it is a consequence.

[mrhottakes]

You don't seem to grasp that the answer isn't "oh well, Western democracies were just going to fail I guess"

[felixgallo]

You're going to have to show your work on that one. Western democracies are suffering not because they are failing, but because they have been chipped away at for decades by fanatical right wing billionaires intent on eliminating taxes and securing their place in a perpetual oligarchy.

[lou1306]

> The only real use case that makes sense to me is giving people in developing countries access to a stable currency they can actually hold, trade, and invest in, meaning USDT or USDC. Outside of that, as an EU/US citizen I don't see why I'd hold stablecoins instead of fiat

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

[zmgsabst]

I use crypto for exchange between friends (US + EU) and myself (SE Asia).

Our options are IBAN (slow!), WesternUnion (fees, denials, hassles) or crypto (10min, cheap). We chose crypto - because it’s the practical path from their bank to mine. CashApp and Coinbase interface with my actual bank accounts, on my end.

If you don’t do international banking, then much of the utility is diminished — so I’m not surprised by your perspective. But once you try to move money between continents, even with ID and documentation, you’ll understand that Coinbase is a godsend.

[whiplash451]

Aren’t there fees to convert fiat from/to crypto on both ends?

[zmgsabst]

Yes — there’s fees converting from/to fiat and when sending the crypto.

You’ll generally have the conversion slippage and transaction fee regardless - so the difference is the second conversion.

In practice, that isn’t too expensive and worth it for the speed; though that may change if you’re sending larger or smaller amounts than I am (in $1k-10k range).

[mothballed]

You can make the fees rather than pay them if you make the market. There are decentralized exchanges where this can be done ~trivially for even low amounts. The fees are for those who want instant gratification.

[Nursie]

Or a service like Wise which is cheap and takes a few minutes most of the time.

Never had much of a need for other services when transferring across the globe.

[sfmz]

An emerging use-case is a bank account for AI agents. I read that Coinbase 'Base' Ethereum layer2 is popular for AI banking.

[ses1984]

Or you could just give your agents a debit card number loaded with only as much money as you specify.

[sfmz]

You spin up agents and want them to paid without opening a bank account... or spin-up hundreds of agents... or your country isn't very well integrated with western banking rails. I think there is more to consider.

[ses1984]

You don’t need to open a bank account to get a prepaid debit card.

[mothballed]

The amount of money you can load or receive into a debit card is limited without doing enough KYC overhead you could have gotten a bank account with the same effort.

If you try automating bots to do KYC what you'll be doing is basically looking like a money launderer and get all your accounts shut down.

[vlian2088]

>Outside of that, as an EU/US citizen I don't see why I'd hold stablecoins instead of fiat.

because fiat can be taken away from you.

[thomashabets2]

Hate to break it to you, but anything can legally be taken away from you by the justice system. And fighting the government can put you in prison, too.

It's just LARPing.

[orwin]

> It's just LARPing.

Usually LARPers are conscious that they don't have magic or any sword skills. I'm pretty sure the person who you respond too really think what he wrote.

[mothballed]

Yet the government went out its way to ban bearer shares, bearer bonds, numbered anonymous bank accounts, large denomination currency, anonymous companies, and all the other methods of anonymous banking.

Seems they were having trouble "taking it away by the justice system."

For the same reason government across the world have pressured or banned exchangers of monero.

[close04]

GP added the "by the justice system" where OP only said "can be taken away". Both digital and fiat currency can be taken away from you through courts, legislation, trickery, or coercion.

Crypto is surrounded by vast amounts of misinformation, misdirection, or misunderstanding. So you get these myths and generalization propagated through lack of education. "I heard crypto is completely anonymous", "I heard crypto can't be taken away from you". Then someone gets tricked out of their crypto, or uses BTC to commit some crime and gets a quick reality check.

[mothballed]

If you toss a bag of cash in a hole buried under a grave in Timbuktu, or toss a bitcoin seed phrase in there. Cover it up, leave Timbuktu back to your western country. Then vow to die before giving up the location (you can claim torture or whatever works, but many people in history have decided to be tortured to death without giving up the information). You can be essentially 100% assured it will never be taken. Possible with both fiat and crypto, though you'll be digging a bigger hole to bury an upward amount of dollars, yet crypto is infinitely scalable with the same size hole.

From a black and white viewpoint the possibilities are the same but the practicality is a bit different (then realize with crypto the hole might only exist in your mind). Maybe the government has control over your body but there is some victory in not letting them have your assets even if they take your life and without having to destroy the underlying value.

Personally I think a cleaner distinction is bearer assets vs titled assets. Both can be taken but bearer assets can be made impractically difficult to seize, especially against the masses at once, whereas titled assets (like bank accounts and deeds) can be taken by the government trivially (ex: in US, IRS can freeze without even a warrant) and at mass scale quickly.

[vlian2088]

tell that to IRGC.

[WJW]

Why do you think stablecoins cannot be taken away? There are already many cases where eg Tether got a court summons and handed over the contents of certain wallets to the local authorities.