[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.

[cyphar]

I mean, cultures are also a kind of technology, arguably one of the first we developed as Homo Sapiens.

In my view the actual issue has always been that cryptocurrency folks don't understand what purpose money serves, mostly because they're all basically gold bugs. To strain the "money is a technology" metaphor, this is a product-market-fit issue -- like trying to build a cloud orchestration framework that only works on DIY Belwulf clusters or a web framework that only looks nice on teletype.

[echelon]

Crypto exists to make early crypto holders money.

You get in on the speculative promise of making yourself wealthy. It's sold to you by the people at the top, and the message is amplified by the grifters and the pick mes in their orbit.

It's never been a convenient exchange of money. If they'd focused on this, maybe the argument would have worked. Instead, it's wacky and has the worst UX of any banking apparatus in the world. Including giant US banks stuck in 2005. This sucks because this is literally the value being sold, and it doesn't deliver on it at all.

By the time quantum chips can attack crypto's underlying hardness (2029?), most of the coins won't have the engineering talent and support left to migrate to more secure cryptography. We'll start seeing shit coins popped left and right, which will cause mass panic. That will cause sell offs, even if the big name brands manage to secure themselves temporarily.

[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

[nradov]

Fiat currency isn't just a matter of belief or stories. If you interact with the US financial system in any significant way then you're likely to end up owing some income taxes, and those can only be paid in US dollars. If you don't pay then eventually law enforcement officers will seize your assets (real estate, cattle, gold, cryptocurrency, whatever) by force and auction them off to settle your tax debt. And if you try to stop them then they'll shoot you. Overall this is a good and stable system. The cryptocurrency clowns never seem to address the sovereign taxation issue.

[Ygg2]

> but crypto is still hanging on among its supporters

From what I last heard about crypto miners, the price of mining is not enough to justify price of rig + electricity, so they are quietly switching to AI.

Wonder how long the second scam will last.

[trollbridge]

AI can’t exactly be turned into money the way crypto shenanigans can.

You can sell inference, but it has to actually be real.

[saalweachter]

You can sell scams -- LLMs may be dubious at many tasks, but they're probably good enough to use to write personalized email or texts convincing random people to send you money.

[tootie]

Honestly as much as people complain the US Federal Reserve really just proved their enormous value and thoroughly vindicated fiat currency. The financial crisis of 2007-8 should have been a new Depression and it wasn't. Instead we've seen uninterrupted growth for close to 20 years. Markets have really internalized that the US economy is indestructible and the Fed will always protect us from disaster. Will it last forever? Of course not. But like Keynes said, "in the long run, we're all dead".

[trollbridge]

Euros, dollars, pounds, francs, and yen are all more stable and easier to use than cryptocurrencies.

It gets even easier once you toss in Visa, Mastercard, Discover, Amex, various debit card and regional networks, and ubiquitous banking services. Checks and online ACH payments are free or nearly free. Payment card platforms are cheap in consideration the value you get for them.

Meanwhile actually spending crypto is quite expensive - worse than Visa’s transaction fees, and far less consumer and merchant protections.

[CodingJeebus]

> There was a lot of anti government rhetoric and fear mongering (from libertarians) but the public never really believed the story was true.

The public never believed it because it runs squarely into the basic fundamentals that underpin the global financial system.

The finance industry learned long ago that currencies have to be stable and predictable in order to be trusted, and therefore NOT financial instruments to speculate heavily on. There's been this reality distortion field that crypto can be both a currency and speculative asset, but that hasn't borne out. If your digital dollar can gain/lose 5% of its value in a day, how do you trust it to transact with?

Crypto has been speed-running into many lessons we learned decades ago from the "Free Banking" era before the Fed, back when states ran their own banks, currencies, etc. Government got involved in banking management as a way to improve the stability and security of the financial system since things like fraud were rampant.