https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/01/31/end.html#section...

Vitalik touched upon this briefly in an other-wise long and wide-reaching essay. I think its a good treatment of the topic that the author is talking about. He categorizes the ecosystem broadly into 4 cohorts- [token holders] (which includes investors, speculators, etc.), [pragmatic users] (actual end-users who spend crypto to buy stuff), [intellectuals] (who give the vision and ideology), [builders] (of blockchains, apps, etc.) - These 4 groups come together but with different motivations and there is a gap in understanding between them. Indeed, there is even resistance against trying to reach an understanding - one which plays out in the comments section of every crypto-related post on hn. The author of this twitter-post clearly falls under [intellectual, builder] and has been disillusioned by the speculators from [token-holders]. Yet the [token-holders] are a vital component (as are the other groups) as they fund most of the development and adoption. Ultimately these 4 groups have more in common than not. The challenge going forward is to balance the occasionally conflicting needs of all the 4 groups, which includes checking the excesses of each group, while try to achieve a consensus. (Vitalik provides a nice diagram that maps out what that would look like). Crypto is an experiment in economics and economics is a science as well as a social-science. Anyone looking for a good solution must seek to understand and address the psychology of all the actors involved.

I worked at a crypto exchange and after I came to the conclusion that 99% of crypto was scams and rugpulls, I sold all my crypto and vowed to have nothing to do with it. It's more of a religion than a financial instrument and absolutely nothing has shown to me that crypto is anything more than a speculative gamble, basically tulips with the religious promise of a better world. The number of employees that lost money on rugpulls while I was there, but "still believed in crypto" was staggering.

I've never understood the initial arguments about Bitcoin, no matter how many times they've been explained to me.

The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database. How anyone, especially many intelligent people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top of such a unwieldy piece of technology is beyond me. Maybe it goes to show how few people understand economics and anthropology and how dunning-krueger can happen to anyone.

Now the uninformed gambling on futuristic sounding hokum? THAT is easy to understand.

That being said, I'm sorry the author had to go through this experience, the road of life is often filled with unexpected twists and turns.

The original promise of crypto was lost a LONG time ago.

Instead of being a true rival to FIAT, it became a thing with a toxic-as-hell commumity, fraud, and basically its nothing more than a high risk stock. The risk is NOT only "will this go up or down" but you have a high risk of being robbed, as have happened to millions of people.

Maybe there will be a better alternative in the future, but right now bitcoin is not it.

I got into crypto back in 2011/2012. I used PayPal and bank wire transfer extensively back then, as I bought and sold a lot of stuff internationally - so to me bitcoin seemed like the natural next step, and a godsend to people like me. At my height, I had 100 BTC.

Eventually big events in my life happened, and I sold my coins out of necessity. I found myself unemployed, separated, and broke - so I sold everything I owned. I cashed in around $40k or so from the coins, which helped me pay off my debts and get a down payment for my house. To be honest, I personally don't know anyone from way back then that became filthy rich off crypto, most sold off their stuff when every boom cycle started again, afraid that it would be the last one...the people I know that became rich, were those that went all-in on crypto around 2017/2018. They dumped everything they had, and managed to 10x-100x their investments.

Of course, had I held onto those, I'd be set for life now. But hindsight is 20/20

But with that said, I remember around 2017/2018 when the first "real" boom occurred - that's when everyone pretty much abandoned ideals, and went into it for the money. Lots of people made life-changing money back then, and the idealistic dream was pretty much dead. "Store of value" won the war, and soon after "moon lambo".

At least for me, the writing on the wall was clearly that crypto would evolve into just another financial instrument that big finance would pump and dump periodically. Though I could not foresee a crypto-friendly US gov. entering the picture.

In recent months I changed views and shifted from the desilluioned "this is a casino" mindset that is described in this article to a "we need this now" one. An example in this article [1], the US can now unilateraly decide to prevent an individual anywhere in the world from having a functioning financial life and this because of the quasi (western) duopoly that is Visa and Mastercard. Nothing against the US in general, this is simply too much power to put in a single decisional entity, whatever/wherever it is. The "crypto" related systems now seem like a needed extra option to the current payment system (the same way cash is almost always an alternative to credit/debit card payment and vice versa)

[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/11/19/n...

It's good to know everyone here is weary of crypto scams, but I don't see anyone accurately describing the significance of these technologies.

Bitcoin failed as a currency, and as that became realized, institutional investors pivoted to the "digital gold" scam, to keep people long, while they divest or hedge. The two reasons why it failed as a currency are transaction latency, and lack of fungibility. Transaction privacy is necessary for fungibility. Both of those are just technical problems; I predict that a distributed ledger currency with private transactions like Monero, but a faster consensus algorithm like Avalanche or Hedera will become popular in the next decade. It's likely to be an Ethereum L2.

That is just the currency aspect of distributed ledgers. It's just one use case that we don't yet have the technology to properly address. The exciting thing that distributed ledgers enable is cryptographic institutions. These technologies allow us to solve coordination problems more easily than ever before. Democracies, businesses, communities, projects can all be coordinated better and more honestly using distributed ledgers. It's not an overstatement to say that distributed ledgers are as big of an advancement for human coordination as democracy was.

If you've been soured on these technologies because most of the currencies built with them are scams, I would encourage you to learn about them as if they were just incredibly robust databases that even governments would struggle to take down. Surely you can think of something cool to build with that, which doesn't involve money.

The US crypto lobby has already raised over 240 million for the 2026 election. It’s a cancer attacking our society’s institutions.

> your bank account would just hold USDC or Bitcoin, and you could send a billion dollars to anyone in the world in a few seconds. That belief is powerful and I still ascribe to it.

These statements still surprise me to this day. If you're a good person engineer, why does sending money in seconds need blockchain? There's parts of the world where this is commonplace and free as well.

I don't believe cross border was there in 2010 or so but why not implement that feature in an existing system instead of building out a parallel universe

All of this was obvious 8 or so years ago during the first real boom when cryptos pants fell down. All hype no usecase. Here we are now how far along in (20 odd years?) with how many smart people making a genuine concerted effort to build something useful (literally millions over the years?) - and still the only useful thing anyone has ever done with blockchain is buy drugs and have a good time.

As I say, crypto is only useful if the whole world is already on the chain. Until then you need to trust outside sources which undermines the entire deal in trustlessness and undermines it in performance.

I had fun with crypto ~12 years ago. I mined a tiny bit, and I built a little crypto trading bot. The bot was mildly profitable, and I had bigger plans for it. Then the exchange I was using declared they had been hacked and shut down, taking all of my profits and seed money with it.

I feel like I learned all I needed to know about crypto from that experience and haven't touched it since then.

GNU Taler is a working implementation of "digital cash" in the spirit of Ecash. Since it doesn't come with its own currency, it cannot be used for gambling. It is quite telling that it has seen essentially zero adoption in the "crypto" scene.

The only smart involvement in crypto was to spend a few minutes buying Bitcoin early on and holding on to it. Everything else — all the altcoins, stablecoins, NFTs, large ecosystem of startups, VC funds, DeFi, web3, payment networks, smart contracts, blockchains – has been an immense waste of time and resources.

Cynically reduced, tfa reads as: "I don't like what the population is choosing to use their brand-new Freedom for", but claims to say: "The promised freedom did not materialize."

If crypto allows people to do something that was previously not possible(order drugs in the mail with the convenience of amazon, invest at consistently insanely chaotic conditions, run multimillion hustles with total impunity) versus doing something that was possible already, just re-skinned(make bank transfers), then it's really no surprise what will see better adoption. The biggest value-add is in the degenerate stuff.

Wrong. People who use crypto as a casino - that is, "invest" into it or "trade" it - are a numerical majority but they aren't those who make actual money there. Actual money is made by those who use it for:

- Tool/facilitation of "brick and mortar" crime, as well as some cybercrime (moving drug money across borders, way to pay ransom in a way difficult to track, etc).

- Tool for scams.

- Hacks, including (but not limited to), on-chain hacks.

I know a lot of people who made 9-digit sums in crypto. None of them invested or traded coins (none were from the 'crime' category either). Most typical kind of people are those who did hard-core (hundreds of thousands of accounts) sybil attacks on ICOs and launchpads in their heyday in 2017-2021. So it was scripting/scraping/cloud deployments using residential proxies/buying passport scans on darknets.

Also those who ran Solana nodes from massive sybils too (up to 200 people - it's 1 node per person so one has to have many persons). While that probably qualifies as speculation/"trading" Solana, servers being little but a booster, so in part it was "casino".

Glad to hear the change of heart here and the guts it took to write it up. I know that's not an easy thing to do, and it likely burned some bridges.

The point about it being gambling, and therefore, taking advantage of idiots, yeah that rings true. The mass proliferation of gambling and the true compulsive addiction and ruin of mostly young men, it's hard to look at oneself and state that they caused that pain for other and their loved ones.

The next step is, of course, to do the very hard part: use the money gained for good. The author mentions that they are a hypocrite for only speaking out after making their money. They need not be so. Finding legitimate ways to use the ill gotten gains for good is a bit of what they built their skills in, after all.

I hope to someday see the next post of theirs detailing how many people they helped and how many lives saved, families reunited and made sound again, based on how they used this new wealth for good.

They are very far from the end of their story, but the midpoint, so to speak, has been passed.

> I wasted years of my life in crypto

I've wasted days of my life explaining to people why virtually all of crypto currencies and exchanges are scams.

Similar thing happened to me, albeit like 6 or so years ago.

I was very young and had been "in the space" for a couple years. The concept of "decentralization" in general appealed to me as someone frustrated with the abuses of centralized power. I liked the idea of a transparent ledger and wanted to apply it to non-profit initiatives. I even spoke about this at the European Central Bank as a 20 year old (got there via anonymous paper submission -- imagine the surprise).

But very quickly I grew frustrated with how much of the space was scams, people looking to get rich quick, etc. I had been more interested in the applications of blockchain that went beyond crypto but even stopped paying attention to cryptos altogether as a speculative investment. Funny enough, a few people who were "evangelized" by me made a fair bit of money.

I'm thankful though because I got into programming at 18 to write smart contracts, and that actually changed the course of my life quite drastically.

“The gamblification of the economy” is the real story here. Crypto, prediction markets, and omnipresent instant gambling apps are poisoning more and more of our society and draining money from folks in an entirely unproductive way. These things promise a quick path to fortune but the only people making money are the fraudsters or the platform owners (often the same people). Serious regulation of these things is long overdue, and no, forcing them to advertise gambling hotlines is not sufficient.

Considering the transaction time and cost, crypto never made sense. As fast as I can tell, it's been pure speculation since its inception.

I’d hesitate to say it’s wasted. Aren’t these some of the most complex, electronic, decentralized systems in human history? That skillset is going to be more and more important the more and more computers there are.

Okay, so if your time felt wasted, that must mean there were better uses of your 20s.

But, how else would you have driven towards your goal of building a new financial system?

My question is, which real-world problem is actually solved by crypto? All I know is transferring money over the border gets much easier than pre-bitcoin era.

You feel old when you read "crypto" and your first tought is about cryptography.

Like most kids, I had my Randian phase. But I grew out of it before moving to Sili Valley.

I've always been a bit of a fan of Adam Curtis' documentary style, and "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" (named after the Brautigan poem) is worth watching. I'm not sure how much of his narrative of Rand is accurate, but it's well presented:

https://youtu.be/I6EBpLfLHCA?si=SE93Dp9nsl11vnU3

Is it really a waste if you made enough money to retire?

One correction. Crypto is not zero sum. It is a potential minus 100% sum for all the players involved. Maybe with exceptions of the folks making cash from the transaction fees.

The low-agency masses will always choose the incorrect way to use something (especially money). Nothing about what happened re: speculation in crypto should be a surprise. The technology is neutral, but basic human traits like greed will always prevail over the popular mind. That our previous cohort of financial demons has now slid into frame should be even less of a surprise.

You didn't waste time, you just spent eight years removing your rose colored glasses.

I don't think the author should be sad. He helped push an industry that lets people move value around freely without third parties being able to choke them off. That alone is pretty powerful. The people gambling with it would probably be gambling with something else instead. As for not learning to create something users want, nothing will prevent him from starting now

> I wasted years of my life in crypto

Yeah you are a software engineer. That means like 80% of your work will probably get minimal traction for a few years before burning into nothing. 8 years on crypto, probably a ton of people interacted with things he created and now it will dwindle to nothing and be replaced by the next hot thing. Sounds like a win imo.

How familiar this arc is to anyone who's ever worked inside an industry whose rhetoric and incentives drift far apart

I always wondered what "clever" people expected from crypto, apart from getting rich quick schemes. Boring.

We had such know-it-alls still with their pimples from Frauenhofer and Max Planck giving presentations. Even back then, 99% percent of the audience were skeptical, but sadly too many decision makers are just emperors with no clothing. There were so many immature, useless loud speakers given a junior professorship because old morons have FOMO too. That must have sucked for the valid academics with proven achievements. I'm glad I'm not one of the ones waiting in queue. There no single project having any sign of impact, naturally. While that can be said of a lot of academic work, crypto: more buzzwords, even less delivered.

I'm amazed by the degree of hate and bitterness around here the last few years toward Bitcoin and the like.

Regardless of anything else, it's money I can email. Without having to rely on almighty permission from whatever country or company controls the currency or platform (and all the corresponding bullshit that often entails, like user-hostile terms of service which nobody in their right mind would agree to if they actually read, overreaching indemnities, arbitrary limits, and in some places risks arising from which way the political winds happen to be blowing).

I've used it to buy real things (that aren't drugs or contraband) where it offered less friction than competing forms of payment, and still feel the magic of that.

Have the finance leeches clawed their fangs into it? Yes of course!

But they did the same thing to regular currency and stocks decades ago (eg. with tangled webs of Nth order derivatives eventually crashing entire economies). Does that mean you don't use cash or credit cards or stocks?

I share the tweeter's frustration with the accretion of scams and other illegal actors, but not their surprise. Technology can't fix human nature.

(Although personally I see regulation catching up - for better or worse - and over time I expect feature improvements will mitigate more of the toxicity, eg. baked-in decentralized dispute resolution mechanisms that are less costly than the traditional judicial system but fairer and more efficient than arbitration alternatives you see today).

This deeply resonates. I got out of the game. The issue is that financial freedom was never a technology problem. Meatspace will always get their hands on anything with a moderate amount of traction.

Alternative to archive.is

https://xcancel.com/kenchangh/status/1994854381267947640

Crypto adds no value to an economic system. It's an expensive way to move money in a big pile.

I'm glad OP has been enlightened. Growth can be painful.

For me I find stablecoins very useful today, I can send money to my family in seconds with cents of fee. even if in my country there is not a lot of international financial institutions.

Also people in my country Venezuela, use usdt as a way for paying for things and saving money as the currency it's inestable.

I lost about $10,000 USD in bitcoin, which put me in a tight spot. I was inconsolable and believed that I had reached my lowest moment, with no possibility of getting my money back. Everything changed drastically when I discovered Coin Hack. The company intervened and promptly helped me get my full refund. Their services are highly recommended You can reach them on coinhackrecovery (@) gmail com for a help if you are having issues.

Crytocurrency was the initial use case for blockchain, but blockchain is not limited to cryptocurrency.

The internet was about freedom (to most of its initial creators). It is now a cornerstone of the surveillance state. And yet, independent journalism is now possible only mostly through the existence of the internet.

AI & crypto may end up in a similar bucket. It is a paradoxical enabler of both freedom and imprisonment. No one gets to build a technology a declare a problem solved. Alfred Nobel made nitroglycerin safe and thus paradoxically ended up being called the Merchant of Death.

Freedom is not free. It is an eternal struggle.

I am grateful for the builders who try to build something for freedom. I do not spurn them when their invention gets corrupted. It is now our job and the job of future generations to fight the corruption.

Guy who was "enamored by the whole idea of Bitcoin being a private bank for wealthy individuals" is shocked to learn that the system "will lead to the long-term collapse of social mobility for the younger generation".

He's now wiser than the average Randian acolyte, but still seems to think this structural feature of capitalism is somehow unique to cryptocurrency.

Sold most of my BTC off at $120k, but kept a chunk not as an investment but as a sort of emergency fund that could be useful if for some reason I ever find myself needing to transact without using cash, bank accounts or credit cards.

I'm sorry this guy feels like that, and I agree that there are tons of fraudsters and casino players in the current crypto scene.

It also doesn't surprise me to read the reactions in here, as most of HN users are from the US or other first world countries.

For people like me who were born and have lived in developing countries or countries were we cannot fully trust our banking/monetary systems, Bitcoin IS a tool to escape possible problems. I'm old enough to have been in 3 monetary crises in my country: 1985, 1994 and 2008. I'm old enough to have seen countries like Argentina, Venezuela, Spain, Lebanon, Greece experience bank runs. And when that happens, only the rich and connected can do something, while individuals like us are left holding the bag and paying for the errors of others (Americans may remember the 1% movement, occupy wall street).

So, no. Bitcoin is and still will be a useful thing for me and a lot of people. First word.country citizens may not understand it, until it becomes too late .

"In theory it's a great idea, in practice not so much."

I feel that's the lesson anyone who toyed with libertarians ideals ultimately come to. It just takes a bit longer for some than others. It's also harder to realize if you're making mad bank on it, rather than be part of the idiots who blew their hard-earned money on some technical misunderstanding, scam, or retro-active regulation.

I worked in blockchain 5 years trying to build good tech, and speculators ruin everything and don't care about good tech, but the real punch line is that

good tech is like 2% of a real answer

Here's a rant about a bunch of other layers of 'so you want to move money'

https://voidfox.com/blog/payment_processor_fun_2025_making_y...

and different parts of the blockchain ecosystem are working on some parts of that, and all together they're still a long ways off

To anyone with half a brain not poisoned by conservative ideology this always was, and is, obvious. Crypto has always been pitched as a get rich quick scheme which only appeals to the financially illiterate.

For more enjoyable snippets like this, I recommend https://x.com/coinfessions/

I get that the crypto world right now is a casino, but the unfulfilled need is still there:

I want to be able to buy over the internet as anonymously as when I use cash in the real world.

Crypto is an absolutely fascinating technology, which solved a seemingly impossible problem in an ingenious way. The entire theory behind it is absolutely amazing, which is something the anti-crypto people rarely acknowledge.

Simultaneously the only use case people have found for it are defrauding people, hiding illicit financial transactions and gambling that some line will go up. Which is something pro-crypto people rarely acknowledge.

As someone who spent some time in "crypto land" and much time in the "real world", my surprise was usually that people seeing odd things in crypto land didn't realize that very similar odd things are also present in real world. E.g. the author's frustration at not being able to spot a real business. How many times have we seen an IPO or acquisition at an unfathomable valuation, for example?

The fiat financial system (aka wall st and main st banking) is heavily regulated on a state and federal level.

Yet after over a decade, the government explicitly did not regulate crypto despite significant overtures from the industry. Nothing other than enforcement actions, until very recently.

This, to me, implies that the government does not want to regulate it proactively because they don’t want to legitimize it.

I've talked to people that, around 2023, were still very deep into the "we are the revolution. open source decentralized finance will free humanity" belief, while it was obvious that more and more of it was blending with institutions and dubious characters. Pretty odd (but massively interesting as a sociological pattern).

> I built a casino. A casino that does not call itself a casino, but it is the biggest, [...]

That's what people involved in the creation of the stock market must have thought.

Aren't all financial systems about this one thing? Buying and selling risk for profit?

If you want to work on something else than a casino you should probably steer clear of any finance.

It's not a complete waste. 8 years is a lot of time spent learning to build a tool that, sure, might not have been "good" but it was still time spent building a tool. Those skills are applicable elsewhere, and perhaps the most important thing to realize is that at least the time wasn't spent on NFTs.

Eight years ago was 2017.

Everything you figured out about crypto was known then. You had to choose to disregard that information and continue on. And you did, and it took you eight years to figure it out. And now that you have money, you think you have special insight others did not. Sorry, you don’t. There’s going to be a significant portion of people reading this saying, “No shit”. But congrats on winning at the casino I guess.

Good thing the industry has moved on to another promising niche technology which is being hyped and ruined by greed.

> I have zero doubt that BTC will hit $1m one day.

Well, there's your problem. Here is a potentially interesting math paper that comes to very different conclusions: https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/BTC-QF.pdf

Luke Smith had a good video that pretty much summarized what happens with projects such as Bitcoin that have noble goals to begin with; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-lS8Y79L7g

Bitcoin doesn't take into account that humans are forgetful.

If you forget your bank card pin code they would post you a new card and pin, if you phone them up. I've done this a couple times in the past pre-smartphone banks.

If you forget your bitcoin password you are never getting access back.

From a developer perspective, a big part of crypto’s problem is that complexity becomes a way to hide centralization.

Everyone talks about "decentralized bridges" but them end up as centralized swaps wrapped in jargon.

The hard problems aren't being solved, they’re being obscured.

Without moral ground every financial system will end up a casino, current stock market is more or less a speculative trading. You can’t ignore your morals and 20 years later ask yourself what did get us here!

Crypto is not necessarily just a casino; the tech has value but there is no mass adoption of the currency as of yet.

We'll probably see mass adoption of crypto if a crypto can become a store of wealth

If you work in cybersecurity, I’d table many views in this thread and just understand it’s the place to be to cut your teeth in fairly hard security problems and make money along the way. If 1980’s security culture seemed cool with a new BoF everyday and Bill Gates himself calling you a bad word for doing it, and toss in advanced threat actors, a sec career in crypto isn’t too far off of that. Of course company by company variations apply and the above could include explaining EDR to small teams with absurds amounts of funds tied to a private key in a .txt.

That said, much of the feedback in this thread applies to working in it imo, as the other side of keeping these companies and their treasuries not hacked and capitalized is it exposes you to a lot.

That said, I’ve done big tech too, and the nonsense in crypto just has a couple less rungs of management insulation than the rest of tech. The rest of tech lives with the consequences of asinine decisions over 4-5x quarters and in crypto you live with it month to month. Pick your poison on preferred version of nonsensical tech instability.

There’s a twitter comment that covers what I’ve come to think - natural state of crypto is just a more direct instantiation of what’s going on everywhere else, crypto just doesn’t hide it (sort of). Hard not to believe that with tech selling “trade in your IRA!” as if that’s not offering a beer to my 20 yr sober Uncle Bob, in terms of products that are cancerous for “the people.” So I see nothing in crypto that’s not reflected everywhere in tech and civics right now.

The crypto tech or integrations to pay attention to - btc, atomic swaps cross-chain, trading firms, whatever finserv is testing for payment and settlement infra. All of these have deep building, are functional and funded. Wouldn’t bet against it over a career.

Crypto is 99% gambling, tax evasion scam, sanction evasion, steal energy on mining, or financing criminal. I suppose big countries may totally forbid it quite soon.

Wasting your 20s sounds like you did nothing in your 20s. Instead you actively made the world worse by building a casino with power hungry technology.

Did he at least make good money though? It's so strange to me that someone can get a sense of purpose from building something specifically for wealthy people tbh

What do people think of hiring people with crypto backgrounds? It is kind of a red flag to me - unless it's a really mainstream thing like coinbase

Crypto helped me step up my cybersecurity skills forever, when someone was exploiting a race condition in my AI app, I only knew how to prompt AI to do atomic operations because of popular smart contract hacks.

I wish I got funded to make a Coinbase bitcoin wallet competitor or Dropbox competitor leveraging blockchain for storage.

Pivoting to AI has better unit economics and I have a handcrafted app architecture because of my crypto venture aspirations.

Doing nothing for years and trying to vibe code an equivalent AI app now wouldn’t be fun.

It's unhealthy to ascribe religious or ideological ideas to money. It's a tool. Ideology needs to preach, to influence minds.

> "I was a politically motivated person when I was a teenager. Of all the books that radicalized me, it was the Aynd Rand books (Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged) that did."

A heartfelt "Thank you!" to Ken on account of having at least the courtesy of saving cool people's time by putting the Origin Story into the first sentences.

Wait until you learn how much of life is gambling + entertainment. Is working for one of the many SV SaaS companies really that much different?

if blockchain is used for anything related to currency or "source of value", i am very bearish on its real utility.

the core theme of establish trust in a trustless environment will truly remain the potential we are yet to fully achieve in a usable way, but i hope it comes.

I've always been intrigued by the whole "decentralized and fixed supply" argument around Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies.

But the more I look into it, the more I wonder: if one Bitcoin can be split into 0.1, 0.01, 0.001 or even smaller fractions for transactions, doesn't that kind of undermine the whole “fixed total supply” idea?

Also, sure, cryptocurrencies are decentralized in theory and the transactions are hard to trace. But at the end of the day, anyone holding crypt is still very much under the control of governments. You can't magically escape regulations or enforcement just because the currency is "decentralized." It's an interesting tension between theory and reality that I don't think enough people talk about.

I heard some people were talking about using crypto to build a full State on it, this is doomed to fail.

Let's say you loose your wallet. What do you do next? You call your bank to block your credit card and to take an appointment with the administration to make a new ID, driving license etc. The cash in your wallet is gone but everything else isn't. The process is annoying but at the end of the day you'll be fine.

Now if all this is based on a private key and you loose it, you're completely done, you're just not part of society anymore.

No one will ever embrace this because humans are messy and make mistakes all the time. Crypto and blockchain are so resistant to mistakes that for this specific case it's just not good at all.

It's sad that crypto might have succeeded if people like him weren't involved in it.

don’t view it as a waste

you understand how to construct complex & stimulating games that people will play compulsively for money. that’s good.

next, craft games for which you can guarantee a house edge. should be small yet assured.

you’re already an experienced casino game developer

I feel similar sentiments about working in Cloud. It's mostly vaporware.

Crypto is a great technology, sadly, as every other existing financial technology it attracts scammers. However the unregulated and accessible nature of crypto opened a window for the common people into mechanisms ruling their lives, so now everyone can learn about the world.

Tangential: a friend of mine growing up refused to read Ayn Rand, because he said that everyone he knew that had read her books turned into assholes, and he didn't want to become an asshole too.

I spent 2014 to 2016 working on crypto. I built crypto apps for a lot of companies, including some that are very very big now. Back then, I really believed in crypto. But after the Xth crypto bubble popping, I gave up. So much time had passed, and nothing was changing (for the better). Banks were NEVER going to adopt this (at least not any blockchain that the general public can profit from) and it would NOT dramatically transform the financial system the way I thought.

I had a ton of bitcoins and ethereum. I even bought ethereum in the presale. Present day value would have been around 5 million euros. But I sold it all back then, because I saw that crypto was never going to make a significant impact.

It turned out, I was right. Most of the bitcoin ATMs disappeared, most webshops stopped accepting it, it plays almost no role at all in the financial world. But I overlooked one major factor: the value of these cryptos isn't based on anything else than thin air. People are willing to pump anything as long as they can personally profit from it. And yes, the famous saying applies here: the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. I saw the fundamentals correctly, but the sentiment wrong.

Anything other than Monero and (maybe) Bitcoin is useless. End of story.

If crypto can no longer outperform S&P500 is it still worth buying?

crypto means cryptography

It's the usual story of technology divorced from morality.

>I wasted years of my life in AI

→ “AI generates slop, false info, deepfakes make ppl look bad, therefore AI = bad.”

Same vibes.

You can wake up with your bank / broker / PayPal balance = 0, and there is nothing you can do to protect yourself from that scenario. Only replicated state machines (or L2s built correctly on top of them) even attempt to close that attack surface — and they’re still not finished.

In 10–20 years the world will run on government-run CBDCs, and your relationship with your bank/broker will finally be protected by actual cryptography and replicated state: xln.finance. That’s when crypto reaches its real bloom. Right now it’s nowhere close to being mature enough to judge.

If you’re a trader, jokes on you — you were never “in crypto.” You were just passing through.

The only people who are actually in crypto are the ones who build: smart contracts, consensus, p2p layers, replicated state machines.

Everyone else is just cheering from the sidelines (usually for the wrong team).

2 friends of mine did an entire presentation on their deep dive into crypto. They started a long time ago, and very smartly: Instead of trading it themselves, they wrote bots to play the arbitrage game: Find price differences between 2 markets for the same product.

They made money with it. More and more, spending significant amounts on hosters to run their bots more often and on more markets.

It was an interesting presentation even if only for the technical details on how they implemented it all.

It took one whole hour. Somewhere near the end, about 5 seconds was spent on 'anyway I lost it all due to the fall of FTX', and then another 5 minutes on how they want to get back into it and what they're looking at, because an individual can no longer play the arbitrage game today.

I had to ask some fairly blunt questions to disillusion the audience. At the end of all that, and with all that effort, *they lost quite a bit of money in the endeavour*. And they wanted to get back into it.

What. the. heck.

This is about cryptocurrencies, not actual cryptography.

HN generally views blockchain tech negatively I've found, but I'll leave this here for the inevitable: crypto if a casino and has no real use.

https://kaveh.page/blog/what-is-blockchain-actually-used-for

There's a lot of talk these days about the enshitification of the Internet. What I rarely see mentioned is that the Internet's first steps towards enshitification started when we attached the banking system to the Internet.

Before you could make transactions online, if your infrastructure was hacked, it was your fault and your responsibility to implement better security. But once money was involved, you could complain to the police about a hack and involve the authorities - because now actual property was involved. This changed everything.

This was also about the time we started seeing spam, scams, and other negativity suddenly spring up. It's hard to believe that we used to post to usenet with our email addresses publicly exposed... and never worry about being added to a spam list.

Money attracted bad actors to the Internet. Bitcoin was money from the start. So of course the whole cryptocurrency scene is a magnet for bad actors - like we've never seen before. This was inevitable. And 95% of the cryptocurrency scene are some flavor of bad actors.

But Bitcoin mostly sits outside of the legal frameworks of the world. So it's much harder to call the authorities when your cryptocurrency is stolen. You can. It happens. But not much. And for this reason, the only path forward for this new technology/money is right through the middle of the hoard of bad actors. That means we have to create technological and social solutions for security instead of relying on the monopoly of violence (the police) to protect us.

The bad acts and just general greed in the scene are holding it back. But this is, unfortunately, necessary. This is a wall of resistance that has to be pushed through for a better tomorrow. It's part of the process.

The future that decentralized technology will bring us will be different from whatever we are imagining now. But we still have to keep imagining and building. Because even though it will be different than the fantasy, its still the right direction.

It's nice to see someone come to a partial realization that their teenage worldview might have been imperfect, but a person who continues to personally finance the destructive activities of Elon Musk has made this realization incompletely.

Believe in what is important and meaningful to you.

Me too. Honestly I still live off crypto but after 6 years of being a blockchain dev I refuse to work in the industry anymore.

There are a lot of selling points around freedom, but in practice its just gambling and its impossible to build real products in the space. In-fact there is no demand for anything other than gambling.

If only everyone could have warned you!

> It would be a lie for me to say that I joined crypto without any financial motivation. As a reader, it may sound hypocritical to you that I decided to swear off the crypto industry, now that I have made enough money. Yes, maybe I am hypocritical. But maybe I also just feel sick about contributing to the cesspool of financialization and gamblification of the economy.

If they truly feel sick about it, they should donate the money they made (or the vast majority of it). Otherwise, hypocritical is right.

> Look at what they do, not what they say

Why not link to the archive.is page in the HN feed? I failed to discover how to open the original article link.

Crypto is NOT a casino.

In a casino the house always wins.

In crypto, every single player that's sat down for 5 years is a winner.

I really love this thread more and more, so I just want to appreciate this moment right now because these discussions are genuinely fascinating to read and I wish to comment a lot and actually feel a little overwhelmed because of it haha

Personally I am really interested in stablecoins, I know there is nothing interesting about them fundamentally and I think people should have their money in banks but still there are coins like fusd if need be which are private

I hate crypto aside from stablecoins which feel "tolerable" to me, not too good not too bad either but what is the general consensus and is there some innovation happening in stablecoins as I see a lot of stablecoins exploding recently.

I have another interesting idea about stablecoins which I see literally noone or quite few people pick up but why is there literally no coin stable-pegged to a etf like vanguards world or similar, I know from a regulatory standpoint it can be hard to create from what I've heard but I've always wondered about it and I would love to know more.

Also just because I think stablecoins are a good-enough idea doesnt mean whole of crypto is and basically I actually want centralized finance to do what stablecoins do without the need of a chain and just be better in my opinion and If I ever work in crypto, it would be very related to stablecoin in my opinion (or I hope so) but I also dont see too much point in working on stablecoins when there are just so many and mostly its a regulatory issue but still stablecoins are definitely interesting to me honestly.

The use case I had for this is that I am a teenager and I had some crypto and currently its in gold but I wanted to invest it in stocks and I have seen that there are chains which are cheap too

Besides this, some privacy gains and some other small use cases personally I am not that big of a believer in crypto (I am one of the haters), I think the technology is cool but the whole industry tries to do unrealistic things which raises alarms as me as I am a index fund kind of guy.

Honestly in my opinion 90% of people dont ever need crypto, what we need are more services like privacy.com basically which can create virtual cards with limits so that shitty companies cant leak my data and lose it. Or if the world can implement something like UPI or even PIX, those seem to be the better option and I only consider something like stablecoin as a slow way to move towards something like UPI or PIX preferably at the world scale.

I know which school I'd count on to not be based on gambling if I had to choose between a distorted view of libertarianism (and Aynd Rand) and the more pragmatic and sound principles of folks like Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett.

This is one of the signs that we are near bottom in the crypto market.

anything but monero is indeed a waste of time

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"Look at what they do, not what they say"

Is also something author should have applied to Randians and Libertarians from day 1.

> I wasted my 20s making boatloads of money in tech. My libertarian dream was not realized.

As OP says: He was radicalized.

I like some aspects of Ayn Rand, I like some aspects of crypto. I like some things Elon did.

One takes in info, incorporates it into ones world view. One does not go nuts following just one gospel as absolute truth.

This piece has nothing to do with Ayn Rand, or Crypto. It's just another example of how, when you're young, some oversimplifications can make you feel like you really understand the world. It's important to guide the young ones through this phase. I also remember putting down Atlas Shrugged thinking I'd find THE WAY. But it's the start of a learning process. Models (as in the models of the world we build in our heads) are useful, but always approximations. One needs to learn to appreciate that. For me that came with age, OP is going through something similar.

I worked for a blockchain startup and left with PTSD (I was asked to leave).

They had started as yet another ICO and when that didn't work, pivoted into a financial space that actually was a great pitch for blockchain.

They were a small company and when I came aboard they had nothing viable, I helped them rearchitect it to something that could work, and the lead ops guy translated it back to the original broken architecture.

That guy was crazy, and claimed that everybody there was spook adjacent (ex NSA, etc) and that our tech was vital to some secret need. They all drank the koolaid.

I do like the concept of blockchain as a "commons" of data, but stil think that cryptocurrency is a colossal scam.

I was saddened when crypto took this direction and became an industry. To me the interesting part was always the idea of someday having a digital medium for value exchange that cannot be controlled by any one or groups of government, billionaire, or corporate entities and to be able to transact privately and anonymously if needed.

Monero is still in this game but the entities listed above are doing everything they can to kill it so they can retain power. They claim we should think of the children and worry about crime, but they really only care about their power. The benefit to the economy if money could flow freely around the globe instantly would far outweigh any real harms.

Another article by a civilization wrecker who apologizes for working tirelessly for years to wreck civilization. Had he made off with a billion USD equivalents this wouldn't have even been written yet the outcome would be the same. Moralizing grifters can gtfoh

Imagine how I felt wasting my professional life in cryptography.

i would have expected more adequate comments on HN, unfortunately it's mostly boomer-minded condescending gibberish from people who don't understand bitcoin, hfsp

> The reality hit me like a fucking truck. I am NOT building a new financial system. I built a casino.

Hey now, you didn't just build a casino. You also built a way for pedophiles and drug dealers to move money around.

Crypto is a casino (often fraudulent) and a scam factory.

It's also the source of at least one great new global public institution (Ethereum) and is likely to run much of the global economy in the coming decades.

If you hate or are skeptical about crypto, it is crucial to at least understand the difference between three things:

1. Casino/scams/hacks

2. Crypto/on-chain technology

3. Ethereum as a decentralized chain and global public institution

I've been a full-time Ethereum person for many years. I hate the casino. I hate the scams and hacks. But I see something very special going on here. So let me try to describe it

The casino is just terrible and it'll likely get much worse. The steady stream of scam shit tokens sold to unsuspecting investors shows no sign of slowing down. And wait until r/wallstreetbets discovers perps (perpetual futures). Perps for equities are already live and scaling up.

The scams will get much, much worse. Crypto (on-chain) lets you send bearer assets over the internet, it's scam fuel. The bad guys will have access to a sophisticated internet financial system, too.

Hacks in mature protocols should get much better over time due to improved bug-finding techniques, including AI/tool-assisted auditing and formal verification.

The technology of crypto offers the world a number of benefits, including inherently globalized payments and instant settlement.

Centralized deployments of crypto technology are a big segment of the future. For example, Stripe is actively working on a centralized chain named Tempo that's optimized for payments. It is basically fintech 2.0 on the blockchain, but entirely centralized.

The last and most important part of crypto is the rise of decentralized chains. There are only two chains that are remotely decentralized, Bitcoin and Ethereum. Bitcoin has no programmable app layer, so its utility is limited beyond the whatever value the world assigns to BTC.

Ethereum is a decentralized programmable chain, a new kind global public institution. Ethereum can make a highly credible commitment that the rules of the programming environment will be followed in all cases. This makes Ethereum a uniquely excellent neutral hub for global commerce.

Ethereum's decentralization (what we sometimes call "credible neutrality") is driving massive grassroots adoption among corporations and institutions. This is the #1 thing in crypto to keep an eye on because if Ethereum gets large enough it will become a de facto global economic backbone.

I understand you hate crypto. I've lived since 2018 full-time in the industry, and it's been often soul-sucking and harrowing. Many days I hate it. But Ethereum as a platform is benevolent, virtuous, productive, and probably a key part of humanity's future.

I have had some thoughts on crypto but basically trust is required in every system, yes there are trustless ways to do things but that isnt the main issue

I think the main issue is that our current credit/debit cards primitives can be stolen/worried about, there are companies which accept your free tier and will auto charge you and hope you forget etc.

Another issue is privacy, Crypto provides some privacy by having usdc <->monero <-> usdc <-> pay where you want.

Another issue is for teenagers, I am a teen, I can't create a banking account but I have accepted money for 0 fees well technically but exchanges are a mess and I have used those to buy domain names and similar via crypto.

I think that there are stable cryptocurrencies with low or 0 gas fees so it can allow some primitives like just having a public key online -> convert it to respective token's -> send lets say 0.1$ as a token of gesture and then like it can enable a sense of microeconomy but the people who try doing it try to mess it up by having their own coins or whatever whereas I believe stablecoins should be the one doing it

Personally I really prefer gold tokens because that is the best way to get "yield" in my opinion because most places like aave etc. kind of work via providing liquidity to traders or this gambling and due to ethics and just in my opinion, gold coins since pegged to gold have an 100x more volume which is genuine.

Personally as a teen, I have always loved the tech behind crypto because it can enable somethings impossible but its current implementation with 0 pegged coins,trading/gambling etc. sucks and is scummy. I think stablecoins are genuinely really nice

I have shared it in another comment but frankly let me reshare it : https://justforhn.mataroa.blog/blog/most-crypto-is-doomed-to...

Man, I really wish if there was someone who can work with me accepting crypto usdc <-> bank account as I know people in some industries who want to work with crypto but crypto is regulated with them in their country basically or like personally although I stay away from crypto even though I have built things on top of it (nanotimestamps), I would love working in stablecoins but I think that the market is saturated and it requires a lot of regulations and funding to establish a new stablecoin and for what basically when there are already good enough options?

Personally I dont think much of what I said makes sense if you are an adult (90% of the population) 90% of the time, privacy makes only sometimes sense when you are buying something very privacy sensitive and want to fundamentally be unable to link yourself with that identity

So mostly crypto would just be for ephemeral things, like I buy some monero right now instantly sell it to someone, like no need to "hold" things imo or only holding a very small amount

Or it can be good for teenagers which I wish man, people should do something about it.

Also for less transaction fees that visa/mastercard etc. take, I wish if companies can implement UPI transactions/Pix transactions or some system expands soon relating to it but UPI is genuinely so good that most of you do not know what you are missing out on if you aren't Indian. I have heard good things about Pix too

The most interesting insight here isn’t “crypto bad,” but how years in a speculation-first ecosystem warp your intuition for what real value looks like.

When incentives reward casinos over products, even talented builders end up optimizing for the wrong game. That lesson applies far beyond crypto.

What stands out to me is how many smart people spent their best years optimizing around the constraints of a system that was fundamentally misaligned with real-world demand. The tech is fascinating, but incentives turned the whole space into a gravity well for speculation rather than creation.

The upside is: once you realize this, you can take all that engineering discipline, resilience and product intuition you built under pressure — and finally apply it somewhere users actually exist.

Wait, you can write full blogs on Twitter now?

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How many with X?

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> I believe it will lead to the long-term collapse of social mobility

I mean, isn't it the goal of US libertarians?

This is a sob story from someone who got wealthy from building an engine to finance crime.

There are paths towards redemption - the author could begin by donating every ill-gotten cent to a worthy charity.

What's that? Crickets? Thought so.