The history of crypto is pretty much a story of technical people creating something interesting with a cyberpunk/ open ethos - then the financial industry realizing it can be exploited to make money in ethically dubious ways, while simultaneously destroying the philosophy behind it. The bitcoin paper is still one of the most elegant technical documents I’ve ever read, a decade+ since it was published.
I’m not sure why this simple narrative isn’t more common, but one guess is that the media is largely dominated by institutional players (deeply plugged into finance) and the simultaneous “death” of cyberpunk & cypherpunk as original culture, rather than just a video game aesthetic. Makes me wish that Satoshi had released bitcoin in 1995 or 2005, when that culture was still alive.
Crypto is the way it is because there are behaviors that are driven by perceived anonymity. We’ve seen it time and time again and fail to learn or understand the lessons.
I’m a child of the 90s. The exuberant promise of the wonders of free access to information really fell short and transformed the world in odious ways. We gave access to a vast swath of human knowledge, but instead consume gambling, porn and think the world is flat.
Crypto is no different. We created a means to transfer wealth like the modern financial system without any controls… and shocking… we created a fertile environment for cons and criminals of all stripes to operate at greater scale than ever before.
Because the people who control the narrative are _redistributors_, not _builders_.
Broadly speaking, I divide people into builders and redistributors according to their primary approach to life - not just their job but their belief system - both how they seek to keep themselves fed and what they enjoy doing.
The thing is, builders are driven by the need to create and that's what occupied most of their time and energy. Sure, they publish their stuff but that's not their primary driver.
Then redistributors notice what they've built and see ways to make money off of it. And because good advertising is way more effective at convincing people to give you their money than simply having a good product, in the end it's them who end up building the narrative because it's them who invest way more time into publicizing the thing.
---
(Note I am not saying all redistributors are bad, there are plenty of honest and socially positive jobs which don't build stuff but have a positive outcome for everyone involved. But I feel like increasingly more and more of the population is preoccupied by how to make the most money with the least effort.
Maybe I need better terminology and split redistributors into two categories.)
I'm not so sure that cyberpunk is dead, it's just that Billy Idol has better things to do with his time than try to co-opt something his manager read about in WIRED. The broken-circuit-boards-and-leather NiN aesthetic lasted for so long that it can't really be revived, which is 100% fine. I think now that a ten year old laptop that can run Linux, tor, and i2p is worth $20 means that now is more cyberpunk than ever.
> The history of crypto is pretty much a story of technical people creating something interesting with a cyberpunk/ open ethos - then the financial industry realizing it can be exploited to make money in ethically dubious ways, while simultaneously destroying the philosophy behind it
This is not 1995 anymore, when there was an air of naive optimism about technology, and everyone thought that would only be a force for progress and good.
When crypto was on the rise, many people warned against it. There were many who were skeptical.
Those who were building it were in on the grift. Gesturing to some shadowy cabal of people that subverted crypto into something it was not meant to be is just giving a pat on the head to people that were willingly building something very destructive for their own damn benefit.
"I was just summoning demons because they look cool, I didn't expect those evil cultists to sacrifice a child in a pentagram" is not a valid line of defense.
Ideological capture is something that any system inevitably faces once it becomes large enough. But the point is to evolve and grow, not stagnate on a fixed concept.
Personally, I think Solana does the best at balancing the original cypherpunk ethos while ultimately driving towards the future with crypto being the rails for natively programmatic global commerce.
I've followed crypto since late 2011, and the ideology today is completely detached from what it used to be. Back in the day you had crypto maximalists that mainly viewed it as freedom from authority, regulations, and traditional banking. No more expensive fees for sending cash, no more third parties like PayPal to charge fees and potentially freeze your money. Detaching your wealth from political systems.
Yes, a lot of techno anarchist and ancaps were part of the scene - with grand dreams of defi taking over the world.
These days it has just evolved into play money for finance bros and hedge funds, and more lately, a mechanism for circumventing corruption for the powerful and wealthy.
I'm not sure the evolution you're describing is as much of a change as it might superficially appear to be. The modern crypto participants may look different than the original enthusiasts, but the philosophy of being free from authority and regulations is still 100% there. It's just that instead of it being about scrappy cypherpunk rebels, it's about billionaires who want to use their wealth to supplant governments and usher in a techno-feudalism future or whatever. Of course some folks are just in it for the get rich quick scams, but there is an obvious ideology around the cryptocurrency space today that is still anti-authority but for all the wrong reasons.
It’s the natural result of the technology’s original goal to be “unstoppable” and beyond regulation or laws.
Makes it a perfect place to run investment frauds, scams, Ponzi schemes and other activities that would be illegal in the regular financial sector. Also attracts criminals, tax evaders and money launderers.
Meanwhile it’s slow and cumbersome enough that anyone not seriously motivated to operate beyond the reach of the law stick with existing systems for convenience.
That's the thing where if you have significant assets your family members get kidnapped until you irreversibly transfer those assets to criminals, right?
I'm not sure how crypto continues to gain mainstream adoption in the face of that, no matter how much excitement there is for it in the current US administration.
My previous argument was that a technology where losing your password means you lose your net worth was incompatible with how human beings actually work. This kidnapping thing appears to be getting a whole lot more media coverage than that.
The irreversible transfer is a large part of the attraction isn't it? Your business policy may be "no refunds", but customers paying with credit cards have a decent chance of a refund from Visa or MasterCard. Now your "no refunds" business, which might be on the scammy side, has to deal with Visa's lawyers per charge backs.
Irreversible transactions make scammy businesses more profitable.
That's the thing, fighting against kings and monarchs with a stranglehold on the colonies means you get invaded by a world superpower, right? Who would tolerate fighting for freedom if it means getting murdered? Such a short sighted pursuit that won't lead to anything better, it is foolish. Clearly we should bow down before the supreme authority and accept their benevolent ruling. /s
History has this way of repeating itself. And it seems the blind will never see. Those who can see, just keep working. Talk is cheap. We will drag humanity into the future kicking and screaming if needed, because we know what waits for us on the other side.
Kidnapping for ransom was a thing in human history even before money was invented.
And money could be lost in many other irreversible scenarios, like fire, government confiscation or devaluation.
So was speculation.
Crypto is just another value carrier. Password is just a risk factor, like trust in govt is.
Crypto should be taking off in use in the AI age. Right now I have credits I paid open AI for so I can use their API. I have anthropic credits, I have some credits in a video generator app.
A2A is becoming a thing, and now it's a realistic thing to potentially expose an agent on a public endpoint to do useful work. Agents working with agents is a very clear future direction.
But everything is a closed ecosystem. But with the addition of a few extra fields to an Agent card (chain name, accepted tokens, cost) and perhaps a transaction addition to the task/send interface. We could build a network of agents working for agents. Compatible with each other. It doesn't have to be all on-chain. It's just the economic layer. You host the agent, the agent accepts payments. The agent makes payments. All the crypto tech we need already exists.
Use USDC, don't have to worry about speculation driving up costs. Use a network like SOL, AVAX, SUI and the transaction will be finalized in seconds.
Credits should be transferable, and not locked in little ecosystem.
We could take it one stop further. Prices could be dynamic. If GPU usage is high, cost should be high. If demand low, price should be low. Outages are a pricing issue, not a technical issue.
Apparently one of the old school decentralized RPC providers (pocket network) has pivoted into being a way to access open data sources in a permissionless way. I think this is what you’re talking about?
I don’t disagree that it would be nice to be able to do this, but barring some black swan-esque event that changes how people see these things, it’ll probably always be somewhat niche compared to more permissioned or centralized systems. That or the decentralized systems will need to be VERY competitively priced to make the value-prop a bit more of a slam dunk for making this more widespread outside of philosophically-aligned hardliners and idealists
> Crypto should be taking off in use in the AI age. Right now I have credits I paid open AI for so I can use their API. I have anthropic credits, I have some credits in a video generator app.
Sounds like things are working just fine without the extra cryptocurrency step.
The next logical step is US Treasury Bonds to be redeemed in Crypto. The current administration is proposing a 2026 budget that adds $5 trillion in new debt (more spending than revenue). Jerome can't print money that fast.
Even the Fed is counting on the "economy to grow faster than the debt". It's like a fiction world. I fully expect a "crypto equivalence" executive order for things where the US can muscle trade partners.
I would be interested to know from a developer working in Crypto about how is the day-to-day work experience compared to working in a similar role in, say, a hedge fund. The latter is fast paced and I have heard that the former is too but would be interesting to hear from people actually in the seats.
Where would the crypto millionaires spend their money? They have to chase some real world assets such as homes, jacking up prices for those. So, for someone who invested in the real world assets, they see their asset value going up. It hardly matters where you invest. It's all in the same pond.
Why? Probably the easiest and quickest way to get a read on everything that’s going on outside of tech and therefore understand the global context our industry sits in…
Crypto was a huge mistake. It should have been rigorously regulated right out of the gate to the point of being unusable for anyone. I have yet to see a use case that doesn’t amount to buying drugs or defrauding rubes.
Sending money without government interference to relatives living in countries with strict foreign exchange controls (Argentina, Lebanon, Turkey...) is one quite legit use case.
> I have yet to see a use case that doesn’t amount to buying drugs or defrauding rubes
Russian here. My forgotten Bitcoin stash saved my ass multiple times by providing a way to transfer money to a friend abroad who then paid for my western expenses (hosting, VPNs etc.) using his Visa / MC cards.
Also, a lot of programmers who emigrated from Russia to countries such as Georgia in 2022 were using USDT as a way to receive their salaries.
WikiLeaks was persecuted. Their credit cards processing was turned OFF. Bitcoin saved them. There have been free speech social media sites BLOCKED by Stripe and all credit cards, and debanked. They switched to crypto. Marc Andressen on Joe Rogan personally knows many dozens of people personally debanked because they were persecured by the government & debanked. Not for drugs or fraud.
Today's society cannot protect people that are easily influenced. Social media has brought remote fraudsters right into your aunt/uncles inbox. Some people are going to get fleeced unless their money is put into something that only dispenses PEZ amounts at a time. This increases if dementia occurs.
There is lots of porn that credit card companies and proccessors don't want to touch. Plenty of kink sites have had problems with them, porn sites have blanket restrictions on keywords like hypnosis and shadow ban certain kinds of legal content in order to not get hamstrung by financial restrictions.
Also there are plenty of blackmarket goods that are heavily restricted and legally punished without good cause, and I do not believe just because something is "illegal" that it is automatically bad.
One of ours biggest customers is mainly used by Ukrainian refugees as easy way to pay abroad. USDC/USDT is simply cheaper and more available to them than regular USD.
It prevents centralized entities being the gatekeepers to the modern financial world. The US maintaining their own digital version of cash would also work, but the government is slow, and does not want to compete against these centralized entities due to being advantaged as the government controls the currency itself.
Payment processors essentially get to dictate what is and is not allowed to be financially viable which is a very powerful form of control over culture.
If you can be objective enough to consider that not everyone likes keeping fiat currency, it was an interesting alternative.
Bitcoin generally appreciated, where fiat had inflation.
While the transaction costs/speed have eliminated this, there was a few years of my life that I both sent money to friends and used a Bitcoin debit card.
It's useful for evading illegal US sanctions, and sometimes also works just as a payment method. I paid a hosting provider with it earlier this year, and that actually worked well.
> I have yet to see a use case that doesn’t amount to buying drugs
Society has been struggling for decades to overcome prohibition via political channels, and watching as multiple generations have been damaged by its impact on local economies, civil liberties, and the boon to criminal cartels.
Then, a mathematical solution arises which unambiguously undermines this regime, and somehow that's a bad thing?!
Let's regulate mathematics. No, it isn't enough...let's regulate physics itself. If we could just control when molecules are allowed to form, we could make it so mean molecules don't exist unless they're allowed to exist by our Council of Very Good People Who Have The Most Money. Since they have the most money, they know better than everyone else. /s
Did you know in some countries, a good loan for someone with perfect credit is 20% apr? Do you know in some countries police can confiscate all the money you have and never give it back? Have you ever heard of civil asset forfeiture? Did you know in some countries, just protesting can have your accounts frozen? Did you know in some countries, sending money can take over 3 days with no knowledge of what is happening to your money during that time? Did you know that Debit and Wire transfer often cost well over $20 to perform?
This list could go on for days. Only fools would speak about crypto so confidently without doing a minimal investigation into its utility.
What I'm always missing with these takes is the "what if" component. Nobody really dares to paint the whole picture in articles like this. Authors seem to go as far as to find the moral infraction, and then stop. But that doesn't do what is happening justice.
No, crypto does not need regulation. Law-based order needs crypto regulation. That's a big difference already. But we can go further than that. What if we don't get crypto regulation, what happens to law-based order exactly?
Trump is not the kind of guy to build businesses and create wealth. He more like kinda goes through them. He's not the guy to invest, he's the guy to cash out. Right now, he's cashing out of the US economy. Lots of real value is there for him to extract that is completely unprotected.
Trump is right. All those assets exist, and he can take them, destroy them, and liquidate them. He has that power. He is permitted. It is a programme, and his execution is successful. There's no point saying "but he can't do that, it would be unethical". Sure it's unethical, dumb, and nonsensical, but at face value, he can do all of that. No point in saying "but he can't do that, America would never be the same". That argument is reactionary, of course everything was going to change anyways.
So, let's face it. A president that is not going to miss his chance to join the true billionaires club (10+ b), a ruling class of industry leaders like it existed 120 years ago. Whether he stays president doesn't even matter. Government programmes are going down the drain, America's influence in the world deteriorates, trade volume breaking down, a less smart military will have to deal with more conflicts.
The only question in that turmoil is going to be what constitues a winner. Right now, everybody is buying crypto like lottery tickets, and it becomes self-fulfilling. Mid-term it might be Florida real estate. Long term? Who knows.
I'd actually like for somebody to really paint this picture and fill in the details. Stopping at the first inflection point that is somewhat scary is unproductive, we've been reading those takes for a year now.
The inevitable bailouts will be breathtaking. We’re in a quadratic adoption phase to legitimize a currency faster than the public discovers its downsides. The first bailout will be in this administration and won’t look like an inflection point. It’ll look like printing fiat into a dark, lucrative, inaccessible hole.
Among average Americans, the biggest advantage for promoters is the widespread susceptibility to scams. FartCoin, $TRUMP, and BitCoin are equally buoyant unless you know just a little about the technology and culture. Demographics might change this before education does. That’s the second inflection point.
The third inflection point is how the politically-connected holders will manipulate hard forks, say due to a quantum breakthrough in Grover. Once we start seeing forged signatures, will we roll Ethereum back to last June? Or back to Tuesday?
sigwinch|9 months ago
keiferski|9 months ago
I’m not sure why this simple narrative isn’t more common, but one guess is that the media is largely dominated by institutional players (deeply plugged into finance) and the simultaneous “death” of cyberpunk & cypherpunk as original culture, rather than just a video game aesthetic. Makes me wish that Satoshi had released bitcoin in 1995 or 2005, when that culture was still alive.
Spooky23|9 months ago
I’m a child of the 90s. The exuberant promise of the wonders of free access to information really fell short and transformed the world in odious ways. We gave access to a vast swath of human knowledge, but instead consume gambling, porn and think the world is flat.
Crypto is no different. We created a means to transfer wealth like the modern financial system without any controls… and shocking… we created a fertile environment for cons and criminals of all stripes to operate at greater scale than ever before.
martin-t|9 months ago
Broadly speaking, I divide people into builders and redistributors according to their primary approach to life - not just their job but their belief system - both how they seek to keep themselves fed and what they enjoy doing.
The thing is, builders are driven by the need to create and that's what occupied most of their time and energy. Sure, they publish their stuff but that's not their primary driver.
Then redistributors notice what they've built and see ways to make money off of it. And because good advertising is way more effective at convincing people to give you their money than simply having a good product, in the end it's them who end up building the narrative because it's them who invest way more time into publicizing the thing.
---
(Note I am not saying all redistributors are bad, there are plenty of honest and socially positive jobs which don't build stuff but have a positive outcome for everyone involved. But I feel like increasingly more and more of the population is preoccupied by how to make the most money with the least effort.
Maybe I need better terminology and split redistributors into two categories.)
trustsafe|9 months ago
surgical_fire|9 months ago
This is not 1995 anymore, when there was an air of naive optimism about technology, and everyone thought that would only be a force for progress and good.
When crypto was on the rise, many people warned against it. There were many who were skeptical.
Those who were building it were in on the grift. Gesturing to some shadowy cabal of people that subverted crypto into something it was not meant to be is just giving a pat on the head to people that were willingly building something very destructive for their own damn benefit.
"I was just summoning demons because they look cool, I didn't expect those evil cultists to sacrifice a child in a pentagram" is not a valid line of defense.
lawrenceyan|9 months ago
Personally, I think Solana does the best at balancing the original cypherpunk ethos while ultimately driving towards the future with crypto being the rails for natively programmatic global commerce.
repler|9 months ago
and also tech journalism as a whole is pretty abysmal to begin with
TrackerFF|9 months ago
Yes, a lot of techno anarchist and ancaps were part of the scene - with grand dreams of defi taking over the world.
These days it has just evolved into play money for finance bros and hedge funds, and more lately, a mechanism for circumventing corruption for the powerful and wealthy.
rainsford|9 months ago
topranks|9 months ago
Makes it a perfect place to run investment frauds, scams, Ponzi schemes and other activities that would be illegal in the regular financial sector. Also attracts criminals, tax evaders and money launderers.
Meanwhile it’s slow and cumbersome enough that anyone not seriously motivated to operate beyond the reach of the law stick with existing systems for convenience.
simonw|9 months ago
I'm not sure how crypto continues to gain mainstream adoption in the face of that, no matter how much excitement there is for it in the current US administration.
My previous argument was that a technology where losing your password means you lose your net worth was incompatible with how human beings actually work. This kidnapping thing appears to be getting a whole lot more media coverage than that.
bediger4000|9 months ago
Irreversible transactions make scammy businesses more profitable.
pawelduda|9 months ago
pydry|9 months ago
survirtual|9 months ago
History has this way of repeating itself. And it seems the blind will never see. Those who can see, just keep working. Talk is cheap. We will drag humanity into the future kicking and screaming if needed, because we know what waits for us on the other side.
imhoguy|9 months ago
So was speculation.
Crypto is just another value carrier. Password is just a risk factor, like trust in govt is.
swalsh|9 months ago
A2A is becoming a thing, and now it's a realistic thing to potentially expose an agent on a public endpoint to do useful work. Agents working with agents is a very clear future direction.
But everything is a closed ecosystem. But with the addition of a few extra fields to an Agent card (chain name, accepted tokens, cost) and perhaps a transaction addition to the task/send interface. We could build a network of agents working for agents. Compatible with each other. It doesn't have to be all on-chain. It's just the economic layer. You host the agent, the agent accepts payments. The agent makes payments. All the crypto tech we need already exists.
Use USDC, don't have to worry about speculation driving up costs. Use a network like SOL, AVAX, SUI and the transaction will be finalized in seconds.
Credits should be transferable, and not locked in little ecosystem.
We could take it one stop further. Prices could be dynamic. If GPU usage is high, cost should be high. If demand low, price should be low. Outages are a pricing issue, not a technical issue.
rcxdude|9 months ago
rollcat|9 months ago
pondemic|9 months ago
https://pocket.network/case-study-building-a-decentralized-d...
I don’t disagree that it would be nice to be able to do this, but barring some black swan-esque event that changes how people see these things, it’ll probably always be somewhat niche compared to more permissioned or centralized systems. That or the decentralized systems will need to be VERY competitively priced to make the value-prop a bit more of a slam dunk for making this more widespread outside of philosophically-aligned hardliners and idealists
mvdtnz|9 months ago
Sounds like things are working just fine without the extra cryptocurrency step.
podnami|9 months ago
croes|9 months ago
Hilift|9 months ago
Even the Fed is counting on the "economy to grow faster than the debt". It's like a fiction world. I fully expect a "crypto equivalence" executive order for things where the US can muscle trade partners.
noisy_boy|9 months ago
zkmon|9 months ago
ionwake|9 months ago
rimeice|9 months ago
concrete_head|9 months ago
hiatus|9 months ago
tim333|9 months ago
or the bypass paywalls extension, or probably a number of other ways.
rimbo789|9 months ago
cherryteastain|9 months ago
MrDisposable|9 months ago
Russian here. My forgotten Bitcoin stash saved my ass multiple times by providing a way to transfer money to a friend abroad who then paid for my western expenses (hosting, VPNs etc.) using his Visa / MC cards.
Also, a lot of programmers who emigrated from Russia to countries such as Georgia in 2022 were using USDT as a way to receive their salaries.
BriggyDwiggs42|9 months ago
seaourfreed|9 months ago
Hilift|9 months ago
tacker2000|9 months ago
AngryData|9 months ago
Also there are plenty of blackmarket goods that are heavily restricted and legally punished without good cause, and I do not believe just because something is "illegal" that it is automatically bad.
dzikimarian|9 months ago
charcircuit|9 months ago
Payment processors essentially get to dictate what is and is not allowed to be financially viable which is a very powerful form of control over culture.
unknown|9 months ago
[deleted]
resource_waste|9 months ago
Bitcoin generally appreciated, where fiat had inflation.
While the transaction costs/speed have eliminated this, there was a few years of my life that I both sent money to friends and used a Bitcoin debit card.
elif|9 months ago
tazjin|9 months ago
ecocentrik|9 months ago
- paying/receiving bribes
- bypassing international sanctions to finance wars
There's a lot of uses for cryptocurrency and only a very small fraction are good for individuals.
bufferoverflow|9 months ago
Crypto has many different useful applications. One of the main ones: limited supply (I am aware not all crypto has a cap).
mvdtnz|9 months ago
Hey now. There's also trading child pornography.
jMyles|9 months ago
Society has been struggling for decades to overcome prohibition via political channels, and watching as multiple generations have been damaged by its impact on local economies, civil liberties, and the boon to criminal cartels.
Then, a mathematical solution arises which unambiguously undermines this regime, and somehow that's a bad thing?!
ohyes|9 months ago
phyalow|9 months ago
There is substantially more to it than that but I will let you chew that over just to point out how blatantly incorrect your prior is.
unknown|9 months ago
[deleted]
polygamous_bat|9 months ago
survirtual|9 months ago
Did you know in some countries, a good loan for someone with perfect credit is 20% apr? Do you know in some countries police can confiscate all the money you have and never give it back? Have you ever heard of civil asset forfeiture? Did you know in some countries, just protesting can have your accounts frozen? Did you know in some countries, sending money can take over 3 days with no knowledge of what is happening to your money during that time? Did you know that Debit and Wire transfer often cost well over $20 to perform?
This list could go on for days. Only fools would speak about crypto so confidently without doing a minimal investigation into its utility.
ionwake|9 months ago
[deleted]
hengheng|9 months ago
No, crypto does not need regulation. Law-based order needs crypto regulation. That's a big difference already. But we can go further than that. What if we don't get crypto regulation, what happens to law-based order exactly?
Trump is not the kind of guy to build businesses and create wealth. He more like kinda goes through them. He's not the guy to invest, he's the guy to cash out. Right now, he's cashing out of the US economy. Lots of real value is there for him to extract that is completely unprotected.
Trump is right. All those assets exist, and he can take them, destroy them, and liquidate them. He has that power. He is permitted. It is a programme, and his execution is successful. There's no point saying "but he can't do that, it would be unethical". Sure it's unethical, dumb, and nonsensical, but at face value, he can do all of that. No point in saying "but he can't do that, America would never be the same". That argument is reactionary, of course everything was going to change anyways.
So, let's face it. A president that is not going to miss his chance to join the true billionaires club (10+ b), a ruling class of industry leaders like it existed 120 years ago. Whether he stays president doesn't even matter. Government programmes are going down the drain, America's influence in the world deteriorates, trade volume breaking down, a less smart military will have to deal with more conflicts.
The only question in that turmoil is going to be what constitues a winner. Right now, everybody is buying crypto like lottery tickets, and it becomes self-fulfilling. Mid-term it might be Florida real estate. Long term? Who knows.
I'd actually like for somebody to really paint this picture and fill in the details. Stopping at the first inflection point that is somewhat scary is unproductive, we've been reading those takes for a year now.
sigwinch|9 months ago
Among average Americans, the biggest advantage for promoters is the widespread susceptibility to scams. FartCoin, $TRUMP, and BitCoin are equally buoyant unless you know just a little about the technology and culture. Demographics might change this before education does. That’s the second inflection point.
The third inflection point is how the politically-connected holders will manipulate hard forks, say due to a quantum breakthrough in Grover. Once we start seeing forged signatures, will we roll Ethereum back to last June? Or back to Tuesday?
olelele|9 months ago
tre7|9 months ago
[deleted]
vidialaxmi|9 months ago
[deleted]
tre7|9 months ago
[deleted]
grezql|9 months ago
[deleted]
jbverschoor|9 months ago
[deleted]