Crypto has become the ultimate swamp asset
122 comments
·May 18, 2025keiferski
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.
Spooky23
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.
throw0101b
> Crypto is the way it is because there are behaviors that are driven by perceived anonymity.
See Penny Arcade comic from 2004:
* https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...
trustsafe
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.
keiferski
Maybe a better way to rephrase my point: money won and took over other sources of value. Technology became the biggest section of the economy.
Case in point: this site is called Hacker News and it’s run by a venture capital investment firm. Those two things (hacker/cyberpunk culture and VCs) would probably have seemed almost antithetical in the 90s.
trustsafe
I think money won some thousands of years before cyberpunk showed up.
Hippie and punk were really the same thing, with different haircuts. Both were useless beyond selling lifestyle.
"cyberpunk" always carried an aesthetic baggage that accomplished nothing, but there was still something there, and it is still there, if you know where to look. I think the deterioration of the political situation in the US and Europe has people dusting off their cyberpunk inclinations. I know that it has lit a fire under me.
sigwinch
Your original point is clear. In the 90s, these technologies and movements did not mandate supplication to authority, which meant some area where punk could still breathe. And atrophied.
ggandv
I’m not so sure that’s a valid dichotomy. The cypherpunks were heavily anti-government libertarians and probably overlap a lot with the local VC crowd over a certain age. The cypherpunk I remember best was a horrible person who used to rant incessantly about gassing Jews on ba.foods and other usenet groups. To cast them as anti-capitalist altruists or even slightly left leaning is not very accurate.
surgical_fire
> 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.
repler
> the media is largely dominated by institutional players
and also tech journalism as a whole is pretty abysmal to begin with
safety1st
Speaking as someone who had a passion for journalism and wanted to become a journalist when I was in high school at the end of the '90s, these days I am comfortable with that industry being completely eradicated.
How did we get here? The Telecom Act of 1996 legalized cross-media ownership and an unprecedented degree of consolidation across all forms of media, news and otherwise. Those rules existed to promote local journalism and independent voices. We now have no local journalism and no independent voices that are staffed and budgeted for doing real, investigative journalism.
Now journalists say what their corporate parent tells them to say; the ones who refused were fired years ago. The ones who stuck around work really hard to obscure this fact because they're clinging to their jobs in a declining industry. We went from a press that was the envy of the world to a cartel of decaying shills. Either reform the industry and break up the monopolies or just terminate it and fire everyone.
okr
Commerce subsidizes journalism. Or art. Or any other "hobby", where i do something, that feels right for me.
I have time on the side, because working for the man gives me the freedom to do things other than surviving.
Long lives commerce and capitalism.
martin-t
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.)
TrackerFF
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.
Hilift
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.
simonw
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.
pawelduda
Kidnapping and ransom existed before crypto
simonw
Reducing the barrier to successfully executing a kidnapping-for-cash turns out to make that crime more common.
sigwinch
That’s not his argument. You must ensure the anonymity of criminals in order to also protect the anonymity of your innocent relatives.
jsheard
So did pump and dump scams, but crypto brought in a new golden age of pumping and dumping. It's a matter of scale and ease of execution.
pawelduda
Getting kidnapped happens against victim's will, whereas getting into a global PvP casino, taking a risk and getting burned is self-inflicted. Sure, it's easy to fall into it when everyone, especially celebrities shill these scams but still, nobody's holding gun to anyone's head here. I've bet on wrong thing many times but ultimately it was my choice
bediger4000
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.
simonw
Sure, that's attractive to vendors. It's not attractive to consumers.
bediger4000
Hence advocating cryptocurrency based on other aspects of it. Irreversible transactions plus decentralized means scammy businesses are more profitable and harder to be rid of.
pydry
That's sort of the point, I think. It's like buying an index tracker in the underground economy.
qqqult
eh, it was fair to say that 8 years ago...
now it's way easier to track public blockchain transaction chains on Bitcoin, Ethereum and the like than it is to track bank transfers across countries
pydry
Yet once you strip out speculation the underground economy is still by far the predominant user of blockchain transactions.
Bank transfers are A) linked to a passport and B) can be blocked.
survirtual
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.
sigwinch
Well, this article is about the difference between USA (with its first businessman president) and the rest of the world. The businessman president offers the cheapest talk, and the greatest return on investment for those who can afford a private audience. The accelerationist future — is this what you mean by kicking and screaming?
imhoguy
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.
hkt
Banks can potentially act as gateways that prevent large transactions that are otherwise possible with crypto. They can do this simply by saying that for any amount above a certain level, you need to attend in person.
The whole "time immemorial" argument is a little silly when we put it in the context of modernity: we have safeguards people didn't have "before money was invented" because we're the beneficiaries of a sophisticated set of social rules intended to protect people. Getting rid of those safeguards because they're recent is fairly likely to make our lives worse.
imhoguy
My point wasn't just to awe crypto. For me it is just another asset/vehicle for diversification.
And you never know when safeguards will turn against the beneficiaries, like Freedom Convoy https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/emergencies-act-banks-ottaw...
swalsh
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.
rcxdude
Sure, but a) this doesn't require blockchain, and b) there's no incentive for the various players to make credits portable.
swalsh
I'm tired of the "this doesn't require blockchain" argument. The alternative is a centralized entity that controls payments. Is that REALLY your preferred solution?
carlob
Yes. Nothing about this needs to be modeled for adversarial agents.
ebiester
The alternative is continually watching over my shoulder for some sort of scam because I have no recourse.
And agents just make it easier.
yorwba
It's the AI companies' preferred solution. You're free to host your own agent that takes crypto, but the other agents you expect your agent to interact with will want you to buy non-transferable credits up front. Why would they join in on a decentralized system that doesn't benefit them?
sigwinch
Yes, I’d rather start a bank chartered with my own rules that leverages regulation, and only use the existence of crypto as an odorous alternative when negotiating service fees with Visa.
mghfreud
I am not following where (in your initial message) you stated that “centralized entity that controls the payments is not good”
rollcat
So you're saying cryptocurrency remains a solution in search of a problem?
swalsh
clearly, that is not what I said. What I said is there is a very big problem (closed ecosystem of incompatible credit systems) that can be solved using this technology that does payments really well.
rollcat
Can I go to any grocery shop, check out, and pay by sticking my watch to a terminal for one second? Can I go to any website, have my browser fill in the credit card details, and click "pay"? Can I submit a dispute if I get charged incorrectly?
Because that's my bar for "does payments really well".
Sure, I can't spend my Amazon gift cards for my Warframe platinum. Yeah, Amazon could strike a deal with Digital Extremes. And maybe I could even use that platinum on Fortnite skins. But their respective deals will happen in dollars, not dogecoins.
podnami
You can do this using OpenRouter; they accept USDC I think
croes
Yeah lets combine two technologies that need lots of energy. Climate change is still a problem
swalsh
A tired old debate devoid of facts. The chains I advocated for are proof of stake, and AI is a useful system worth the energy it uses. Should we not consume energy at all?
surgical_fire
> A tired old debate devoid of facts.
You are advocating for more fucking cryptocurrency.
You don't get to ignore any response as "a tired old debate devoid of facts".
h2782
You've stated you're tired in several threads. Maybe you should take a break from the internet for a few minutes?
croes
I highly doubt that the majority things AI is used for is useful.
I see lots of spam videos, pictures and texts that flood insta, Youtube etc. to monetize on ad revenue or simply scam people.
I think cryptocurrency aren’t any better if you compare legit uses vs criminal ones.
> Should we not consume energy at all?
No need for a strawman. Prevention of wasteful use doesn’t mean no use at all.
ionwake
I just think its wild you all have subscriptions to the economist
tim333
I don't. It's not that hard to ready anyway. You can use the archive.ph version https://archive.ph/HpY1R
or the bypass paywalls extension, or probably a number of other ways.
rimeice
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…
ionwake
I prefer my own curated news sources that never required me to pay. I dont think Ive ever paid for an online newspaper.
hiatus
There are some sites that sell them at a discount.
noisy_boy
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.
zkmon
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.
rimbo789
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.
cherryteastain
Sending money without government interference to relatives living in countries with strict foreign exchange controls (Argentina, Lebanon, Turkey...) is one quite legit use case.
ecocentrik
Cryptocurrency also empowers kleptocrats, dictators and warmongers to bypass sanctions and international banking controls, making it more likely that politically and economically oppressive states will thrive and persist for longer. The benefit to the individual is marginal compared to the benefits to actors that might limit that individual's other freedoms. Also, foreign exchange controls aren't the only form of taxation and there's nothing stopping governments from increasing taxation on something else to make up the difference.
Most arguments for cryptocurrency are just as weak as this one.
cherryteastain
Kleptocrats, dictators and warmongers have been around for way longer than crypto. If sanctions worked, the likes of Kim family or Iran's ayatollahs would have fallen in the 90s or 2000s.
Crypto allows my family members to bypass arbitrary restrictions set by one such kleptocrat right now so the benefit is very much more than marginal.
mannycalavera42
Let's not assume foreign exchange controls are always bad. Not saying they are not ... in some cases
helsinkiandrew
Unfortunately to governments and law enforcements that looks identical to organised crime and terrorists sending money.
All three of those countries have restrictions/regulations on converting crypto currencies into local currencies - doesn't crypto just move the the problem to converting it to local currency?
cherryteastain
When it comes to receiving USD, EUR etc these countries do not tend to have restrictions, as the point of forex restrictions is to keep capital in the country. Hence, these countries are usually quite lax about KYC/AML stuff because they want hard currency inflows, wherever it's sourced from. The utility of crypto comes in when
1. You want to convert the "hard" currency into the local currency
2. You want to convert the local currency back to the hard currency
3. You want to send hard currency back
Often there are official rates set by the central bank in these countries, and then there are black market rates. Banks etc will convert hard currency to local currency only using the official rates, which tends to be a lot lower than the black market rate, so you get shafted by that in the first instance. Then, when you want to convert the local currency back, banks won't sell it to you because the government does not let them sell hard currency to the general population. Finally, sending hard currency abroad is usually de facto (and sometimes also de jure) banned so your money can't leave the country once it's in. And as a last resort if you say screw you I will withdraw e.g. USD notes and take a flight, banks will refuse to give cash hard currency.
Obviously crypto lets you sidestep all that as nothing can prevent you from sending USDT from your wallet.
BillinghamJ
Legit from whose perspective though? Around an authoritarian government maybe widely viewed as reasonable/justified, but doesn't sound legitimate to those governments
sigwinch
Or, since it’s important to preserve the anonymity of my Turkish, Argentinian, and Lebanese relatives; it’s important to preserve the anonymity of the bigger users: ransomware C2 operators funding North Korean rockets.
BriggyDwiggs42
To some particular psychopath out there, I’m sure murder seems fine.
frainfreeze
Wild argument
Eddy_Viscosity2
> is one quite legit use case.
While it is useful for this case, it is not 'legit', in that its purpose is to by-pass (break even) laws of the country with the capital controls. In that sense, money laundering is also a legit use-case.
BriggyDwiggs42
Buying drugs doesn’t have to be an illegitimate use case. Depends on the person, the drugs, the safety of the marketplace, etc.
AngryData
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.
MrDisposable
> 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.
Hilift
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.
tacker2000
Who should regulate it? Due to its nature it is inherently extremely hard to regulate.
jsheard
The technology is hard to regulate, but the exchanges where the overwhelming majority of fiat-crypto trades happen are regular old businesses which can be regulated or sanctioned just like anything else. Blockchain magic wouldn't stop the feds from seizing Coinbase's assets and hauling Brian Armstrong off to prison if they wanted to.
liotier
Just like money laundering: choke it at the interfaces with the legitimate financial system.
dzikimarian
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.
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hengheng
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.
sigwinch
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?
hengheng
I am still wondering what money it was that predominantly went into crypto. Lots of retail investors lucked out between Tesla stock and BTC, but that can't account for all of it. I suspect a lot of shady money coming in from outside the US that raised the water level. Yet people talk about it like it's a co-op pension fund.
National bailouts going into an international fund are going to be a global power readjustment. Fun times.
My personal guess for an inflection point is civil unrest. Doge are already tightening the belts for the lower class. Nobody has really figured out how far they can take it. Police has been arming itself for the last decade or two, that started way before Trump, and they have been ready to thwart any uprising. But I am wondering if something is going to happen regardless. Civil war is only a bad idea as long as there are other options.
grezql
[dead]
https://archive.is/HpY1R