Crypto's Wild West Era Is Over
87 comments
·July 18, 2025NoLinkToMe
sneak
> Virtually nobody is using it for transactions (except for illegal products), for banking, or as an inflation hedge.
This is false for almost everyone I know, when speaking specifically about Bitcoin (which you are).
ben_w
The current limits of Bitcoin *enforce* that "Virtually nobody" uses it — like, uses it at all. It can't scale up to even just the monthly rent and bill payments in just the city limits of Berlin, let alone e.g. people in this city just buying lunch and nothing else anywhere else in the world.
The talk about e.g. it being layer-0 and day-to-day stuff being level-1 or whatever, that immediately deletes all the supposed benefits that bitcoin advocates for as it becomes "here is a bank that is backed with BTC just like normal modern ones are backed with fiat and old ones with gold".
stevage
Then the people you know are unusual holders of Bitcoin.
Cthulhu_
So are they using it for transactions? Paying for products and services?
BSOhealth
about 400,000 people use bitcoin daily.
0.005% of earth population.
but yeah, it’s about the size of a single medium-sized accelerationist Thiel colony participating with each other.
like if Cincinnati was raising bonds to convert to a seastead.
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Cryptionio
Its true for everyone I know.
I used it only to buy drugs.
Friends hold it as a gambling invest.
broken-kebab
I used to send money to relatives. I'm sorry you bought supposedly addictive drugs, and I hope you won't do it again. But "I know one guy, and myself" is a very poor argument when you are generalizing.
kindkang2024
Trump coin, is it? Fair enough — I believe everyone should have the freedom to launch a memecoin, Trump included. You have that freedom too. And everyone has the freedom to buy it or not.
Whether it’s a "shitcoin" or not really depends on perspective. Those who bought it voluntarily and profited likely don’t see it that way — and even some who lost money might not consider it trash. Their opinions matter just as much as yours.
In the end, it’s the collective will of the people that determines whether a memecoin survives or thrives. To me, that’s a perfect example of freedom in action.
inatreecrown2
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Cryptionio
Crypto is shit. It produces an extreme amount of co2 and is responsible for Billions in Fraud.
It also disrupts energy systems for poor people around the globe.
broken-kebab
You can replace 'crypto' with 'building roads' and the statement will remain valid in the same emotional context though
endymion-light
It would help if every crypto project wasn't either an obvious attempt at stealing money or a solution in search of a problem.
Say what you want about the LLM hype, but there's been situations where i've used a LLM and thought oh yeah that makes sense, that makes my life easier. I've never seen a crypto project where I think, oh yeah, that was way easier than the current basis.
If any evangelist has a crypto project that does this, i'd be happy to support crypto/blockchain etc, but I've really not seen a useful outcome. I even own a crypto wallet, but there's a reason why I still pay for everything with visa.
adrianwaj
I just found Flashback Labs today, "Be among the first to train AI Privately and monetize your Data!" and I was thinking if I'd like to ask the HN hivemind a question, how would I do it, and how would the mods enable it?
Ask HN - imagine if the AI answered some of those questions.
Google has "Programmable Search Engine" - how about "Programmable AI" ? Then there's the whole monetization thing - can that revenue be somehow distributed back to sources?
sneak
The most popular crypto token is neither of those things. Neither is the second or third or fourth.
If Bitcoin weren’t useful, people wouldn’t use it, and it certainly doesn’t exist to steal anything from anyone.
endymion-light
Not token - projects.
Honestly, is Bitcoin anything other than a speculative asset? It's useful in the sense that it's worth more money, but it feels more like a way of achieving a kind of gold mining in the digital age.
I suppose there's use from that angle, but i'm talking more about the actual projects (Helium, NFTs, etc) which all seem to fizzle into being far worse than what already exists.
sneak
Gold is useful also as a medium of exchange and store of value beyond a speculative asset.
Not everyone denominates their wealth in inflationary currencies.
The utility of things like gold and bitcoin is that no force on Earth at the moment has the ability to change policy and inflate them. Many people find that to be a big issue with fiat currencies. Those that don’t, of course, are not compelled to ever touch cryptocurrencies.
They are a purely opt-in alternative to people who find fiat currencies to be lacking for their use cases.
I’m personally not very interested in most random open source projects; they’re usually boring and uninspired. I’m not sure why we expect the bar to be any higher in crypto.
NFTs are a good example of something that get a lot of unnecessary hate. Nobody starts foaming at the mouth when rich people drop five or six figures on MTG or Pokémon cards (or Hermes bags, for that matter), but somehow NFTs are specifically bad?
stevage
> If Bitcoin weren’t useful, people wouldn’t use it
This patently not remotely true in the world of crypto.
rimbo789
Good. I hope its overall era is over soon too. Insane that we allowed crypto to exist in the first place; a massive sink of time and energy just to allow criminals to defraud people easier.
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owebmaster
If someone comes back 100 years from the future, one of the few things I'd bet to still be around would be Bitcoin and JavaScript.
ben_w
Around? Perhaps.
When I was a kid, I had a typewriter. Was even still possible to buy ink ribbons for it in a local stationary store, not that I could afford them on pocket money, but I've not seen ink ribbons in a stationary store since the early 90s.
Despite that, typewriters are still around: https://www.amazon.com/Royal-79101t-Classic-Manual-Typewrite...
owebmaster
I think Bitcoin will be the currency of an interplanetary humanity. And I don't even own any bitcoins or think it will continue going up in the next years. But technically, blockchains will be key as store of data in the (distant) future.
Cthulhu_
Definitely Java, it's the cobol of our time. JS, maybe in a different form, still the runtime but Typescript has overtaken it [0] in popularity.
BTC might still be around but very much in the background in favor of newer ones.
rimbo789
What a hell that would be
w4yai
Sounds like money in general.
Swenrekcah
Regular money is useful for all people, including criminals.
Bitcoin and derivatives are of little to use for people other than criminals and gamblers.
broken-kebab
That's a very first world opinion. You can find physical crypto-fiat exchange booths all over the developing world. Because usual banking gets complicated when you passport is not first-class.
null
sneak
Crypto is just messages in a permissionless p2p network. To not “allow” it to exist is the legislature banning what is presently considered protected expression/free speech.
Crypto is speech, not property.
I really don’t think you’d like where that can of worms leads.
It doesn’t even matter if you like cryptocurrencies or not; we all have a vested interest in being able to create p2p networks amongst the whole internet and send any kind of messages/frames within them that we wish.
pavlov
Similarly savings accounts and loans are just messages that describe agreements between private parties.
So how can we have bank regulation, when everything that a bank does is just speech?
The answer is that the law is interested in the content of communications, and whether the messages are cryptographically peer-to-peer this-or-that is irrelevant. If your crypto messaging is about selling drugs or unregistered securities, it's not much of an excuse that you were doing it peer-to-peer.
kjksf
The difference is that bank has a CEO that can take your money or loose it by doing risky things with your money.
Bitcoin network doesn't have a CEO. It is what it is and will always be that. Bitcoin network will not decide, at some point, to lend out your bitcoin at 100x leverage. There will never be a run on Bitcoin network because it always has the same amount of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin network is already "regulated" by the code.
Bitcoin regulations are merely governments trying to regain control they had with banks (they can get all the info they want about you, they can order banks to shutdown your account, like Canadian government did).
ben_w
> Crypto is speech, not property.
Crypto*graphy* is speech.
To assert that crypto*currency* is not property is quite bizarre.
Esophagus4
Genuine question: could someone explain the real value of stablecoins?
I always hear hand waivy notions like “no middleman,” “faster settlement,” and “lower fees,” but it has to be exchanged to fiat somewhere to be spent right? And there are fees and settlement periods there?
Many fiat P2P services are instant as well - when i Venmo a friend, they see it instantly. When I transfer to my bank, that may take several days to settle. But exchanging USDC for USD and transferring off the exchange to my bank will also take several days.
People always say “it COULD be used this magic way,” but I’ve never heard anyone say, “it IS used this magic way.”
What is the killer use case I’m missing?
Cthulhu_
The "real value" is in the name, stability; people quickly stopped using Bitcoin for buying pizzas because its value was so unpredictable, making it more suitable for an investment than a currency, which made its value even more unpredictable because it wasn't spent predictably anymore.
Like, there was a webshop that accepted BTC, doing real-time ish price conversion between USD and BTC; if I was that webshop, I wouldn't have sold the BTC for fiat as it came in, but just let it accumulate until the BTC price went up favorably. A $100 purchase would become $200 with the BTC price appreciation over time.
Anyway yeah. Killer use case is a digital currency whose value is stable and predictable, so actually usable as a digital currency.
Esophagus4
Thanks! So are people using it to buy and sell stuff?
It seems like I’ve never seen a merchant accept a stablecoin as payment. Is that happening?
Geee
They're not typically exchanged for fiat currency. They're mostly used on crypto exchanges and on DeFi, and also increasingly as everyday money in places where USD is not the official or legal currency. The killer use case has mostly been providing USD liquidity for exchanges worldwide.
Esophagus4
Thanks!
If USD is not official currency in those places, then does stablecoin become an underground, unregulated currency?
chii
> real value of stablecoins?
to be able to transact it into other coins without going through a fiat exchange.
endymion-light
Genuine question, what's the current comparison of fees for say exchanging $1000 dollars into a currency like euros compared to a fiat exchange using stablecoins?
I'm not particularly well versed into crypto but every time i've attempted anything similar it's always seemed wildly more expensive to do it via crypto than going into a currency exchange.
soco
There's no difference whether I have stablecoin A or stablecoin B. The original question is, what can I do with any of them better? Except buying influence in case of the presidential ones.
Ekaros
Gamble on crypto market... So strange that fiat with single extra step is so popular there. I thought it was all about not being beholden by fiat currency...
My guess is that it is just trying to avoid any legislation that would come into play when using pure fiat balances.
c9o
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westpfelia
Its a way to add legitimacy to transactions. The idea is that 1 stable coin (usdt, tether, ect) equals 1 dollar. So you buy 100 tether for 100 dollars and you use that to buy your bitcoin. And that tether is supposed to be backed 1 to 1 with assets/cash.
The problem is they arent. Tether for instance refuses to be properly audited. They keep saying that between cash and cash equivilants they are in parity. But per a Galaxy Research article its probably backed by 3% cash. and the rest is treasuries and commericial paper holdings. Which means that if some shit were to go down best case they can make 3% of people good. And the rest... who the hell knows. Its all a scam.
Esophagus4
Thank you - so, why buy your bitcoin in a stablecoin vs in USD at an exchange?
Oh, is this so you move in and out of BTC whenever you need at an exchange, and rather than offboarding to USD, you stay in the ecosystem by just holding USDT?
bawolff
Stable coins (which is what the article is about) feel like just a small part of the cryptocurrency ecosystem, and far from the craziest part. I dont think the wild west era has passed yet.
EduardoBautista
The most traded cryptocurrency is USDT, a stablecoin. It has over double the daily trade volume that Bitcoin has, the second most traded cryptocurrency by volume. Stablecoins are a huge part of the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
Cryptionio
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sneak
In my experience, most normal utility users of crypto use USDT above all else. Surprisingly (to me), a lot of the usage is on Tron, too.
Remittances are a really big deal, and the permissionless nature of blockchains means there’s basically zero barrier to entry for anyone.
Sending BTC or ETH (fees aside) is just too much volatility for everyday users.
Bender
Word is getting around [1] of the risks and in the current economy people just don't have enough disposable cash to take the risks much less relearn history lessons the hard way.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpqreZlmHGU [video][7m21s]
anonzzzies
Is it? A guy in my tiny village sold his house and went all in on crypto a few years ago; he made a killing and sold over the last few days. Seems it is still stupid fluctuations and people going 'all in' like they don't do with other assets.
Ekaros
Seems like you have not heard about wall street bets... Or about any gambling...
specproc
That article stinks of PR.
It's certainly an interesting, newsworthy development, but the piece is missing just a teeny bit of context: the crypto donations and Trump interests, the money lost in the last cycle, the risks involved in opening up volatile assets to broader markets, the really sketchy actors and use cases, the dubious history of Tether.
This is a puff piece.
throwaway48476
A 'currency' is a medium of exchange. The largest and essentially sole market crypto currency is predominant in is the black market.
revskill
Yes without scamcoin.
jajko
... while bitcoin's value is at all time high
DennisP
It's almost like things are more valuable when they're legitimate parts of the economy.
Cryptionio
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Devasta
Abject nonsense.
Crypto has no purpose outside the wild west. Any attempts at applying a sheen of respectability over it all is just trying to find new bagholders.
The current president of the world's most powerful country recently launched a personal coin, named after himself, held for 80% by him, earned him billions (estimated at approximately half his net-worth), hosts pay-to-play dinners the top 200 coin holders, and creates a mechanism for foreign states to pump the coin in exchange for political gifts.
Crypto's current era has never been more wild. It's actually quite insane.
The number of shitcoins is at an all-time high. Most crypto trading is of the gambling nature.
Bitcoin is getting relatively mainstream and not too wild, everything else is a shitshow. But even bitcoin for 99% of users is just a speculative asset, just more stable and mainstream. Virtually nobody is using it for transactions (except for illegal products), for banking, or as an inflation hedge. Even in high-inflation countries like Turkey, sub 1% of assets are held in bitcoin.
Poor journalism to make this wholly unsubstantiated claim about crypto's wild west era being over based on some new US legislation around stablecoins, even if the part about stablecoins was true.