Perpetual Futures
6 comments
·December 5, 2025Animats
wmf
The people who want trustless decentralization and the people who want leveraged gambling and the people who want KYC-free international money transfer may be different people. The only problem with Liberty Reserve was that it got shut down; if a "decentralied" fig leaf can allow it to operate... let there be "decentralization".
mhh__
That's not true with decentralised exchanges like hyperliquid, no?
Maxatar
Hyperliquid and similar exchanges aren't decentralized. That is their long term goal but they are very far from achieving it.
The few actual decentralized exchanges are too slow and expensive.
block_dagger
This comment makes sweeping generalizations.
Analemma_
By now crypto-in-practice has violated so many of its supposed founding principles that it's tired and cliche to point it out.
It was supposed to be limited in supply unlike fiat, and yet Tether underpins the whole thing and they print that out of thin air all the time. It was supposed to be decentralized, but in practice a few big exchanges control all the transactions and a few big mining pools control all the minting. It was supposed to be "code is law", and yet if you find a big exploit on smart contracts it'll be unwound later on and the cops will still show up for you. And as you say, it was supposed to be trustless, but counterparty risk is everywhere.
And it turns out nobody cares, because to a first approximation nobody is in crypto for the libertarian principles. It is all about number go up; always has been, always will be. It's not even worth pointing out anymore.
It's striking how much the crypto world depends on trust in other parties. The whole point of crypto was supposed to be that it was "trustless". But it's not set up that way. All these crypto derivatives are not set up as contracts on a blockchain, with assets locked up until the derivatives settle. They're book entries with some weakly regulated exchange in Outer Nowhere.