I feel like at this point there isn't anybody defending stablecoins who isn't using them primarily speculative investment/trading. There has yet to be a usecase for distributed ledger that isn't solved better by a centralised ledger other than niche counter-culture solutions whose users are typically blinkered to the fact that they are already a self-selected techno-elite who can't bring their utopia to the commons. That ended a bit more nasty sounding that I intended, apologies.
Although the current government is having a good go at reducing the value of the currency, it's barely budged on the chart.
> I agree that a centralized US dollar CBDC that isn't run by scammers would be a simpler way to do this.
I don't think it's a stretch to imagine that the government would ban all other stable coins and strictly control what "valid commerce" is allowed to be done with the centralized coin (see Operation Choke Point)
what about situations where centralized ledgers won't serve you? e.g. someone who wants to buy drugs, or sex workers want to get paid. And you mention "niche counter-culture solutions" but I don't think it's so niche - in 2002, the government of Argentina stole 2/3rds of everyone's savings by forcibly converting their dollar-denominated bank accounts into pesos at a terrible exchange rate. Not having to worry about this because you have a trustworthy government is nice, but it puts you into an elite class of your own.
Do cryptocurrencies provide value to people living in third-rate hellhole countries? Perhaps, because they are connected to the outside world. Ideally you could just have a foreign bank account that your country cannot touch. If the big governments gang up on crypto exchanges, then crypto will be worthless. The only reason they don't gang up on the exchanges seems to be that they (the people in government) use crypto for nefarious activities and money laundering.
The technological innovations of cryptocurrencies make for good thought experiments or puzzles, but serve as a distraction from their inevitable uselessness.
Stablecoins are not speculative or investments at all - their price stays the same. That's where stable in stablecoin comes from.
You see crypto and think day trading
TerraUSD enters the chat
You're right that they aren't speculative in the financial sense of "hopefully gaining value over time", but you do speculate (in the more general sense) on the fiat-pegging mechanism(s) to work to preserve the value you are storing in them...
As I understand it, many countries in the European Union use distributed ledgers for elections. Essentially it lets you cross reference votes and store that database across servers in multiple countries. It also prevents post-election data tampering by the state holding the election.
My understanding is this this system is not an open to every random Joe who wants to have a server (like bitcoin is). I think you still need to be a state actor to be part of the distributed database (so it's not a zero trust environment).
(Unfortunately, I don't have any good links to back this claim up)
I think you’re right to criticize crypto as a techno-elite project. However I think stablecoins have a legitimate use case for billions of people who don’t have access to good banks, or a stable currency, and can’t afford traditional fees. IMO it’s one of the best things to come out of crypto.
The problem stablecoins are solving are self-inflicted: KYC to open a bank account, restricted nationalities, account freezes, capital controls, taxation over-reach, etc.
At some point someone figured out that if they start over, there is a lot of “value” to be unlocked out there; and paid/lobbied/sponsored the right person to execute on that.
E.g."Stablecoins won’t bank the unbanked, because people get stablecoins by purchasing them on a crypto exchange, and no crypto exchange will open an account for a customer unless they have a bank account."
Well, I understand that US has dystopia level of financial surveillance, but in many places in the world you can change cash in person to crypto without many issues. And you don't need to use any major exchange for that, that defeats the whole point.
And yes, Russians, Iranians, Palestinians are known to use crypto, for example. And the majority of them don't have US bank accounts.
One of the core features of crypto that it's not an American (or anyone else) thing, like paypal, stripe, or any other system and American laws can be easily ignored if both parties are outside of the US. That's already a very liberating feature for at least a billion of people of nations hostile to the US and potentially to 8+ billions of people more.
It's not an 'all-or-nothing' thing.
Those are instruments which already help many people (those you define as questionable for some reason). I'm actually pretty happy to see that the world has a tool to help millions of people with "questionable" religious, cultural, political, ideological views or sexual orientations. That reduces the pressure and advantage of people who want to make their lives harder.
If you don't need it, don't use it. That's totally cool. It doesn't have to be global. To be honest, I don't think anything needs to be global. That gives too much leverage to a single group at the expense of everyone else. The world is better off having many options for everyone.
Yes and mostly (as in 99% by amount of crypto moved) it's their governments
For example Russia it is not legal to pay with crypto, and to cash it out allowed crypto exchanges must submit your transactions to the government etc otherwise they get blocked.
But the bandit state is free of course to use it to trade with its friends like NK (which basically runs its nuclear program on ransomwared crypto) or Hamas;)
Sorry, but it's very naive to think that Russian people use only "allowed" crypto exchanges and comply with the laws. That would be an impossible country to live in.
Direct connections with people and being street-smart are important kinds of skills in such societies. And even without connections, you can easily go to some popular Russian exchange aggregators and find no-KYC options with cash delivery, as far as I know.
EDIT: I've actually just checked for you: starting from 10,000 USDT, you can cash out anonymously with cash delivery for 1% in Moscow right at this moment from a publicly accessible resource with reviews.
“dystopia level of financial surveillance,”
these days…
recently i made a cash withdrawal from my personal account ahead of a trip abroad (they asked me why) and within days received a FinCEN notice in the mail warning me about “ structured transactions”… having made no other cash transactions days or even check cashing or writing days before or days after.
I am not convinced this carbon-intensive form of money laundering is a good thing, but it certainly exists.
EDIT: went looking for data and it's estimated that ~63% [1] of power used in bitcoin proof-of-work operations. I honestly thought this figure would be higher, but with the insane campaign the American government is doing to invest and expand on drill operations this could go up in the short term. Long term though it's unlikely that this will keep up and we should see renewable sources gaining space more and more, just because it's the smart thing to do.
(And to be clear, I’m someone who has never been particularly enthusiastic about crypto or blockchain.)
Consider living in a country with an unstable and fiscally irresponsible government. And having a net worth <$10k. Suddenly being able to hold your money in USD, on an account that cannot be seized, and can be used globally, becomes incredibly attractive.
You don’t need financial literacy, there is no min-buy in like ETFs/bonds, and there is minimal KYC or other identity restrictions. I think this is an incredible boon for the billions of people living in such conditions.
Is it high fees, is it overly burdensome sanctions/AML checks, something else?
This is just one example of a few factors that lead to a sort of isolation from international banking.
And I’ve never felt clear on how people trust wallet, hot or cold — at some point they connect to the internet for transactions, and all the vendors seem suspect. I really doubt most users are building their wallet from code reviewed cryptographically signed source… but maybe I’m wrong?
Unless you manually inscribe it with a laser (good luck), that wouldn't really be a great idea unless the computer assisting you in the inscriptions is completely air-gapped.
Stamping/manually engraving your seed on fire resistant stainless steel (308 is my preference) is still one of the most "air-gapped" way to do this.
> at some point they connect to the internet for transactions,
Some don't, for example ColdCard. It is possible to use it without ever connecting it to a computer. Using a power source and a USB cable, they even offer a way to avoid using power adapters (using common batteries) as these tend to become "smarter" these days and could one day be the source of an exploit.
Yeah, it's basically Uber for finance/banking/etc. Reap the free real estate created by rules and regulation by..skirting the rules and regulations.
It also adds indirection, which in turn allows all the parties involved to point fingers at each other Spiderman-style. "Oh I thought $X was responsible for $COMPLIANCE." Eventually, y'all get audited and shape up but that's a years-long process. And in that time you've grown and grown and finance/banking/etc is pretty sticky. Kaching :)
That worked in the U.S.
European banking regulators saw through this ploy and forced them to seek a banking license.
I think this is successful in its goals
Liquidity providing on concentrated liquidity pools is something I would like to see in the high volume US equities market
But will realistically only exist on tokenized platforms that trade their surrogates
It’s extremely lucrative and was only in the domain of market making firms before this technology
A lot of these things are lucrative until they're not. If they are inherently lucrative then that profit will diminish as people catch on.
back to what I'm a fan of: CLMMs (Concentrated Liquidity Market Maker) is a very competitive field. The level of profits depends solely on volume and amount of capital participating. You are counting on other capital getting bored and moving away, as well as volume rising. Thats the game, it will always be the game. Its already "lucrative until its not" so its not really a gotcha or that insightful for those passing by. I'm glad you have some experience with it.
I mean look at something like the Rabbit R1. I'm an AI researcher and I saw my peers get fucking excited about it because it was a leap ahead of all the state of the art research we knew. Sorry, but what? It takes time for research to get into a product, sometimes years, even in tech, even in the fast pace AI world. Like you think they put what normally takes at least one $10k GPU and put that into a $200 device? That they could leverage GPT and not have a subscription fee? You're not going to beat ChatGPT by using ChatGPT lol.
Somehow stuff like this keeps happening and we never learn our lesson. Author is right, they're just chasing. And the irony is that that chase is actually preventing us from getting what we're really chasing
USD has its own woes with inflation and trade wars so fundamentally isn't stable, compared to say gold. Other currencies have runaway inflation or much higher friction to transact.
However the promise of stablecoin is that it can be exchanged 1:1 with USD with transaction fees much lower than CC fees (on exchanges like Solana e.t.c).
Unlike fraud from FTX, USDC stablecoin buys US treasuries dollar for dollar. This generates demand for USD as well as Circle makes profit from treasury yields.
Elegant idea in a way. Fast, cross-border low fee transactions in USD.
Bitcoin now has proven itself as inflation-hedged store of value. USDC is proving itself as a way to transact on goods and services.
Obviously trust is earned as droplets but leaves in buckets.
Crypto is ripe with scams and shady exchanges.
These technologies didn't fix the problems. There is too much regulation, you can't do anything without a license. The only solutions are political, not technological.
Everything feels like a scam within a scam. I feel dizzy just thinking about it. I'm completely demoralised. Everything related to career feels pointless, sisyphean because of the bureaucracy and monopolization. Any work that pays well is useless at best, harmful at worst. It's either illegal or impossible to do anything which might provide value to people. Even if all the hurdles could be removed, I'm not even sure I want to contribute... For whose benefit? And I feel totally disconnected from the broader society around me.
I basically completely checked out career-wise. I'm good at faking though so I just fake it. I just started bullshitting my way through life. I hate it but everyone is just eating it up and loving it. What can I do? Just give the people more of what they want I guess. Value creation doesn't pay, bullshitting pays... People are living a lie and they love it when you build on top of it. If you just say the right words, they will deny their own eyes; this is what COVID taught me and I can see this in my day-to-day life. It's depressing, they are good people, that's why they assume good faith. I was just like them before, living in a bubble, I understand, I'm no better than them, just less fortunate. If they saw what I saw, they would probably do what I do. Many would do worse.
I feel like I need therapy from being this way. I have bills to pay though. I think I did everything approximately right but I've been ridiculously unlucky. I was operating on limited info and incorrect assumptions. Now, I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place.
It's illegal to be homeless in my country. It's illegal to live in a tent on 'your own' property, you are not allowed to build your own house without some expensive license and approvals... You can't do shit within your means. All the things which seemed unimportant to me before are now the centre of my life and on that plane of existence, I see scams all around.
> Bradley Lott-Tillery, 24, from Arizona also entrusted Yotta with his savings, thinking his money would be protected by the federal government. “I emailed [Yotta], made sure it was FDIC insured. Of course, they emailed me back and told me, yes, it’s FDIC insured, which we now know is not true,” Lott-Tillery said.
> While the banks with which fintech companies like Yotta and Juno partner are FDIC insured, this only kicks in when a bank is found to have failed. Since the intermediary Synapse filed for bankruptcy, but not any of the banks, the money is not covered by the regulatory agency.
https://businessjournalism.org/2025/03/synapse-collapse/
(their money was "insured" in the same way depositing money in a random guy's bank account is insured: it's not insured against the guy! these bank-shaped companies managed to convince a bunch of people that they were close enough to banks and about as safe, and then it turned out they all handed the money over to the same fintech company to interface with the actual banks, and that company went messily bust)
You blame regulations and then mention that everything is pointless because everything is: "sisyphean because of the bureaucracy and monopolization".
The tech industry is lousy with scams, hell the entire model of the global economy is exit scamming everyone. No one builds anything because it is meant to last, everyone is fighting for the next IPO or buyout. You have pointed your ire in the wrong direction... because you were unable to scam first? Confusing...
There is definitely a belief in this industry that its primary intent was to demoralise those fleeing the traditional system... Almost as a way to scare them back towards papa fiat.
Crypto, as it turned out, was likely a case of the fiat system playing good cop bad cop with the world's nerds. To push them around and demoralise them into apathy and compliance.
The regulation is there to reduce the amount of scamming and con artists. It's the same reason we have Blue Sky Laws.
> Everything feels like a scam within a scam. I feel dizzy just thinking about it. I'm completely demoralised. Everything related to career feels pointless, sisyphean because of the bureaucracy. Any work that pays well is useless at best, harmful at worst. It's either illegal or impossible to do anything which might provide value to people. Even if all the hurdles could be removed, I'm not even sure I want to contribute... For whose benefit?
None of this is because of regulation. It's all because of greed and unchecked grift and profit capture. Technology is making the world worse because of greed and capturing profit, not because of regulations. The work most of us are doing is harmful because of greed and capturing profit, not because of regulations. Everyone is living a lie because of greed and capturing profit, not because of regulations. These uncountable scams are all because of unregulated greed and profit. People on HN are mad, but they're acting out against an imagined "regulation boogieman," not what's actually causing all of the shit.
Disagree. Zoning law and regulation-driven credentialism are the closest thing to a root cause you can find for most of the problems with modern society; sure you can say "greed" but that's a permanent part of human nature, and most societies find a way to live with it. Today's world where for a family to succeed both parents have to be putting 40+ hours into bullshit fake work in a circular economy of bullshit fake solutions to bullshit fake problems so that they can afford to get their kids the right bullshit fake qualifications is a distinctly regulation-based phenomenon.
> These uncountable scams are all because of unregulated greed and profit.
Sure. But are they actually any worse than the regulated scams? Often the licensed and regulated stuff hurts the end victim more than the direct scams.
But it's hard to fix greed. The solution to fix greed is way more radical, it's violent. The greedy will defend their interests with violence when confronted. The only non-violent solution I can think of is to let the system collapse, under their own direction. That's the only way the greedy would relinquish enough control to allow people the freedom to get things going again. There was a bit of this after COVID but it wasn't enough.
I just hope people can maintain their sanity through this. I hope it's not going to be an endless cycle of society repeatedly rebounding off from rock bottom... Never actually lifting itself out of the muck but basically always scraping rock bottom with only short temporary breaks.
As a developer, the system and code complexity we have to work with is increasing to the level that it should be considered mental assault. You need to develop a kind of apathy to get through life.
You want to be a good person doing good things for other people and getting along peacefully? Sorry, but happy planet is that way. Don't come to earth.
want to elaborate which country this is?
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondex (Mastercard)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Cash
And there is ongoing from the BIS https://www.bis.org/about/bisih/topics/cbdc/tourbillon.htm beside that there are many CBDC projects designed for inter-banks usages or some for wide public usage.
And I am talking about myself here. My only excuse is that I simply don't use my money. Which is not necessarily a good thing either.
Repeat after me. Do not use technology to try to solve people problems.
I am saying the solution to make people smarter or empower the people. Buy now pay later, credit cards, and all these bespoke algorithms is just an illusion to make people feel better when they get ripped off.
Someone responded like "lol, sure, we can find some sociologists to start programming our apps", and I thought Damn. That's really missing the point. And it seems so arrogant. Like, not only do we laugh at the idea of people doing our jobs, we also need to laugh at the idea of the relevance of their fields.
Yet we really should depend on their insights to further our field, in my opinion. No profession truly stands alone, just like no person does.
I think we'll get better about this over time. Right now we've definitely got some growing pains.
I'm not afraid of looking like I don't understand - I simply don't understand. I've tried reading a few "yellow papers" for crypto projects and they are so abstract and full of jargon that I never come away knowing more than when I started reading.
If anyone has a good resource for getting into the technical details of crypto please let me know. I would like to gain a full enough understanding that I can finally decide for myself if it's revolutionary or overhyped.
In some cases, this is by design. The project is nonsensical and/or a scam, and the white paper is an obfuscatory smokescreen to provide an illusion of sophistication.
A lot of what we do might be sophisticated in some far corners, but at the end of the day the end results can be trivially explained.
"Taxi ordered from a phone app, "Sleep in other people's homes", "Restaurant delivery service with GPS tracking", "Exercise bike with a screen showing workout videos", "Someone else shops for you", etc.
Unfortunately with crypto, a lot of it is trivially explained as "obfuscated scam"
Blockchain is pretty simple. There's a database, organized in a way that you can add records to it but you can not edit past records - or if you try to, everybody would know you did. There's a network of people maintaining this shared database, as a payment ledger - basically, this database for them says "X has $Y amount of database-money". People participating in maintaining this database get paid in the same database-money. They have incentive to do it properly, otherwise their database-money aren't worth shit. They also have incentive to steal if they could, but since they can't edit the database without other people noticing (who aren't interested in having db-money stolen from them) it's hard. That's the basic level of cryptocurrency systems, very shallowly and simplified, of course. If you want to know the math and protocols, there are full college degree programs dedicated to it (I am not kidding at all, there are). There's even free courses on Coursera and such which deal with the basics.
The second level is allowing to do other, more complicated stuff with the same database. Like keep ownership records for other things (that's basically NFT). The next level is turning it from passive database into a computation engine, so you can make computations that will be reproducible over the database. That's ethereum contracts and such. There also side aspects - like privacy chains, where the information who owns the money is encrypted, so you can prove you own the money but somebody else would have hard time seeing how much you got and where it came from (it's usually very easy in most chains). Etc. etc.
Whether it's revolutionary or overhyped - I have no idea. That's kinda societal question, certainly all the above (and more) can be useful and you can build useful stuff on top of it. Would some people use it? Probably. Will everybody switch to it from existing ways of doing things? I have no idea, but I suspect no. But I am nobody, so it's worth nothing. A lot of people smarter than me thought there's a use case for certain things, and spend a lot of time and money building stuff, and nobody every used it. Take Meta - the whole "metaverse" thing, nobody even remembers it now. There are many things like that. Is crypto one of them? I dunno. We'll see.
For example, there have been a lot of novel or interesting projects centered around cryptography, consensus, decentralization, anonyimity. On a sociological level, there are a lot of interesting social/economic experiments unfolding in the DeFi world as we speak.
But I think that is where the truly interesting or valuable contributions to humanity as a whole end, and the vast, vast majority of it otherwise is just speculation or scams. It is hard to find that signal in the noise, but it is there, if you look.
Fundamentally, we've been making digital versions of everything. We have digital phone calls, television, bookkeeping, document writing, drawing, etc.
One thing we didn't have digitally was a currency.
Why would we want a digital currency? For similar reasons to all the other stuff above. It's more convenient. When you "transfer money" from your bank account to another, your bank has to physically move the associated cash from it's vault to the other banks vault, by hiring secure trucks, people, and so on. If the money has to cross a border, that's even more of a hassle, now you have to physically cross a border with a truck full of cash. When a bank "holds onto your money", they need a big vault full of cash, they have to count it, account for every dollar, physically safeguard it, etc.
This is a huge cost, inefficiency, and a big challenge of banking, and it's one reason transaction fees and banking fees are so high.
Now we have an idea of why we might want to make a digital currency. The biggest issue with making one is how do you solve the "double spend problem". That is, if I have 1 unit of a currency and I give it to you, how do we guarantee I no longer have that unit after it was given to you? In a physical world, I'm giving you the actual unit of currency, but in the digital world I'm giving you a copy of it, it would be easy for me to keep my copy as well and have an infinite money glitch.
The solution to that is simple, you have a source of truth that processes the transaction. That source of truth records that I had 10$ and you had 10$, I gave you 1$, and now I have 9$ and you have 11$.
That's easy enough. Here comes the second problem, who would trust owning that source of truth? Would you trust me keeping the official source of truth log of how much money everyone has? I could easily add myself a few 0s to my account, or remove some from yours.
Would you trust the government of your country? Of another country? A big corporation? A US charity?
This is where crypto comes in. Crypto says, nobody would ever trust a single entity, but what if everyone could join a network of nodes that together form the source of truth? Not owned by any single person, but the union of everyone who wants to join the network, and you could join the network, I could join it, anyone is free to join it, and we can all validate and check each other's work to make sure no one else on the network is fudging the numbers.
And now a lot of complex cryptographic math comes in to from this network.
That's several centuries out of date, I'm afraid. Even before computers banks didn't actually do that, but now they certainly never do that. They just change records in their books - it has been paper books once, now it's just database files. I mean, banks do move cash (still do) but not when you transfer money from account to account, it has nothing to do with that, unless when you're running a massive cash-based business (which most banks hate btw, for many reasons).
>
> This is a huge cost, inefficiency, and a big challenge of banking, and it's one reason transaction fees and banking fees are so high.
That's absolutely not how this works though. Banks perform electronic transfers and most of the money is accounted for in databases. The problems are slow, antiquated, technology, which is made worse by the amount of regulation surrounding it that makes it hard for new contenders to enter and drive down prices via competition.
Cryptocurrency is trustless, but there is an interesting tangent about if you _do not_ want a government to control monetary policy.
Someone completely misunderstands how the real world works, misrepresents that even more when trying to articulate, uses convoluted wording to hide their total lack of understanding of the real world. Then create a "solution" for the problems that do not exist in the real world in the first place, in the process reinventing problems that are solved for centuries already or running head first into ideas that have been proven multiple times in history to just not work.
This whole machinery is then used by criminals to launder money, scammers to scam people out of money and speculants hoping to get rich quick, providing real money liquidity for the previous two.
Payment settlement is a solved problem and very rarely involves physical cash transfer. Most of this is just numbers moved between accounts which commercial banks have with a central bank.
That hasn't been true for, uh, centuries. It's like literally the entire point of banking, to allow financial transactions to take place without having to physically haul around collateral anywhere.
(And if you want a digital version of what banks actually do, it's called SWIFT, and has been around since checks Wikipedia 1973).
While I'm sure some of this is true for some banks at some point in history, this is the kind of understanding of a given industry that results in TechBros reinventing buses or juicing machines.
> This is a huge cost, inefficiency, and a big challenge of banking, and it's one reason transaction fees and banking fees are so high.
The reason banking fees are so high is because they charge what the market will bear, and most of the banks customers are a captive audience. It doesn't cost $2 to perform a transaction at an ATM; it costs pennies, if that. Banks should be paying you for holding, and putting to use, your money.
That’s not at all what happens!
Transfers are done digitally, physical cash does not move between vaults or bank branches.
Democratic solutions are, imho, doomed to failure. In order for them to work a significant portion of "take back control" and "make my country great" brigade will need to have some kind of revelation about the direction of society as a whole. Given the amount of resources pumped into keeping people separate and fighting one-another, this seems like naive optimism.
I consider this to be a woefully inadequate response to a vast, complex and thoroughly embedded set of interconnected issues. Appropriate solutions will require a deep appreciation of complexity science, radically better system design and, frankly, a level of imagination, determination and competence that simply doesn't exist as a social norm, and will not emerge for at least a generation (or three), given that educational and political institutions are so deeply rooted in the current mode.
I don't think Bitcoin is revolutionary - it's just algorithmic scarcity - but I do think that distributed ledgers are an important piece of a future puzzle, as they provide transparency where previously it didn't exist. That said, there are no silver-bullets and not everything should necessarily be held on one.
My position is that, until we actually address the misconception of infinite growth within economic system design (i.e. not by external constraints, such as taxation), we haven't even started. Some may say that Bitcoin already does this, but its capture by the financial sector demonstrates that it is, at best, another asset class.
My anticipation is that this won't happen, so I am fully expecting a kind of looney tunes moment as we race off the side of the cliff. I am interested, not in preventing that from happening, since I think it is inevitable, but rather on planting bushes on the side of the cliff that might give us things to grab as we fall. Feel free to accuse me of either pessimism or optimism.
None of them work cross-border. And one suspects the US Government is working very hard to make sure they never do (look at the money laundering accusations against the Brazilian system for a recent example).
Also, what is this headline even about? Why the bashing on fintech? I worked for 4 fintechs and communicated with many more, not a single one was blockchain related.
Why is this even on hn?
If you want to read proper criticism of blockchain, read Molly White's essays instead
Having no other way to do these simple things, from my point of view, it is not a problem of hundred thousand people in Venezuela, it's a valid problem of tens (if not hundreds) of million people around the world.
IMO The author significantly underestimates how limited and inaccessible the current financial system in the world is.
What crypto is already useful for is not to replace the cash in your pocket and your savings account. It is useful to replace SWIFT and Fort Knox.
What crypto will be useful for in the future is uncertain. But uncertainty does not mean pie in the sky. How the internet would be used was uncertain in the 70s.
Yes, nerds were already excited about the internet in the 70s. Have a look ath the "Mother of all demos": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos It takes decades to iron out the details of how to use fundamentally new technology.
Fear of change. Is there any new technology that HN is in favour of?
Some of its use cases such as having a "smart" personal/digital assistant on the computer helping organize your day are only popping up now thanks to the combination of LLM tech, model self hosting and MCP protocols.
Only took 50+ years, right?
That is what I mean by point 3 in my comment.
As I pointed out last time, Bitcoin was released at roughly the same time as the iPhone. Nobody needed to wait for use cases for the iPhone: the global economy immediately reoriented itself around the smartphone, because it delivered massive amounts of obvious value to customers. If this isn’t happening around cryptocurrency, at some point you have to face facts that it’s because the value isn’t there.
But it seemed pretty obvious to me more than a decade ago what cryptocurrency would be useful for. I remember the ideas flying around in the early days.
It's been a bumpy road...but then, I also remember through the late 90s (and especially after the dotcom crash) when there were countless takes on how the Internet (and PCs in general) had been vastly overhyped. "Computers were supposed to eliminate paper, but we're using more paper than ever! We were supposed to do all our shopping and get our news from the internet, but Sears is thriving and I still get my daily newspaper every morning!"
Somebody could absolutely have made a book out of all the overpromises of the "Internet Superhighway" era.
The path to general use for cryptocurrency has been, and will continue to be, rocky. Moreso than the net. It inherently involves money--lots of money--and so it's been rife with scams. "Nigerian Princes" on steroids.
But I can tell you guys: before the rush of investors and crazy bubbles, before the scams and collapses, long before hucksters like Trump got involved, there was a group of people to whom the potential of cryptocurrency seemed obvious.
Money is not that difficult of a concept, you use it to store value or transact. As a store of value it has no intrinsic advantage compared to any other alternative we have now, and same goes to transactions, it doesn't bring anything to the table than current systems already don't do.
All the features people keep mentioning like the immutable ledger are simply not something we actually need or government have asked for.
The only utility is making money for the people that work on it, there's no societal value in crypto at all.
Fort Knox still exists. US gold reserves are still increasing:
https://www.statista.com/graphic/1/188843/united-states-offi...
I empathize with the author, I really do, but you can't care about someone more than they care about themselves. If anyone has had the supremely unpleasant experience of trying to get loved ones to work out, they know. The last time someone (democrats) tried to tackle healthcare, they lost scores of seats all down the ballot.
https://www.quorum.us/data-driven-insights/under-obama-democ...
> but you can't care about someone more than they care about themselves.
Human history tells us that we don't make it through alone. We thrive on social structures and forming coalitions. Sometimes we get down and our friends and family put in work to pull us back. Your claim is the mental equivalent of "I can't lift someone up more than they can lift themselves up." Sorry, but if all they've got is bootstraps then you bet I can lift them up high into the sky while they can only lift themselves as high as they can jump. I'm pretty sure most people can't jump onto my shoulders and I'm confident none could jump that high and stay without support. Stop asking people to fly and look down at who's shoulders you're standing on
You can't get most Americans to care about anything they consider "socialism", and if you try too hard you'll get Trump.
Democrats losing support can be explained by several reasons that have nothing to do with tackling healthcare. It can be the fact that it ended up being a weak half measure in comparison to the strong desire for a universal healthcare system. Or completely unrelated to healthcare altogether, like the Hilary Clinton scandal fiascos.
The claim then is that people don't care enough about having public healthcare (or are actively against it) for it to be a politically popular goal.
"Why do you see the speck in your neighbour's eye, but do not notice the plank in your own eye?"
One problem with this argument is that insurance companies disagree and nobody with any power in the US seems to want to move away from the "insurance provider" model.