this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2025
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Hot take: crypto is dumb.
That take is lukewarm at best.
People are dumb. Currency cannot work if it's not used as a currency. Cryptobros "investing" in it are the dumb ones, trading currency as it's stocks or something (not to mention, that stocks are dumb as well). How can it not be volatile?
Blame the first fork. Bitcoin Cash would have had a sticker on every cash register but wall street came in and stanned the lightning network now transaction fees are impossible to use it other than a fancy money gram.
Most people will never really understand what happened back then, it's so disheartening, it's like society was just about to reach up to the stars, and was curb stomped back to the ground.
So, stablecoins are not dumb?
What makes them stable? And how has that stability been more stable than tech stocks?
They are backed by treasury bonds
They are comparable to other company bonds. Much more stable than shares.
Except when they aren't.
So many examples of stable coins just being a delayed rug-pull that collapses as soon as people pull out their money and it turns out that they aren't backed by anything at all.
At best they work like putting regular money in a bank. At worst they work like putting money in a "bank" but the bank is some shady anonymous dude from the internet with no oversight whatsoever.
You don't trust a bank because it could be mismanaged and greedy bankers could steal your money? Why on earth would you trust an anonymous rando more?
It's like those people who don't trust "big pharma" and instead eat supplements they bought from India via the internet by the kilogram.
Oh yes. Not all stablecoins are good. But the original point was that crypto was dumb because it was volatile.
USDC is backed by banks and is regularly audited. They are not shady or anonymous.
The downside is that it is that stablecoin are not federally insured, although USDC accounts were bailed out when SVB went bust.
It has “stable” in the name.
Hotter take: you missed out on it 15 years ago. I know I did.
Well, every second you "miss out" on going all-in on the highest leverage possible and win. Afterwards you always know better so don't be sad about it. Back then it was probably even more risky than it is now, so depending on your risk tolerance and investment goals it was probably right to miss it.
Well, thanks, I guess I'll read that comment again when I eat my cold leftovers for supper tonight...
Just imagine you invested sum X back then. Who knows if you would still hold it. Maybe you would have made 10 into 100 $ and quit or shifted some into another crypto and lost it there, maybe you would have gambled with derivates which then did not perform as well. Picking single investments is basically gambling. I know this won't make your leftovers taste better but try not to blame yourself for decisions that were 50/50 bets at best.
Is a bubble, cripto exists for the sake of cripto, eventually all of it is gonna collapse, specially when only a tiny fraction of it is used for transactions.
I could have gotten in very early, for almost no money.
But hey, clipping coupons for pasta and going to the thrift store is cool too.
You say that as if you don't think the entirety of capitalism is dumb.
The difference is that first currency is backed by nation state trust.
Crypto is touted as independent of that, except we've seen that's not really the case in recent years. So yea, what's the point then of crypto?
violence
What kind?
There's only one kind of violence: The kind where a party uses power to deprive another party of a current or potential freedom. We tend to conflate violence with physical force, and much of it is that, but it isn't limited to that nor are the means of the nation state.
(To be clear the user above conflated capitalism with fiat currency, this answer works for both)
Can you give specifics for how that applies in this context?
Not sure. What do you mean by that?
Still curious...
How the comment you replied to maps onto your singular definition for violence. Who are the parties, what are the freedoms, etc?
You can pay and get paid on the internet with it. No ID required. No blocked transactions (if you don’t go through companies, or use the right crypto). Anonymous and confidential payments on the internet that can be withdrawn or used without too many problems, with the coins made for that.
P2P online payments without going through some kind of company is not possible without crypto. There’s just no alternative.
You can accept donations without revealing personal information about yourself…
Do I need to go on?
I used it to send some money to a friend in another country.
The fees from the more "conventional" services were really expensive to send money between our two countries, for some reason (government [dis]agreements, I assume).
I just sent crypto instead. It was much cheaper and simpler.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_religion
You don't?
I do think the entirety of capitalism is dumb. Hierarchies that obscure, enable, and aggrandize violence are lame.
for investment, yes. but for autonomy, no. if it wasn't so hard to buy or pay with it tho, that'd be great.
Sadly in this world, you either use your tools or you’re used by your tools.
Easy often rythmes with you being fucked over in some way. Windows and Linux, privacy, open source vs centralized and closed source… you have to learn it, but once you do, there’s just nothing better
I think this makes it a funny thing about libertarian ideals. The way people interact with it is ultimately in centralized and KYC compliant exchanges. As far as I know its not illegal to not use them, but people do for simplicity. Microcosm of the idea that market winners entrench to promote their version at the detriment of the markets freedom.
If the Trump administration, and especially Project 2025, have taught America anything, it's that libertarians don't fucking have ideals.
Libertarians spouted propaganda about small government and free speech and privacy until conservative authoritarians took power. And then they cheered while conservative authoritarians built the most extensive police state and government surveillance apparatus in American history and began arresting people for writing op-eds and posting memes.
Libertarians, like Republicans, never actually supported small government or free speech or the privacy of citizens. They deployed the rhetoric of small government and free speech and privacy as weapons to attack liberals and prevent Democratic administrations from pursuing their policy goals. Now that conservatives are in power, those weapons are no longer useful, and libertarians have discarded them.
Libertarian "ideals" were weapons against Democratic government, and they were never anything else.
And to get back to your point: of course libertarians spout rhetoric about financial privacy while keeping cryptocurrency in centralized KYC exchanges. Because crypto was never about privacy as an ideal. It was about bypassing financial regulations, laundering money, dodging taxes, grifting, scamming normies, and gambling on pumps and dumps. Crypto bros talk a good game about privacy and independence to shield themselves from regulation and make themselves look legitimate. Anyone who actually believes that crap is a useful idiot that probably lost all their money in a cryptoscam.
The libertarian's lament is that the market doesn't provide them with more opportunity to be the boot.
Unfortunately, Know Your Customer has done a lot of damage to privacy, but there's still a lot of exchanges where you can get Monroe with Bitcoin without Know Your Customer. And since Monroe is actually truly anonymous, you have a truly anonymous currency at that point.
And the Monroe developers are working on making atomic exchanges work better, which are peer-to-peer trading of coins with low overhead and fees because it's direct. No middleman.
It's called monero btw