The rise and fall of crypto culture | Hacker News Reader

The rise and fall of crypto culture

andrecronje.medium.com

42 pointsDestiner100 comments

> We are entering a new age, the current iteration will become the badlands, where unknown wallets lurk in the shadows, we will see the rise of a new blockchain economy, not one driven by greed, but instead driven by trust, not trustlessness.

(Public, permissionless) blockchain will never be a mainstream technology. It simply doesn't have any practical advantages over existing technologies, and hence doesn't solve a problem better than existing technologies.

There are technologies like VR which are also in their infancy, but already provide real value to customers. And if you squint your eyes you can see where incremental improvements will lead to (and no, I don't mean everyone living in the metaverse). But with blockchain - I have tried, I really tried. I just can't see it, and I yet to have find a crypto proponent that gives me a real example where a blockchain based tech adds real value to customers.

You obviously have no idea what blockchain tech is about.

What do people do with their money when central banks only offers 0.03 percent interest while inflation is 9 percent. They can convert their money to a crypto stablecoin and get upto 20 percent yield.

How are they getting a 20% yield and at what risk?

Because it's a pyramid scheme

Those are literally Bernie Madoff returns.

My guess would be they are staking UST (stable coin) on Anchor Protocol. The staked funds are lent to traders. Thats how they can promise such high returns since 20% a year is only 0.055% per day. Traders will typically trade positions with a risk to reward ration of 1:1.5 or higher. These fees are negligible at this point for a position that will take a few hours or days to close. This is how you can trade with leverage on exchanges. Risks are protocol exploit or depegging of the staked coin.

Right answer. (There are some other new interesting protocols on the horizon too MARS, PRISM)

Trading what on what exchanges?

Trading what?

IB lends leverage at like 2%.

20% implies a ton of risk compared to what’s available.

Considering the crypto itself does not produce anything of value I´d be surprised if it would continue to outperform the stock market as crypto starts to stabilise. Maybe it could be used to be a little more resistant to inflation than with regular cash, but wouldn´t make any sense to me if the value of crypto would consistently grow to a bigger percentage of all wealth on earth.

Crypto is a technology just like Microsoft Windows is. As more people use it its value increases. Only difference is now there is no bill gates and the rewards are shared by all early adopters.

And the next day the value of their portfolio drops by 200%, and never quite recovers.

If your argument is that banks and savings in particular offer poor interest, the proper answer is to look into index funds and focus on long term growth, rather than short-term speculation.

I said stablecoin for a reason.

You are under the impression that most folks are investing money somehow?

Nope. Most folks are pretty poor, and realistically the money at the banks isn't collecting interest at all. The banks provide a service: Somewhere fairly safe to stick your money, where it will be available to pay for food and rent and utilities.

What most folks actually save for - when they can - is emergencies. We are talking less than a month's income at a possibly average salary. This money needs to be easily accessible. you know, in case your car breaks down. You might save for a down payment, but realistically you aren't going to be much better off by investing in anything long term. And when you are at these income levels, investing in anything that could mean you lose your money is too devastating to deal with, even if you supposedly can get "up to a 20 percent yield". Not to mention that you can't use that money for anything without planning.

If "de-banking" gains popularity as a way to suppress and punish dissident populations[1][2], crypto stands to gain. There are still issues with traceability and privacy but the basic technology seems pretty sound as an alternative to a state-run currency.

1. https://townhall.com/columnists/johnrlottjr/2022/02/23/canad...

2. https://www.businessinsider.com/mypillow-ceo-mike-lindells-b...

Wouldn't those doing the "de-banking" also make it impossible for anyone to provide service to the "de-banked" or punish those who allow it to happen? After all they still need to live in physical world and ignoring some customers is easier than being hit for bigger fine than the gains or outright stopped from operating.

They invest it one of dozens of other regulated ways. For example: Stock market, housing, financial derivatives, etc.

Also: A crypto stablecoin is (supposed to be) pegged to a major currency, usually the USD. So in terms of return, it shouldn't matter if you have your money invested in stablecoin or cash under your mattress. Oh wait, it does matter, because most stablecoins are scams and you'll eventually lose all your money.

Assuming the stablecoin doesnt lose its peg (choose a decentralized one), you can get 20 percent yield from staking it.

Agreed. I think whatever small value crypto provides is outweighed by how slow and expensive it is. It's a nice technology, but I think it left the lab too soon.

Its multitrillion dollar valuation is pure speculation (sometimes called HODLing by its acolytes). It's virtually impossible that it will maintain this valuation, and most investors will make a loss.

>(Public, permissionless) blockchain will never be a mainstream technology.

Right, but neither will private permissioned blockchain. For every single use case I've seen thus far, there is no good response to the "why not just use a database instead?" question.

If you squint hard enough, Git is kind of a permissioned blockchain. So, I wouldn't dismiss the possibility completely. But yeah, it's difficult to see it becoming mainstream. Git certainly isn't mainstream.

This stretches the meaning of the word blockchain past breaking point.

The Establishment / Wall Street abuse is what caused the massive effort behind Crypto (open source, open ledger, etc.)

* Why not use a database. Because that means the Establishment/WallStreet are the only ones with full control.

* Banks / WallStreet / Establishment long-term abuse is what created the mandate. The crypto industry is the equivalent to people taking to the streets to fix the problems.

* Open ledger fixes Bank / Wall Street / Establishment long-term above.

* Open source code prevents rigged economy theft by wall street. High Frequency, Front running, Data centers for front running, distance between exchanges for front running purposes.

* The article author is saying "Give the few establishment players full control. Data base. Ledger. Code. Block innovation. Block competition."

* Competition is the fix. 1inch.io takes in trades. It routes to the best exchanges with the smallest: Fees, margin spreads, order book fraud, etc. The fix is many 1inch.io to send trades to, that finds the lowest fee, most ethical set of exchanges. So orders are carried out ideally. Free market, competiton, not blocking new competitors, transparency (ledger + code + order book + etc.) is the fix

How would you send someone in China (or Nigeria, Peru, ...) money?

If they had an ethereum address and you already had a wallet yourself, it's crazy easy. Setting up and funding a wallet is currently a little tricky, but not as hard as some like to make it seem.

You've described how to send someone in China, Nigeria, or Peru etheriums, but not how to send them money. It turns out when there are capital controls, taxes, laws against crypto, etc., the two are not quite the same.

Three steps, first you buying intermediate currency, then transfering that, and then them selling it for their own. First and second are mostly solved, but is there sufficient for third? And what are the conversion costs or fees in each of these? And what are the market fluctuations?

Sure, there are issues, but the question remains, how would you send money to someone in China? I'm seriously asking. I don't know a simpler way then crypto.

I believe Alipay would be the easiest for that.

Other countries do have banks, and international money transfers are a solved problem. I have personal experience with sending money from Europe to Latin American countries. It generally works just fine. I assume Venezuela and at times Argentina may be exceptions due to their political situation, and yeah, for those cryptocurrency may be useful, as an instance of the general rule that cryptocurrency is mostly useful to route around laws and regulations.

In principle, cryptocurrency could act as competition to drive the price of transfers down (which would be awesome), but in practice and at the scale I was looking at, there was no price advantage, and the convenience advantage was clearly with the traditional banking system.

Yes, I know other countries have banks. How would you do it though? What are the steps and services involved?

With Ethereum it's (again, assuming you have an address, which is trivial):

1. Get their address (a single universal unique value, no "what's your routing #")

2. Send the Eth to that address

3. They go and buy bread with their ETH.

...

Oh, wait?!

TIL HN doesn't know what stablecoins are.

Stablecoins are basically on-chain gift cards, with each token priced at about a dollar. Some (USDC, PAX, etc) have businesses you can directly redeem the stablecoins in order to get $1 sent to a bank account, and others (DAI, FRAX, UST) have more complex mechanisms to stay at or ~$1.

If you're using a chain that isn't BTC (technically you can use USDT on Omni but almost no one uses it for this), you can probably send the person a stablecoin that is priced at $1 USD.

And yes, people in Nigeria and other EMs do this every day, either for remittances, FX trading, or other reasons (reasons can be legal or illegal, i'm not supporting harm or illegal use cases but at some point we gotta recognize the 'freest' countries either still support race-based class discrimination or legalized slavery, so it's insufficient for the purposes of good faith discourse to throw pseudo mic drop rebuttals that assert legal institutions are infallible).

EDIT: and to pre-empt the "what if the stablecoin goes up to $2 or down to $0.50???" questions: - Centralized stablecoins like USDC, PAX, etc have licensed businesses that use actual banks to store the reserves, so if anyone wants to sell me their USDC for $0.75, please do and jog on - Decentralized stablecoins like DAI have more complex checks nad balances, and with those, unless you're a market maker or doing something that requires a non-top 3 decentralized stablecoin, it's often better to go with the ones that have been audited and/or battle tested, provided it suits your use case.

I'm pretty sure the point was that your average bodega doesn't accept cryptocurrency.

What is insisting that Blockchain does nothing useful?

It provides the following features which everyday financial institutions do not:

- 24/7 operation. Did you ever try to start a transfer on the weekend? - Near instant results. No more waiting several business days to get your own money. - Transactions will not trigger "account reviews", potentially locking you out from accessing your funds for an indefinite time, since you were traveling or otherwise spending your money in a way you usually don't. - Transparency on what data is retained about you and who it is sold to. - Authentication with cryptographic signature not SMS

All modern Blockchains will do the above without sending you paper mail or requiring you to update your income and address all the time.

None of that requires a blockchain.

Blockchain provides no advantage for any of those features over a centralized authority.

Can you provide an example of a centralized authority providing a service with these features that is widely adopted? Because there are blockchains that provide these features currently, and central authority finance has had a lot more time to figure things out.

yes.

And then you copy paste the wrong account number or amount, and you're screwed as transactions are irreversible, and there's no central authority which can revert that.

Oh and money laundering

Tell me you've never used Zelle in the US or a bank wire without telling me you've never used Zelle in the US or a bank wire.

Right because money launderers prefer a permanent public record of all their TXs?

Seriously I don't get the money laundering angle on chains.

Maybe in early days it was assumed chain analysis would be difficult, these days many contractors specialize in on-chain analytics and governments are investing in this too (as they should).

In fact I would LOVE to see traditional banks settlements as public record, y'know for all that money laundering that never happens on their books ;)

^^^ for your user class, probably true. But for others, it is deeply needed. The two mainstream use cases I see are transferring money where a fiat bank was too problematic (fees, limits, audits, etc) and purchasing items with the perception of anonymity (e.g. an incognito subscription with a coingate payment option alongside Visa). It is nice to know there is a way to digitally pay for things without major payment processors running analytics on my spending.

And in providing foreign aid, crypto has helped us reliably transfer funds without corrupt intervention. Culture ebs and flows, but in this case core user needs are being met by the tech.

Re transferring money: Do you think transferring money abroad is expensive because of technology? It's not, it's because of regulation, international agreements etc. What do you think will happen when crypto should go maintstream? Do you think it will just stay unregulated? No, we're already seeing countries starting to regulate crypto. And then you'll just end up at square one.

Re anonymity: Your every crypto transaction is publicly viewable under your pseudonym. Once somebody connects your pseudodynm, all your anonimity is gone. If you purchase something with Visa, only you, Visa, and the company your purchasing from sees your info. I'd take that each time over a public trail of my purchases.

> Re transferring money: Do you think transferring money abroad is expensive because of technology? It's not, it's because of regulation, international agreements etc.

Yes! And this is artificial and problematic, and cryptocurrency is an inevitable symptom of such an artificial regime.

There are a handful of communication functions that people in every society want to avail themselves of: to talk to each other, to read/write and find information, and to transact value for commerce. For the first two applications the Internet has made those functions possible in increasingly powerful and useful ways: we went from 300-baud modems and BBSes to broadband and Twitter. Search and unlimited music catalogs and electronic bookstores are all available in virtually unlimited amounts at 1/100,000th of the 1990 cost on amazing portable devices we carry in our pockets.

So you’d expect that the ability to transact value on a computer would also have followed a similar trajectory. But weirdly (and crucially: artificially) it hasn’t. Sending an international wire is better than it was in 1990, but not orders-of-magnitude easier or cheaper like the functions I listed above. Similarly, buying products on retail websites has improved in many ways, but it still involves typing in a 16-digit number off a plastic card (and then insuring that card expensively to guard against fraud.) Sending money to a friend is just barely possible in small amounts recently (thanks to a few services like Venmo etc.) ACH will go from 3-day to 1-day settlement “soon” (has it already happened?) There’s nothing like the visible improvement and IT cost reduction you see in every other electronic product.

And the reason you don’t see that improvement is not because the technology makes it impossible, or that sending money cheaply and easily is technically infeasible. The reason you don’t see those improvements is entirely artificial. The technology can exist but has been deliberately held back by cozy business arrangements and government regulation. I will even grant that much of this regulation is well-intentioned. But the thing is, nature abhors a vacuum. The result of trying to artificially stop technical progress is that the technical progress happens anyway (when PCs and p2p gets cheap enough) and then it happens in weird ways that are outside of society’s control. That’s where we are now, and it’s our fault for letting things get here.

Transferring money has also become extremely easier compared to the past. I mean, using something like Revolut or Wise I can transfer money quickly and cheaply to all major currencies and countries.

But keep in mind that money is different than sending an email, because of crime. Rightfully, governments want to prevent criminal transaction, money laundering and so on - and that leads to increased transaction costs.

I'd rather have my transaction take one day or cost a couple of cents than let financial crime run rampant.

“It has become easier” and “it has become easier in proportion to the massive many-orders-of-magnitude technological improvements every other IT function benefits from” are very different statements.

Re: crime, I am in agreement that the purpose of much regulation is to prevent crime. But it’s 2022 and I still buy things on the Internet by typing in a 16-digit static credit card number, or send wires/ACH by giving people my static bank account and routing number (from which, here in the US they can withdraw arbitrary funds!) We have the technology to vastly improve the security of these mechanisms, but instead of doing that we operate with 1980s-era technology undergoing constant fraud, and rely on layers of regulation to keep them viable. That’s not inevitable, it’s a very artificial choice. Cryptocurrency is the inevitable result of making that choice, just as Napster and Apple Music were the result of record labels' decision to pursue a (profitable) CD-based music sales model in the era of the Internet.

These are great points, let's go a bit further.

Trying to regulate crypto is like trying to regulate the internet. There are some good attempts, but by using different routes we can circumvent (even in china). Blocked by firewall, use cell, blocked cell towers, use satellite, block satellite??? With crypto, regulate one, fork it, change the network, make another... change the route... use a different crypto/fiat vendor. Good luck.

Right on anonymity, but users doen't care... they just need the "perception of anonymity" or good enough. If you watch teenage trends, it's a great predictor of the near future.

Consider the teen buying weed with the choice of fiat or crypto. On their child bank account under their parent, even if they use cash, those withdrawals raise questions. But that same teen who tells their parent, yeah I just put $300 on coinbase for crypto. Now that teen can use funds without their parents knowing. Sure the trail can be traced back with some work, but it's really hard for the parent. And by trading crypto for cash outside regulated exchanges, it becomes increasingly difficult to unwind anonymity. Now reread this paragraph swapping out teen for average citizen, parent for government, and buying weed for sending money to support mom.

It's ok to not see the use case personally if you don't need it. In 1993 people thought mobile carphones were a pointless trend, and they kindof were -- nobody today uses phones mounted in a leather case in their car to call people. But with some design iteration the most profitable companies on the planet emerged. I think we're at 1993-carphone of blockchain. The use case is kindof there, but as you said the "mainstream" use case hasn't really emerged yet. However that doesn't mean it won't.

The best example I have is the stock exchange. Here's a DTCC discussion from 5 years ago before the whole GME-AMC fiasco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXy0qbwaqhY

There's an issue with unaccounted-for shares that is solved perfectly by the blockchain.

I bought some crypto for the first time recently. Because Mastercard and Visa don't work for me anymore - I can't pay for services outside my country of residence, and maybe there is some obscure way to do it not touching crypto, but I chose to get some Bitcoin because that was relatively easy.

So, illegally overcoming sanctions.

That's literally the problem

Only a problem if you’re a fan of U.S. imperialism.

Нет, но я понимаю что сейчас есть большее зло.

I'd much rather have some regulation than no regulation at all. It doesn't have to be one of the extremes.

It's not overcoming sanctions if you are not a sanctioned individual.

Or the counterparty.

Walmart any other major retailers are about to start taking payments via Lightning Network this year. Will be able to pay from cash app or others without explicitly converting from USD. Cheaper and faster than Visa etc.

I'll believe that when I see it.

How many people have ever actually bought some physical real world product with crypto?

Even among crypto fans, I suspect the answer is a very small minority.

As an actual currency, crypto has yet to get out of the starting gate. Any popularity it has is mostly among those who don't know much about monetary policy and for the most part, really don't care. Any crypto "culture" is built around myth and imagination of what might be but has never been.

Do you really believe most crypto fans are just holding and doing nothing else? Especially after earning 10x 100x 1000x in dollars? I have convinced several ppl to buy crypto pretty early but nobody of them kept holding after earning several times more they have bought.

OP said literally nothing about buying and holding, so you’re starting off with a straw man.

How many of those people have used crypto to purchase any goods?

Can VPN be considered as goods?

It would classified a service, not goods. But feels a bit pedantic in this context.

nobody of them kept holding after earning several times more they have bought.

No? So did they spend it ... or did they exchange it into something that is actually a working currency?

> actually a working currency

Isn't "working currency" a "physical real world product"?

No.

How a nice-smelling crunching-sound cash might be not a physical and not a product?

You crooks know that there are some taxing problems in some parts of the world if seller wants crypto instead of national currency.

Sick of arrogant & condescending comments like this made by ignorant people. You're flexing because you took advantage of a bubble, congratulations, nobody cares, and it's completely irrelevant to the parents comment.

I was maybe condescending but in what place I was arrogant?

And who seems more ignorant - dollars & bitcoins user or only dollars user?

> nobody cares

Except of you?

I have, I bought some jewellery for around $100 worth of crypto. Admittedly, that was before crypto culture really became what it is now - probably 2014 or so. I've distanced myself from it all now, but it was reasonably easy to buy real products back then. I'd be surprised if it wasn't easier now, assuming transaction fees aren't absurdly high.

Drugs is the answer you are seeking.

LSD, Ketamine, 2CB and MDMA. It’s cryptos only use for me personally.

https://app.ribbon.finance/v2/theta-vault/T-yvUSDC-P-ETH

This is an automated put-selling strategy using stablecoins (USDC). Every week the smart contract picks a new strike based on the Black Scholes formula and sells puts for the ETH price.

This is just one use case for one project in the DeFi space. It has $115 million deposited which is a small amount of the total put to work in DeFi.

Crypto doesn’t need to be a currency - crypto is permissionless finance. There are thousands of projects like the one I linked. HN commenters generally have no idea what’s going on in this space and continue to argue “bUt iS iT a CuRrEnCy???” talking points as if anyone gives a fuck who works or invests in the ecosystem.

People implemented automated trading strategies decades before Blockchain or "smart contracts" existed.

Key word is “permissionless” - anyone on earth can create more projects and anyone on earth can invest. No license, government, or agreement needed.

What does permissionless even mean in the context of an automated trading strategy? Ultimately, someone needs to put up the initial capital, meet marginal calls when required, and cover losses when they happen. What happens when your smart contract goes to initiate a sell and there are no buyers (a real possibility in any market but especially illiquid crypto markets)? Exchanges exist for a reason.

Everything is building blocks. For the project I linked it’s fully collateralized - you can’t withdraw money that would make the system unstable. Other projects build on other pieces of infrastructure to do all of that automatically.

Again it seems like the person I’m talking to understands very little about this space because your questions are rudimentary to anyone who understands crypto, but you comment as if you are an authority. This is the central problem with HN and crypto conversations.

Actually, the central problem with crypto advocates is that they start from the position of assuming everyone around them is an idiot and then set about building replacements for all sorts of things (banks, currencies, exchanges, legal dispute resolution mechanisms, supply chain management, databases, etc.) that they themselves do not understand and end up with fragile, inferior substitutes that never get any traction for good reason.

Clearly I am indeed speaking with someone who has no idea what they are talking about, which as I previously stated is the default HN crypto commenter.

> assuming everyone around them is an idiot

Or just subservient to a corrupted system.

In this context it means: -system is built with bearer-style assets in mind to handle liquidations without having a 'negative' balance (so instead of a margin call, onus is on the user to track prices and refill liquidity, otherwise the system liquidates the position to pay back the other market participants involved) - Anyone can put money in this - the smart contracts use other automated markets like AMMs (think of it like a two-way vending machine between Twix and M&M's, where one can set the price between two assets based on how many units of Twix and M&M's they put in initially, and people can trade into and out of them by putting one in, and getting the other. The people who put in both provide liquidity, and they get a portion of the trading fees. These two-way vending machines are set up so that if someone puts a ratio of Twix/M&M's in their vending machine that doesn't match the market price, someone can just arbitrage that out so that the price matches the market. It's like finding the cheapest place to get food

Does 100% living off of crypto count as 'actual' to you? Plenty of people in that boat.

The fact that someone doesn't want to pay an extra $3 and wait 15 minutes to buy a coke is really a poor basis for reasoning.

Is TSLA also not "actually" valuable? You have to sell it for it to do anything too.

From before the Bitcoin whitepaper, the goal has been to decouple value from arbitrary, inflationary, corporate and state-imposed forces. It was referred to as egold not ePayPal.

EDIT: literally asking for crypto perspective then downvoting when it's provided. This is why no one responds positively on HN crypto threads. Too much head in the sand with karma.

Yikes. There's a lot to unpack here.

> Does 100% living off of crypto count as 'actual' to you? Plenty of people in that boat.

Who? Lol. The overwhelming majority of people do not "live off of crypto".

> The fact that someone doesn't want to pay an extra $3 and wait 15 minutes to buy a coke is really a poor basis for reasoning.

No it isn't. If I go to CVS to buy a Coke I don't want to be there for fifteen minutes. I want to be there for a few seconds at most.

> Is TSLA also not "actually" valuable? You have to sell it for it to do anything too.

Yeah but it's unlikely people are _living off of it_ or trying to convince other people that if they get in, then they too can live off of it.

> From before the Bitcoin whitepaper, the goal has been to decouple value from arbitrary, inflationary, corporate and state-imposed forces. It was referred to as egold not ePayPal.

Yes, we know why Bitcoin exists. We also know why _it doesn't work_. The power of the State dictates the power of the currency.

Within the next year you will literally be able to go to CVS and buy whatever you want via Lightning Network and it’ll be nearly instant. An actual completed transaction too, not something that doesn’t settle until later.

I just don't care that much really. The current systems work fine IMO.

They work fine but they’re relatively expensive. 3% of the total cost of a transaction can be a double digit percentage of the profit margin of a sale. Then there’s the risk of chargebacks etc adding more cost on top of that.

I'm sure tons of fallible things work in your experience.

>If I go to CVS to buy a Coke I don't want to be there for fifteen minutes.

Nor do you want to pay a transaction fee that is twice the value of the item you are purchasing.

I hold Monero since it's popular on darknet marketplaces.

With the global drug trade estimated at ~$8 trillion, if XMR captures 1% of that it's ~$80B.

XMR is currently valued at ~$4.3B so I'd be looking at 18.6x ROI

But I don't think this is the utopia use-case that crypto proponents support

Whenever I hear someone say “if X captures 1% of the market, that’s $Y Billion” I can’t help but feel like that’s backwards: If X captured $Y Billion of revenue then it’ll have 1% marketshare. Capturing 1% marketshare is not equally easy in all markets, it’s much harder to capture 1% of a very large market. There’s no hard-and-fast rule that “surely anyone working hard enough will get at least 1% marketshare”.

I agree with you.

It's so easy! I'll just capture 1% of global GDP and make $847B/yr

I think my thesis is directionally correct (I do hold XMR broadly for the reasons stated)

But the spirit of the post was to be ridiculous

Among my peers, we learned about cryptocurrency back when it was the best/only way to buy MDMA off the Silk Road.

It is quite the opposite. It is pouplar among thoes who __know a lot__ about monetary policy and they want to get __out__ from the fraud that our current global regime is. As for "has yet to get out of the starting gate": you have to get your head out of the sand instead. It is already mainstream and it is already being adopted by huge companies including JPMorgan, KPMG and a lot of others and also by countries like El Salvador.

I've long felt that cryptocoins real promise to sellers is the lack of chargebacks / fraud. Once you've received the money, you've received the money.

For a bunch of coins the high transaction fees make it pretty pointless (why pay 20$ worth of BTC for a 5$ exchange). But something like monero's with ~0.0007$ fees [1] (which the buyer pays anyways) should be attractive to a seller.

[1]: https://www.monero.how/monero-transaction-fees

There were well over 30k attendees at the Miami Bitcoin 2022 Conference last week. Every single vendor accepted Bitcoin payments over the Lightning Network. Many local shops and restaurants in Miami Beach also accept Bitcoin.

I purchased multiple coffees and meals using BTC/LN, with zero issues and the payments were processed faster than a credit card.

In addition to physical goods, some prominent online services have been accepting Bitcoin for a while, such as Namecheap (dns registrar) and Mullvad (vpn).

One of my old pals bought lots of drugs on the dark web over the course of 5 years, nearly a decade ago. They estimate that if they would have held that bitcoin instead of it (quite literally) going up in smoke, it would be worth nearly 5 million USD today. But that's the only real world transaction that comes to mind, buying illegal stuff (which is now legal where we live). Normal people don't pay for a coffee with cryptocurrency because it's not convenient, not fast, and and not "easy".

Ukraine's military is using it.

> “In a situation like this, where the national bank is not fully operating, crypto is helping to perform fast transfers, to make it very quick and get results almost immediately,”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/11/technology/bitcoin-ukrain...

The notion that regulation equates to the fall of crypto is a falsehood. Regulation will help clarify crypto usage.

Yep. A lot of major institutions want to get in but can’t until there’s a regulatory framework in place.

> The notion that regulation equates to the fall of crypto is a falsehood.

Hence why Stripe waited for regulations first and entered in again, with everyone in this thread screaming and crying at them. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30628677

This article has no substance and the author doesn't understand the basic concepts of the ecosystem. For example trustless is completely misunderstood in this context. I agree that we need regulation but not because of the reasons outlined in this article.

> we will see the rise of a new blockchain economy, not one driven by greed, but instead driven by trust, not trustlessness.

it sounds to me like he is talking about the holochain p2p app framework, and other projects like Ceptr, Hypercore/DAT, Secure Scuttlebutt, etc., loosely united under the umbrella term 'DWeb'.

this is Cronje doing a code review of holochain a few years ago:

"The Holochain scalable distributed computing model seems to be taking decentralization to a new level, but bloody hell, is this thing just too good to be true?"

[...]

"I think the above is an important distinction. “A holochain is a validating distributed hash table (DHT) where every node enforces validation rules on data against the signed chains where the data originated, this is not consensus [instead it's agent-centric like Git]"

[...]

"The idea here, is that not all data needs to be shared with everyone. If A and B wish to transfer value, and they agree, C doesn’t have to know about it. This is a good idea for systems where not all parties need to participate, social networks, chat programs, p2p platforms, things like shared document updates. It’s essentially a large scale hosted shared git repository for collaboration."

[...]

"Holo, Holochain, Ceptr, and MetaCurrency are all the same thing, this is confusing at first, but MetaCurrency is the root, they have their next generation Operating System (Ceptr), and Ceptr is Holochain, with Holo being their first real world application system."

[...]

"First impressions, this is really good code. New standard kind of good."

[...]

"A lot of production considerations already in. This code is scary good."

[...]

"I love this code. File after file after file is just amazing. I’m going to be spending a lot more time here."

Credit given and optimization added. I can’t get enough of this code. (Editor’s note: cold water thrown at Andre about this point.)"

[...]

"Guys, this is something else, after seeing the above code, I started exploring a bit more."

[...]

"Clutter, a fully distributed twitter built on holochain."

[...]

"Holochat, a distributed Slack. This is actually insane. There is so much here already. Everyone is going on about the new distributed Internet, here it is. Ready to be used."

https://cryptobriefing.com/holochain-code-review-and-distrib...

There are some good trading opportunities. Anyone who has previously traded stocks can apply a lot of the same knowledge. See my auto crypto trading SaaS under development if you like: https://tradecast.one

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