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I started in crypto just three years ago, and while it's a bit more alternative, overall it's just business. Sure, I get paid in all kinds of tokens, and it's

by k__ 2y ago

I started in crypto just three years ago, and while it's a bit more alternative, overall it's just business. Sure, I get paid in all kinds of tokens, and it's nice to see some coins rise after I get paid, which makes freelancer work feel a tiiiiiny bit more like being and employee with stock. But it's just a job like any other. I write articles, I write code, I talk with clients, investors, users... And at the end of the day I get paid.

staunton 2y ago
There's ransomware hackers in some countries who also write reports while getting health insurance and paid parental leave...
- k__ 2y ago
  Fair.
- b112 2y ago
  You could say the same about anything, let's pick cars. "There are people driving cars to commit crimes, like bank robbery!" Oh no! Now all cars and their drivers are criminals, I suppose? Grandma driving to the grocery store surely is up to no good? I think the claim being attempted is that crypto is mostly used for crime. Yet is that true? How many transactions happened yesterday? And how many were nefarious?
  - danielheath 2y ago
    > I think the claim being attempted is that crypto is mostly used for crime. Yet is that true? I mean... whether it's true or not, it sure _looks true from the outside_. What it looks like from the outside has little bearing on the underlying reality, but it's extremely relevant to questions like "will I be viewed with suspicion for having worked with this" or "is my company likely to end up subject to restrictive regulation". Assuming (I genuinely do not know) that the crypto industry has got legitimate uses which are not dwarfed by illegitimate ones, it has got a _massive_ image problem - because "everyone knows" it's for crime.
  - staunton 2y ago
    I made no specific claim about "crypto" one way or the other. My point is that to decide if some activity is legal, or moral, etc., you have to look at what is actually done. It's not enough to look at whether the day-to-day work "feels like a normal job", or "looks like a normal job" from the outside. You can have a highly respectable job while interacting with people who all look like stereotypical movie mobsters (e.g. prison social worker). You can also sit in a respectable office all day wearing a nice suit while committing genocide.
    - Terr_ 2y ago
      > "He was just a little villain. An old-fashioned craftsman, making crimes one-off. The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present–they are real." -- Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold
      - ElFitz 2y ago
        Totally unrelated. But first Discworld, now this? I need your book recommendations, or reading list :)
        wiredfool 2y ago
        I can definitely recommend the Vorkosigan series by Bujold. That quote is from the first one, and echoes here and there throughout.
        ElFitz 2y ago
        Thank you!
        Terr_ 2y ago
        Pratchett and Bujold are pretty much my top-two, which extends the the degree to which I feel compelled to share quotes. Both are rather character-oriented and often I find things (jokes, references, turns of phrase) on a re-read that I didn't catch the first time. My main caution is that I wouldn't start with Pratchett's earliest works--there are already bunch of suggested reading-order guides out there. I spent a decade thinking Pratchett was overrated because I started with the wrong book. (IIRC The Colour of Magic seemed just too much of a parade of absurd situations for their own sake.) I like the City Watch books (starting in Guards! Guards!) and Small Gods is a decent stand-alone. For Bujold, the Vorkosigan series is the flagship, where I'd put the Curse of Chalion (fantasy) as a second.
  - wpietri 2y ago
    That's not the right question. There are three buckets. The biggest bucket is going to be purely financial trades. This is true whether you're trading wheat or copper or oil or whatever. Anybody who thinks they can make a dime but doesn't actually want any of the underlying is here. Then of the rest, you split by social value. For the traditional markets, most of these trades will be socially positive. Wheat buyers and wheat sellers are mostly making things that people actually want and benefit from. Anything like that is in the "positive social value" bucket. The third bucket is socially negative. In the traditional commodities, this includes the people who were trading nickel but just swapped in rocks, and other kinds of fraud. Or if you were a terrorist who was buying oil to dump it on the Great Barrier Reef, that'd be there too. Most crypto trading is in the first bucket, because that's true of almost any financial market. People who need the underlying don't trade much compared with people who are seeking financial advantage. But of the rest, unlike traditional markets, most of the non-financial trades are socially negative. Cryptocurrencies main non-trading uses are things like ransomware, scams, pump-and-dumps, rug pulls, and money laundering, plus other efforts to evade the controls of the traditional financial system. So the right societal question is: Ignoring the financial traders, what's the ratio between the socially positive and socially negative uses of the underlying?
    - b112 2y ago
      So the right societal question is: Ignoring the financial traders, what's the ratio between the socially positive and socially negative uses of the underlying? If you look at my last two sentences, that is precisely what I said, so saying it's "not the right question", then asking the same question isn't very fair.
      - wpietri 2y ago
        No, in my reading you were conflating the financial trader bucket and the socially positive bucket in a way that minimizes the socially negative bucket. Which is a very common defense of crypto. Your analogy, driving cars, certainly primes people in that direction, as the great bulk of current car trips aren't caused by traders looking to make a buck off the underlying motion of the people who actually need to get somewhere. I think you're also grossly misunderstanding the most relevant claim, which is not that most crypto trades are directly criminal. I think most informed people agree that these days the bulk of them are speculative. (But speculators can speculate in anything, so crypto doesn't add anything to the world there.) The common claim is instead that the places where crypto has a direct advantage for actual use are mostly criminal. And I think that's pretty obviously the case. When you compare the original Bitcoin paper with the current state of things like online bill pay, debit cards, Zelle, Square, Cash App, Venmo, M-Pesa, and the like, it's clear that Bitcoin has failed in it stated goals. It's just not very good at solving the problems normal people have transmitting money. Who needs to move money around but can't use any of the effective legit options? It's mostly criminals.
pavlov 2y ago
> “I get paid in all kinds of tokens, and it's nice to see some coins rise after I get paid, which makes freelancer work feel a tiiiiiny bit more like being an employee with stock.” This is the very definition of a security in US law. These tokens are unregulated penny stocks. (Of course you and your employers may be in another country and this doesn’t apply.) It certainly doesn’t seem like a big crime. And maybe your employers are the good guys. But everyone knows there are also tons of bad actors in crypto who sell junk tokens to retail investors who lose their savings. This happens all over the world: millions of Nigerians have invested in crypto, but it’s almost exclusively into tokens created by local influencers that end up being worthless in a few years. That’s the overwhelming global reality of crypto, not the stories of noble dissidents receiving Bitcoin.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- k__ 2y ago
  Yes, it's mostly a shit show. NFTs, meme coins, etc. I don't understand most of that. I keep to my niche, build with stuff I think is interesting, and keep away from most of it.
wpietri 2y ago
Does it bother you that there's no actual value creation at the bottom of it? I used to work for financial traders, and while I was there I'd justify it to myself in the usual terms: the traditional commodities markets increase liquidity and keep prices low for people doing actually socially valuable things, like growing wheat or turning it into food. But honestly, even then that could have been accomplished with 1/10th of the effort and smarts that was put into trading, and it was mostly driven by greedy people and/or fools, so when I got out of that industry I was glad to be shut of it. Crypto strikes me as yet worse, in that there's no underlying value, just a circus of greed.
- digging 2y ago
  The crypto industry is extremely untrustworthy, but for me, I don't think "there's no actual value creation at the bottom of it" is more true of e.g. Bitcoin than USD. Assume USD is somehow attached to food, shelter, and other necessities (for the record, I agree that it is, but only indirectly). Those necessities are the things we need, but we don't need money to create them. We just need energy and physical resources (which, technically, also just require energy). All money is an accounting system built on top of the physical processes that we use to grow, gather, hunt, cultivate, shape, and build matter. So there's nothing weird, to me, about money being built almost directly on top of energy usage. I think it makes sense. Most money is built on top of gold or other precious-but-unnecessary materials, which I can't say seems more attached to real value than energy. But even if we assume 1 unit of money is 1 day's worth of food, who's to say that unit of food is actually a necessity for the holder? That food is a specialized form of energy; energy which has been used and which can't be unused. The food itself is an accounting of entropy. But it (mostly) can't be converted into shelter or other necessities, only traded or stored. So, again, I don't see "this money is an accounting of energy used" as outlandish, but reasonable. Let me conclude, however, by roundly rebuking crypto grifters and the majority of the industry. They're generally not operating on the arguments I've made above anyway.
  - wpietri 2y ago
    All currencies are built on trust. The reason the wildcat banking era failed was lack of trust. The reason various national currencies failed was never about resources, but lack of trust in the government behind the currency. The USD has been a very strong currency because it's backed by a stable government with a strong economy and has a stoutly independent central bank, which has built up enormous trust as a custodian of the currency. I grant that the rhetoric of Bitcoin is about energy usage, but it doesn't work that way in practice. The most obvious use is the rise of Ethereum and its shift to proof of stake rather than proof of work. But there's plenty of other evidence. David Rosenthal has some good evidence there, like: https://blog.dshr.org/2024/10/it-was-ten-years-ago-today.html https://blog.dshr.org/2024/10/it-was-ten-years-ago-today.htm... https://blog.dshr.org/2024/05/sufficiently-decentralized.html https://blog.dshr.org/2024/05/sufficiently-decentralized.htm...

by k__ 2y ago

staunton 2y ago

There's ransomware hackers in some countries who also write reports while getting health insurance and paid parental leave...

k__ 2y ago
Fair.
b112 2y ago
You could say the same about anything, let's pick cars. "There are people driving cars to commit crimes, like bank robbery!" Oh no! Now all cars and their drivers are criminals, I suppose? Grandma driving to the grocery store surely is up to no good? I think the claim being attempted is that crypto is mostly used for crime. Yet is that true? How many transactions happened yesterday? And how many were nefarious?
- danielheath 2y ago
  > I think the claim being attempted is that crypto is mostly used for crime. Yet is that true? I mean... whether it's true or not, it sure _looks true from the outside_. What it looks like from the outside has little bearing on the underlying reality, but it's extremely relevant to questions like "will I be viewed with suspicion for having worked with this" or "is my company likely to end up subject to restrictive regulation". Assuming (I genuinely do not know) that the crypto industry has got legitimate uses which are not dwarfed by illegitimate ones, it has got a _massive_ image problem - because "everyone knows" it's for crime.
- staunton 2y ago
  I made no specific claim about "crypto" one way or the other. My point is that to decide if some activity is legal, or moral, etc., you have to look at what is actually done. It's not enough to look at whether the day-to-day work "feels like a normal job", or "looks like a normal job" from the outside. You can have a highly respectable job while interacting with people who all look like stereotypical movie mobsters (e.g. prison social worker). You can also sit in a respectable office all day wearing a nice suit while committing genocide.
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    > "He was just a little villain. An old-fashioned craftsman, making crimes one-off. The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present–they are real." -- Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold
    - ElFitz 2y ago
      Totally unrelated. But first Discworld, now this? I need your book recommendations, or reading list :)
      - wiredfool 2y ago
        I can definitely recommend the Vorkosigan series by Bujold. That quote is from the first one, and echoes here and there throughout.
        ElFitz 2y ago
        Thank you!
      - Terr_ 2y ago
        Pratchett and Bujold are pretty much my top-two, which extends the the degree to which I feel compelled to share quotes. Both are rather character-oriented and often I find things (jokes, references, turns of phrase) on a re-read that I didn't catch the first time. My main caution is that I wouldn't start with Pratchett's earliest works--there are already bunch of suggested reading-order guides out there. I spent a decade thinking Pratchett was overrated because I started with the wrong book. (IIRC The Colour of Magic seemed just too much of a parade of absurd situations for their own sake.) I like the City Watch books (starting in Guards! Guards!) and Small Gods is a decent stand-alone. For Bujold, the Vorkosigan series is the flagship, where I'd put the Curse of Chalion (fantasy) as a second.
- wpietri 2y ago
  That's not the right question. There are three buckets. The biggest bucket is going to be purely financial trades. This is true whether you're trading wheat or copper or oil or whatever. Anybody who thinks they can make a dime but doesn't actually want any of the underlying is here. Then of the rest, you split by social value. For the traditional markets, most of these trades will be socially positive. Wheat buyers and wheat sellers are mostly making things that people actually want and benefit from. Anything like that is in the "positive social value" bucket. The third bucket is socially negative. In the traditional commodities, this includes the people who were trading nickel but just swapped in rocks, and other kinds of fraud. Or if you were a terrorist who was buying oil to dump it on the Great Barrier Reef, that'd be there too. Most crypto trading is in the first bucket, because that's true of almost any financial market. People who need the underlying don't trade much compared with people who are seeking financial advantage. But of the rest, unlike traditional markets, most of the non-financial trades are socially negative. Cryptocurrencies main non-trading uses are things like ransomware, scams, pump-and-dumps, rug pulls, and money laundering, plus other efforts to evade the controls of the traditional financial system. So the right societal question is: Ignoring the financial traders, what's the ratio between the socially positive and socially negative uses of the underlying?
  - b112 2y ago
    So the right societal question is: Ignoring the financial traders, what's the ratio between the socially positive and socially negative uses of the underlying? If you look at my last two sentences, that is precisely what I said, so saying it's "not the right question", then asking the same question isn't very fair.
    - wpietri 2y ago
      No, in my reading you were conflating the financial trader bucket and the socially positive bucket in a way that minimizes the socially negative bucket. Which is a very common defense of crypto. Your analogy, driving cars, certainly primes people in that direction, as the great bulk of current car trips aren't caused by traders looking to make a buck off the underlying motion of the people who actually need to get somewhere. I think you're also grossly misunderstanding the most relevant claim, which is not that most crypto trades are directly criminal. I think most informed people agree that these days the bulk of them are speculative. (But speculators can speculate in anything, so crypto doesn't add anything to the world there.) The common claim is instead that the places where crypto has a direct advantage for actual use are mostly criminal. And I think that's pretty obviously the case. When you compare the original Bitcoin paper with the current state of things like online bill pay, debit cards, Zelle, Square, Cash App, Venmo, M-Pesa, and the like, it's clear that Bitcoin has failed in it stated goals. It's just not very good at solving the problems normal people have transmitting money. Who needs to move money around but can't use any of the effective legit options? It's mostly criminals.

pavlov 2y ago

> “I get paid in all kinds of tokens, and it's nice to see some coins rise after I get paid, which makes freelancer work feel a tiiiiiny bit more like being an employee with stock.” This is the very definition of a security in US law. These tokens are unregulated penny stocks. (Of course you and your employers may be in another country and this doesn’t apply.) It certainly doesn’t seem like a big crime. And maybe your employers are the good guys. But everyone knows there are also tons of bad actors in crypto who sell junk tokens to retail investors who lose their savings. This happens all over the world: millions of Nigerians have invested in crypto, but it’s almost exclusively into tokens created by local influencers that end up being worthless in a few years. That’s the overwhelming global reality of crypto, not the stories of noble dissidents receiving Bitcoin.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
k__ 2y ago
Yes, it's mostly a shit show. NFTs, meme coins, etc. I don't understand most of that. I keep to my niche, build with stuff I think is interesting, and keep away from most of it.

wpietri 2y ago

Does it bother you that there's no actual value creation at the bottom of it? I used to work for financial traders, and while I was there I'd justify it to myself in the usual terms: the traditional commodities markets increase liquidity and keep prices low for people doing actually socially valuable things, like growing wheat or turning it into food. But honestly, even then that could have been accomplished with 1/10th of the effort and smarts that was put into trading, and it was mostly driven by greedy people and/or fools, so when I got out of that industry I was glad to be shut of it. Crypto strikes me as yet worse, in that there's no underlying value, just a circus of greed.

digging 2y ago
The crypto industry is extremely untrustworthy, but for me, I don't think "there's no actual value creation at the bottom of it" is more true of e.g. Bitcoin than USD. Assume USD is somehow attached to food, shelter, and other necessities (for the record, I agree that it is, but only indirectly). Those necessities are the things we need, but we don't need money to create them. We just need energy and physical resources (which, technically, also just require energy). All money is an accounting system built on top of the physical processes that we use to grow, gather, hunt, cultivate, shape, and build matter. So there's nothing weird, to me, about money being built almost directly on top of energy usage. I think it makes sense. Most money is built on top of gold or other precious-but-unnecessary materials, which I can't say seems more attached to real value than energy. But even if we assume 1 unit of money is 1 day's worth of food, who's to say that unit of food is actually a necessity for the holder? That food is a specialized form of energy; energy which has been used and which can't be unused. The food itself is an accounting of entropy. But it (mostly) can't be converted into shelter or other necessities, only traded or stored. So, again, I don't see "this money is an accounting of energy used" as outlandish, but reasonable. Let me conclude, however, by roundly rebuking crypto grifters and the majority of the industry. They're generally not operating on the arguments I've made above anyway.
- wpietri 2y ago
  All currencies are built on trust. The reason the wildcat banking era failed was lack of trust. The reason various national currencies failed was never about resources, but lack of trust in the government behind the currency. The USD has been a very strong currency because it's backed by a stable government with a strong economy and has a stoutly independent central bank, which has built up enormous trust as a custodian of the currency. I grant that the rhetoric of Bitcoin is about energy usage, but it doesn't work that way in practice. The most obvious use is the rise of Ethereum and its shift to proof of stake rather than proof of work. But there's plenty of other evidence. David Rosenthal has some good evidence there, like: https://blog.dshr.org/2024/10/it-was-ten-years-ago-today.html https://blog.dshr.org/2024/10/it-was-ten-years-ago-today.htm... https://blog.dshr.org/2024/05/sufficiently-decentralized.html https://blog.dshr.org/2024/05/sufficiently-decentralized.htm...