46 ms·

Fintech dystopia

263 points by LasEspuelas 1y ago

dotcoma 1y ago
> They aren’t as stable as they claim to be, and the stability they do have arises from free-riding on the US banking system and monetary policy – and as we’ll come back to, if stablecoins are able to keep gaining market share, these parasites might eventually endanger their hosts.
- joshtbradley 1y ago
  Strong statement, where is the evidence? The GENIUS Act is quite brilliant in my opinion. It strengthens the dollar by simultaneously creating demand for USD and US Treasuries.
  - dotcoma 1y ago
    I was merely quoting the author, in Chapter 3, in the paragraph just before > Stablecoins around the world https://fintechdystopia.com/chapters/chapter3.html https://fintechdystopia.com/chapters/chapter3.html
    - joshtbradley 1y ago
      And I was merely refuting the premise of that quote.
willprice89 1y ago
> people are either still too afraid of looking like they don’t understand, still too deferential to Silicon Valley’s supposed technological expertise, or still too busy doing other things, to voice any skepticism about blockchain-based solutions 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.
- edwardbernays 1y ago
  It's a revolutionary technology for the trustless, public exchange of data. It's overhyped as a financial instrument. Anybody who desires a completely public, completely trustless infrastructure for money or property is stupid.
- antonvs 1y ago
  Try asking an LLM about it. They're good for that kind of introduction, because they can respond appropriately to your level of knowledge. Just ask it to provide references so you can verify what it's saying. But in general, hallucinations aren't a big issue with those kinds of prompts.
- lern_too_spel 1y ago
  The article you're commenting on will tell you everything you need to know.
  - willprice89 1y ago
    The article I'm commenting on is pretty clearly heavily biased against the entire field, possibly for good reason. I'd like to get my foundational understanding from a more neutral source so I can better consider the arguments put forth in TFA.
- duskwuff 1y ago
  > 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. 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.
  - steve_adams_86 1y ago
    I feel like this describes so much of the tech industry. 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"
Herring 1y ago
> Home ownership and the rest of the American dream seem out of reach for many people, and there’s very little safety net available when it comes to healthcare expenses, retirement, or just bad luck. 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-democrats-suffer-largest-loss-in-power-since-eisenhower/ https://www.quorum.us/data-driven-insights/under-obama-democ...
- voxl 1y ago
  Why do you think these two things are connected? Working out is a personal choice that should have zero barring on how we care for and help one another. For example, someone shouldn't have less access to healthcare because they don't or didn't work out. 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.
  - antonvs 1y ago
    They're saying that convincing other people to do what's in their own interests is very difficult if they don't care. Working out is given as an example: it's obviously a beneficial activity, but that's not enough to convince many people to do it regularly. 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.
  - t-3 1y ago
    > For example, someone shouldn't have less access to healthcare because they don't or didn't work out. 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.
  - 1y ago
rr808 1y ago
The funniest thing is why crypto bros talk about the Venezuelan taxi driver who has to pay Western Union $10 to send money home, and that is most of the justification for minting trillions of dollars of riches. Yeah OK Visa/MC have a monopoly but even they are worth less than most bros think.
- gora_mohanty 1y ago
  Doesn't that exist already? Mobile payment gateways are available in many countries already. India's UPI, for example,had 18+ billion transactions in June 2025, and is entirely free. Yes, the government, and probably financial institutions, do track the transactions
  - lmm 1y ago
    > Doesn't that exist already? Mobile payment gateways are available in many countries already. 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).
    - Integer 1y ago
      G20 Targets for Enhancing Cross-border Payments[1]: “Reaffirm UN SDG: Global average cost of sending $200 remittance to be no more than 3% by 2030, with no corridors with costs higher than 5%” “75% of cross-border remittance payments in every corridor to provide availability of funds for the recipient within one hour of payment initiation and for the remainder of the market to be within one business day, by end-2027” “More than 90% of individuals (including those without bank accounts) who wish to send or receive a remittance payment to have access to a means of cross-border electronic remittance payment by end-2027” [1] https://www.fsb.org/work-of-the-fsb/financial-innovation-and-structural-change/cross-border-payments/g20-targets-for-enhancing-cross-border-payments-2/ https://www.fsb.org/work-of-the-fsb/financial-innovation-and...
      - lmm 1y ago
jongjong 1y ago
I was in relatively early in the web as a developer, I was in early on the crypto movement, also as a developer. 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.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  > 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. 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.
anon-3988 1y ago
The other half of technology is the people using it. If that other half is stupid, the technology side will have to overcompensate or will maliciously abuse them. Neither is good. 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.
- salawat 1y ago
  >If that other half is stupid, the technology side will have to overcompensate or will maliciously abuse them. Repeat after me. Do not use technology to try to solve people problems.
  - esseph 1y ago
    That should be some kind of daily reminder for everyone here
  - steve_adams_86 1y ago
    This reminds me of something I read here the other day. There was an exchange about social implications of technology, and the idea of designing software based around our understanding of these matters more in the future. 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.
    - BobbyTables2 1y ago
      Well put! Turns out “tech bros” aren’t that good at sociology either! Even in computing, a profession dominated by scientists and engineers, has a lot of failing. Even the damn SPEC benchmarks don’t know to average numbers correctly.
  - 1y ago
godelski 1y ago
A lot of tech is very weird, as the author suggests. It often seems like there's good ideas but everything must go through a hype wave. Unfortunately, the hype wave makes it difficult to distinguish good actors from bad ones. Consequently the bad ones win because it's easier. It's like we've designed everything to be a lemon market. It's like we're not trying to build tech to make life better and make money along the way but to find the most exciting looking or sounding thing and figuring out how much money we can make 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
raytopia 1y ago
Beside Cryptocurrency and GNU Taler have there been anyother attempts at p2p digital currency?
- notpushkin 1y ago
  How do you define “cryptocurrency” and “P2P digital currency”?
  - yanko 1y ago
    US dollar derivative that will lower government tax collection in long term with all negative consequences... Despite all talks around - financial blow up in next up to 3-6 months is inevitable so brace for impact
    - dotcoma 1y ago
      Financial blow-up of what kind, in your opinion? The stock market? Loans? Real estate? Crypto? Thanks.
      - ptero 1y ago
        IMO US is heavily exporting its inflation by leveraging its world reserve currency status as other countries have to buy it's treasuries (petrodollar system legacy). No other country would be able to run 30+% budget deficits and sell long duration government bonds under 5%. This will break, sooner or later. When external buyers stop buying treasuries US will have to massively inflate its money supply, taking bondholders and a bunch of other groups to the cleaners. Such events have a lot of collateral damage, which may fit the definition of financial blow up. But I would place us much further away than 6-12 months, likely at 5-10 years. If there is a viable alternative to US treasuries, potentially sooner, but still not in 12 months. My 2c.
        dotcoma 1y ago
        Interesting, almost inevitable (I think) and scary in more ways than one; but I agree, this is probably not going to happen tomorrow, nor in 2026. In the shorter term... NVIDIA is 8% of the US stock market. 88% of NVIDIA’s revenue comes from enterprise-scale GPUs primarily used for generative AI, and half of that is purchased by only 4 companies, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta. By the end of 2025, these 4 companies will have spent over $560 billion in capital expenditures on AI in the last two years. Their AI revenues? Around $35 billion. And then there's Tesla, which is 'worth' more than Ford, GM, VW and Toyota combined. So, 6 out of the 7 largest companies in the US are in a strange position. Only Apple, the laggard in AI, seems relatively safe to me. https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/
gronglo 1y ago
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- deleted 1y ago
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- bepvte 1y ago
  All of the games that feature this mechanic are bad, empty, fintech husks. Often they feature same neon vaporwave artstyle, maybe with apes, and usually are transparently asset flips designed more to to feature on cryptocurrencies landing page then to be played. No good games include this ridiculous use case that I cannot imagine anyone who plays games even a little bit to want.
- xwolfi 1y ago
  imbecile, stop repeating this scam...
- jcranmer 1y ago
  > NFTs are poised to unlock the sharing of items between video games, for example. Of all of the supposed use cases for NFTs, this is one of the silliest. If you've ever looked into video game modding, one of the things you tend to realize is there is nothing close to a standard model format for art assets, so it's an insane amount of work to get an item in game A imported into game B, and that's only considering the work in mapping the visual design--the work that goes into mapping item properties is in some cases just "there's nothing you can do." (And this is despite there existing just three software packages that gets used in practice to make this stuff!)
  - gronglo 1y ago
    > it's an insane amount of work to get an item in game A imported into game B I understand why that would have been a road block in the last, but my hunch is that this type of problem (mapping visuals and item properties) is something AI would make quick work of.
    - 1y ago
deleted 1y ago
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yieldcrv 1y ago
I love automated market making and the varying research there 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
- TheCowboy 1y ago
  One problem with this is crypto AMM (automated market making) works best with stability and low volatility. For example, it's terrible in the context of prediction markets. Market makers get hosed due to real life, and traders (me) can profit at their expense. It's a big part of why prediction market traders encouraged Polymarket to develop orderbooks. And if crypto is viewed as disruptive, then it's likely inducing greater volatility. 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.
  - yieldcrv 1y ago
    Every market has a use case, and AMMs are not solving event markets, event markets tried to use AMMs and successfully pivoted to order books. I think Polymarket's implementation still has liquidity challenges, as they still have to centrally bribe people to participate. Honestly I don't like Polymarket's contract at all, but it is fast and low cost. Bribes in the solidly AMM model I think were more efficient at attracting liquidity. Slight tangent, the oracle in Polymarket is a bigger issue, people need to convince them to lower the weight of UMA. 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.
neumann 1y ago
This is a really fun well-written and on point set of articles. Thank you for sharing. 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.
- johncole 1y ago
  I agree, I see very few (none) use cases for crypto that aren’t human misery trafficking. This article seems to explain that well.
  - CaptainFever 1y ago
    Buying NSFW things.
    - _9ptr 1y ago
      Exactly
    - eszed 1y ago
      I think the further down the supply chain of "NSFW things" you go the more closely it resembles "human misery trafficking".
      - BobaFloutist 1y ago
        I don't think they were referring to live-action "NSFW things" which is traditionally called "pornography."
        eszed 1y ago
        The same applies to drug manufacturing, so far as I'm aware.
vivzkestrel 1y ago
I would like to see aidystopia.com that breaks down all the GPTs and LLMs like this
- wmf 1y ago
  https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/
ArtTimeInvestor 1y ago
I think people here on HN keep underestimating the relevance of crypto for four reasons: 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 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?
- Analemma_ 1y ago
  I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m really sick of the “ok, crypto doesn’t have any uses now, but they’re coming eventually” defense. For one thing, it’s unfalsifiable, and I suspect this is why it’s so popular, since unfalsifiable claims are pretty much the only ones that crypto boosters have left. It’s also just pathetic: Bitcoin is coming up on 20 years old; how many technologies had no compelling use cases after 20 years? And this hasn’t been a neglected 20 years, it’s been 20 years of massive hype and tens of billions in investment and R&D, with nothing to show for it. 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.
  - itsalotoffun 1y ago
    The compelling use case is grift.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- ordinaryradical 1y ago
  It has to have better use cases than fraud and gambling for the first ten years of exploration for me to buy this argument.
skybrian 1y ago
From a brief skim, this series seems too much "let me tell you my opinions" and not enough "let me tell you a story." I recommend reading Matt Levine and Patrick McKenzie instead.
cactusfrog 1y ago
I think the biggest problem with fintech is that the financial system is already decentralized, and full of tech. It really just seems like it involves using unregulated technology, which allows the skipping of restrictive regulations. This might actually be a good thing, but once a path has been proven to be non destructive the banks can just take over the market by begging the government for deregulation.
- whateveracct 1y ago
  > It really just seems like it involves using unregulated technology, which allows the skipping of restrictive regulations. This might actually be a good thing 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 :)
- joshtbradley 1y ago
  Except that stablecoins are strictly regulated thanks to the GENIUS Act and hopefully the CLARITY Act will provide the same guidelines for crypto as a whole. Gary Gensler did nothing to create regulation. David Sacks is out there doing God’s work.
mattbillenstein 1y ago
I looked at crypto a little for a startup - the thing that isn't usually mentioned is the huge downside of custody. Not your keys, not your coin - and holding those keys securely, think fire, theft, hacks, backdoored hardware wallets, etc - is really really hard to get correct. And if you mess up once anywhere - poof - all your money is gone and there's nothing you can do to get it back.
- nytesky 1y ago
  Yeah who in this world has never had to reset a password? That’s what this means. That laser inscribed metal fob with you keys on it may as well be made of platinum. 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?
  - mattbillenstein 1y ago
    I think most users have no clue how any of it works - there are so many footguns doing it yourself that probably an exchange like Coinbase is the best bet, but again, not your keys, not your coin...
    - throwawaycoins 1y ago
      I lost 13 bitcoins when the TradeHill exchange disappeared. A decade later, I have 0.2 bitcoins in Coinbase. I want to move to owning my own keys and it's hard to be confident in avoiding footguns. Any advice on how to securely transition to owning my own keys would be much appreciated.
  - UltraSane 1y ago
    Best you can do is to split your crypto among many different hardware wallets and some metal cold storage wallets. Maybe even try to memorize at least one wallet password. It just seems so stressful.
  - 1y ago
basilium 1y ago
The use case for crypto (eth) and stables (dai) at least for me is clear as day 1) to be able to save money 2) to be able to freely take it with me anywhere (on a vacation for example) 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.
Prunkton 1y ago
so much japing, so little substance and to make a point LETS JUST SWITCH TO CAPS and round it off with a reddit comment - this is capitalism baby! 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 https://blog.mollywhite.net/blockchain/ https://blog.mollywhite.net/blockchain/
jernejzen 1y ago
As someone working with African companies (legitimate businesses, mid-sized transactions), the key use case is payments in stablecoins—their banking infrastructure doesn’t allow for reliable and consistent foreign remittances. These deals would be practically impossible without stablecoins. (And to be clear, I’m someone who has never been particularly enthusiastic about crypto or blockchain.)
- whatshisface 1y ago
  Do you know why people would choose to use stablecoins, rather than trade shares in an ETF that held government bonds, or something like that? That's what stablecoins are, effectively just a share in the holding company's bank account.
  - lmm 1y ago
    How do you transfer those shares to another company to pay them?
    - imtringued 1y ago
      As someone who tried to figure this out. The answer is essentially you must actively seek out a broker that lets you do this in the first place and let me tell you, in my country there are only a handful of them that make it easy and even those will still require you to fill out a signed form on paper and mail it to them.
  - baq 1y ago
    Or a CD, or maybe just a bank account. I think of stablecoin issuers as banks because why not: they keep your cash, pay you some yield and promise to give it back to you when you ask them. Walks like a bank, quacks like a bank…
    - 0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
      Does holding stablecoins require any sort of KYC? Or do I just need to maintain the security of a private key? If the latter, I think that explains why stablecoins are popular in countries with weak institutions. In a country with strong laws, and strong rule-of-law, "Code is Law" is a solution in search of a problem. But in a country with weak laws, it can be a lifesaver.
dartharva 1y ago
Sounds like most of American "Fintech" is more about dodging regional laws and restrictions than anything else.
- baq 1y ago
  Why limit yourself to American…
  - dartharva 1y ago
    Because Fintech in a many places outside of America has been downright awesome and has opened up entire new economies. India is the biggest example.
dmantis 1y ago
This is a very American-centric post. 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.
- malthaus 1y ago
  and in what fantasy world would a system primarily used by questionable countries/organisations/individuals ever become a global standard?
  - dmantis 1y ago
    First of all, who says that it has to be a global standard? 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.
  - atemerev 1y ago
    Questionable individual here. My bank accounts are all blocked now just for the reason of my nationality, nothing else. Crypto is currently my lifeline.
willguest 1y ago
> Actually improving people’s financial wellbeing, for example, will require us to pursue real, slow, piecemeal, democratic solutions. 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.
- wilkommen 1y ago
  I think you got it in one. Eventually there will have to be a sudden "falling off the cliff", but the main question is what will happen after that. If the right ideas are in the air, it's possible that the opportunity that the crisis presents could be seized for something good, similar to the way the Great Depression created the opening for the New Deal. The progressivism movement of the 1920s laid the ideological groundwork and ensured that the right ideas were in the air when the crisis hit. The best we can do is the same - make sure that the right ideas are in the air and be ready to pounce when the crisis hits and everyone is suddenly asking "how could something like this happen?"
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ckastner 1y ago
> PayPal never did seek a banking license, arguing that it wasn’t actually accepting any deposits [...] That worked in the U.S. European banking regulators saw through this ploy and forced them to seek a banking license.
nojvek 1y ago
I agree on most points with the author, but stablecoins have fundamental value to countries that are not US whose currency gets devalued faster than US dollar, or want to do cross border transaction. 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.
blessing4321 1y ago
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lily0987 1y ago
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263 points by LasEspuelas 1y ago

> They aren’t as stable as they claim to be, and the stability they do have arises from free-riding on the US banking system and monetary policy – and as we’ll come back to, if stablecoins are able to keep gaining market share, these parasites might eventually endanger their hosts.

joshtbradley 1y ago
Strong statement, where is the evidence? The GENIUS Act is quite brilliant in my opinion. It strengthens the dollar by simultaneously creating demand for USD and US Treasuries.
- dotcoma 1y ago
  I was merely quoting the author, in Chapter 3, in the paragraph just before > Stablecoins around the world https://fintechdystopia.com/chapters/chapter3.html https://fintechdystopia.com/chapters/chapter3.html
  - joshtbradley 1y ago
    And I was merely refuting the premise of that quote.

willprice89 1y ago

> people are either still too afraid of looking like they don’t understand, still too deferential to Silicon Valley’s supposed technological expertise, or still too busy doing other things, to voice any skepticism about blockchain-based solutions 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.

edwardbernays 1y ago
It's a revolutionary technology for the trustless, public exchange of data. It's overhyped as a financial instrument. Anybody who desires a completely public, completely trustless infrastructure for money or property is stupid.
antonvs 1y ago
Try asking an LLM about it. They're good for that kind of introduction, because they can respond appropriately to your level of knowledge. Just ask it to provide references so you can verify what it's saying. But in general, hallucinations aren't a big issue with those kinds of prompts.
lern_too_spel 1y ago
The article you're commenting on will tell you everything you need to know.
- willprice89 1y ago
  The article I'm commenting on is pretty clearly heavily biased against the entire field, possibly for good reason. I'd like to get my foundational understanding from a more neutral source so I can better consider the arguments put forth in TFA.
duskwuff 1y ago
> 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. 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.
- steve_adams_86 1y ago
  I feel like this describes so much of the tech industry. 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"

Herring 1y ago

> Home ownership and the rest of the American dream seem out of reach for many people, and there’s very little safety net available when it comes to healthcare expenses, retirement, or just bad luck. 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-democrats-suffer-largest-loss-in-power-since-eisenhower/ https://www.quorum.us/data-driven-insights/under-obama-democ...

voxl 1y ago
Why do you think these two things are connected? Working out is a personal choice that should have zero barring on how we care for and help one another. For example, someone shouldn't have less access to healthcare because they don't or didn't work out. 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.
- antonvs 1y ago
  They're saying that convincing other people to do what's in their own interests is very difficult if they don't care. Working out is given as an example: it's obviously a beneficial activity, but that's not enough to convince many people to do it regularly. 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.
- t-3 1y ago
  > For example, someone shouldn't have less access to healthcare because they don't or didn't work out. 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.
- 1y ago

rr808 1y ago

The funniest thing is why crypto bros talk about the Venezuelan taxi driver who has to pay Western Union $10 to send money home, and that is most of the justification for minting trillions of dollars of riches. Yeah OK Visa/MC have a monopoly but even they are worth less than most bros think.

gora_mohanty 1y ago
Doesn't that exist already? Mobile payment gateways are available in many countries already. India's UPI, for example,had 18+ billion transactions in June 2025, and is entirely free. Yes, the government, and probably financial institutions, do track the transactions
- lmm 1y ago
  > Doesn't that exist already? Mobile payment gateways are available in many countries already. 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).
  - Integer 1y ago
    G20 Targets for Enhancing Cross-border Payments[1]: “Reaffirm UN SDG: Global average cost of sending $200 remittance to be no more than 3% by 2030, with no corridors with costs higher than 5%” “75% of cross-border remittance payments in every corridor to provide availability of funds for the recipient within one hour of payment initiation and for the remainder of the market to be within one business day, by end-2027” “More than 90% of individuals (including those without bank accounts) who wish to send or receive a remittance payment to have access to a means of cross-border electronic remittance payment by end-2027” [1] https://www.fsb.org/work-of-the-fsb/financial-innovation-and-structural-change/cross-border-payments/g20-targets-for-enhancing-cross-border-payments-2/ https://www.fsb.org/work-of-the-fsb/financial-innovation-and...
    - lmm 1y ago

jongjong 1y ago

I was in relatively early in the web as a developer, I was in early on the crypto movement, also as a developer. 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.

ryandrake 1y ago
> 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. 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.

anon-3988 1y ago

The other half of technology is the people using it. If that other half is stupid, the technology side will have to overcompensate or will maliciously abuse them. Neither is good. 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.

salawat 1y ago
>If that other half is stupid, the technology side will have to overcompensate or will maliciously abuse them. Repeat after me. Do not use technology to try to solve people problems.
- esseph 1y ago
  That should be some kind of daily reminder for everyone here
- steve_adams_86 1y ago
  This reminds me of something I read here the other day. There was an exchange about social implications of technology, and the idea of designing software based around our understanding of these matters more in the future. 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.
  - BobbyTables2 1y ago
    Well put! Turns out “tech bros” aren’t that good at sociology either! Even in computing, a profession dominated by scientists and engineers, has a lot of failing. Even the damn SPEC benchmarks don’t know to average numbers correctly.
- 1y ago

godelski 1y ago

A lot of tech is very weird, as the author suggests. It often seems like there's good ideas but everything must go through a hype wave. Unfortunately, the hype wave makes it difficult to distinguish good actors from bad ones. Consequently the bad ones win because it's easier. It's like we've designed everything to be a lemon market. It's like we're not trying to build tech to make life better and make money along the way but to find the most exciting looking or sounding thing and figuring out how much money we can make 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

raytopia 1y ago

Beside Cryptocurrency and GNU Taler have there been anyother attempts at p2p digital currency?

notpushkin 1y ago
How do you define “cryptocurrency” and “P2P digital currency”?
- yanko 1y ago
  US dollar derivative that will lower government tax collection in long term with all negative consequences... Despite all talks around - financial blow up in next up to 3-6 months is inevitable so brace for impact
  - dotcoma 1y ago
    Financial blow-up of what kind, in your opinion? The stock market? Loans? Real estate? Crypto? Thanks.
    - ptero 1y ago
      IMO US is heavily exporting its inflation by leveraging its world reserve currency status as other countries have to buy it's treasuries (petrodollar system legacy). No other country would be able to run 30+% budget deficits and sell long duration government bonds under 5%. This will break, sooner or later. When external buyers stop buying treasuries US will have to massively inflate its money supply, taking bondholders and a bunch of other groups to the cleaners. Such events have a lot of collateral damage, which may fit the definition of financial blow up. But I would place us much further away than 6-12 months, likely at 5-10 years. If there is a viable alternative to US treasuries, potentially sooner, but still not in 12 months. My 2c.
      - dotcoma 1y ago
        Interesting, almost inevitable (I think) and scary in more ways than one; but I agree, this is probably not going to happen tomorrow, nor in 2026. In the shorter term... NVIDIA is 8% of the US stock market. 88% of NVIDIA’s revenue comes from enterprise-scale GPUs primarily used for generative AI, and half of that is purchased by only 4 companies, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta. By the end of 2025, these 4 companies will have spent over $560 billion in capital expenditures on AI in the last two years. Their AI revenues? Around $35 billion. And then there's Tesla, which is 'worth' more than Ford, GM, VW and Toyota combined. So, 6 out of the 7 largest companies in the US are in a strange position. Only Apple, the laggard in AI, seems relatively safe to me. https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/

gronglo 1y ago

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bepvte 1y ago
All of the games that feature this mechanic are bad, empty, fintech husks. Often they feature same neon vaporwave artstyle, maybe with apes, and usually are transparently asset flips designed more to to feature on cryptocurrencies landing page then to be played. No good games include this ridiculous use case that I cannot imagine anyone who plays games even a little bit to want.
xwolfi 1y ago
imbecile, stop repeating this scam...
jcranmer 1y ago
> NFTs are poised to unlock the sharing of items between video games, for example. Of all of the supposed use cases for NFTs, this is one of the silliest. If you've ever looked into video game modding, one of the things you tend to realize is there is nothing close to a standard model format for art assets, so it's an insane amount of work to get an item in game A imported into game B, and that's only considering the work in mapping the visual design--the work that goes into mapping item properties is in some cases just "there's nothing you can do." (And this is despite there existing just three software packages that gets used in practice to make this stuff!)
- gronglo 1y ago
  > it's an insane amount of work to get an item in game A imported into game B I understand why that would have been a road block in the last, but my hunch is that this type of problem (mapping visuals and item properties) is something AI would make quick work of.
  - 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

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yieldcrv 1y ago

I love automated market making and the varying research there 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

TheCowboy 1y ago
One problem with this is crypto AMM (automated market making) works best with stability and low volatility. For example, it's terrible in the context of prediction markets. Market makers get hosed due to real life, and traders (me) can profit at their expense. It's a big part of why prediction market traders encouraged Polymarket to develop orderbooks. And if crypto is viewed as disruptive, then it's likely inducing greater volatility. 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.
- yieldcrv 1y ago
  Every market has a use case, and AMMs are not solving event markets, event markets tried to use AMMs and successfully pivoted to order books. I think Polymarket's implementation still has liquidity challenges, as they still have to centrally bribe people to participate. Honestly I don't like Polymarket's contract at all, but it is fast and low cost. Bribes in the solidly AMM model I think were more efficient at attracting liquidity. Slight tangent, the oracle in Polymarket is a bigger issue, people need to convince them to lower the weight of UMA. 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.

neumann 1y ago

This is a really fun well-written and on point set of articles. Thank you for sharing. 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.

johncole 1y ago
I agree, I see very few (none) use cases for crypto that aren’t human misery trafficking. This article seems to explain that well.
- CaptainFever 1y ago
  Buying NSFW things.
  - _9ptr 1y ago
    Exactly
  - eszed 1y ago
    I think the further down the supply chain of "NSFW things" you go the more closely it resembles "human misery trafficking".
    - BobaFloutist 1y ago
      I don't think they were referring to live-action "NSFW things" which is traditionally called "pornography."
      - eszed 1y ago
        The same applies to drug manufacturing, so far as I'm aware.

vivzkestrel 1y ago

I would like to see aidystopia.com that breaks down all the GPTs and LLMs like this

wmf 1y ago
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/

ArtTimeInvestor 1y ago

I think people here on HN keep underestimating the relevance of crypto for four reasons: 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 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?

Analemma_ 1y ago
I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m really sick of the “ok, crypto doesn’t have any uses now, but they’re coming eventually” defense. For one thing, it’s unfalsifiable, and I suspect this is why it’s so popular, since unfalsifiable claims are pretty much the only ones that crypto boosters have left. It’s also just pathetic: Bitcoin is coming up on 20 years old; how many technologies had no compelling use cases after 20 years? And this hasn’t been a neglected 20 years, it’s been 20 years of massive hype and tens of billions in investment and R&D, with nothing to show for it. 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.
- itsalotoffun 1y ago
  The compelling use case is grift.
- deleted 1y ago
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ordinaryradical 1y ago
It has to have better use cases than fraud and gambling for the first ten years of exploration for me to buy this argument.

skybrian 1y ago

From a brief skim, this series seems too much "let me tell you my opinions" and not enough "let me tell you a story." I recommend reading Matt Levine and Patrick McKenzie instead.

cactusfrog 1y ago

I think the biggest problem with fintech is that the financial system is already decentralized, and full of tech. It really just seems like it involves using unregulated technology, which allows the skipping of restrictive regulations. This might actually be a good thing, but once a path has been proven to be non destructive the banks can just take over the market by begging the government for deregulation.

whateveracct 1y ago
> It really just seems like it involves using unregulated technology, which allows the skipping of restrictive regulations. This might actually be a good thing 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 :)
joshtbradley 1y ago
Except that stablecoins are strictly regulated thanks to the GENIUS Act and hopefully the CLARITY Act will provide the same guidelines for crypto as a whole. Gary Gensler did nothing to create regulation. David Sacks is out there doing God’s work.

mattbillenstein 1y ago

I looked at crypto a little for a startup - the thing that isn't usually mentioned is the huge downside of custody. Not your keys, not your coin - and holding those keys securely, think fire, theft, hacks, backdoored hardware wallets, etc - is really really hard to get correct. And if you mess up once anywhere - poof - all your money is gone and there's nothing you can do to get it back.

nytesky 1y ago
Yeah who in this world has never had to reset a password? That’s what this means. That laser inscribed metal fob with you keys on it may as well be made of platinum. 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?
- mattbillenstein 1y ago
  I think most users have no clue how any of it works - there are so many footguns doing it yourself that probably an exchange like Coinbase is the best bet, but again, not your keys, not your coin...
  - throwawaycoins 1y ago
    I lost 13 bitcoins when the TradeHill exchange disappeared. A decade later, I have 0.2 bitcoins in Coinbase. I want to move to owning my own keys and it's hard to be confident in avoiding footguns. Any advice on how to securely transition to owning my own keys would be much appreciated.
- UltraSane 1y ago
  Best you can do is to split your crypto among many different hardware wallets and some metal cold storage wallets. Maybe even try to memorize at least one wallet password. It just seems so stressful.
- 1y ago

basilium 1y ago

The use case for crypto (eth) and stables (dai) at least for me is clear as day 1) to be able to save money 2) to be able to freely take it with me anywhere (on a vacation for example) 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.

Prunkton 1y ago

so much japing, so little substance and to make a point LETS JUST SWITCH TO CAPS and round it off with a reddit comment - this is capitalism baby! 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 https://blog.mollywhite.net/blockchain/ https://blog.mollywhite.net/blockchain/

jernejzen 1y ago

As someone working with African companies (legitimate businesses, mid-sized transactions), the key use case is payments in stablecoins—their banking infrastructure doesn’t allow for reliable and consistent foreign remittances. These deals would be practically impossible without stablecoins. (And to be clear, I’m someone who has never been particularly enthusiastic about crypto or blockchain.)

whatshisface 1y ago
Do you know why people would choose to use stablecoins, rather than trade shares in an ETF that held government bonds, or something like that? That's what stablecoins are, effectively just a share in the holding company's bank account.
- lmm 1y ago
  How do you transfer those shares to another company to pay them?
  - imtringued 1y ago
    As someone who tried to figure this out. The answer is essentially you must actively seek out a broker that lets you do this in the first place and let me tell you, in my country there are only a handful of them that make it easy and even those will still require you to fill out a signed form on paper and mail it to them.
- baq 1y ago
  Or a CD, or maybe just a bank account. I think of stablecoin issuers as banks because why not: they keep your cash, pay you some yield and promise to give it back to you when you ask them. Walks like a bank, quacks like a bank…
  - 0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
    Does holding stablecoins require any sort of KYC? Or do I just need to maintain the security of a private key? If the latter, I think that explains why stablecoins are popular in countries with weak institutions. In a country with strong laws, and strong rule-of-law, "Code is Law" is a solution in search of a problem. But in a country with weak laws, it can be a lifesaver.

dartharva 1y ago

Sounds like most of American "Fintech" is more about dodging regional laws and restrictions than anything else.

baq 1y ago
Why limit yourself to American…
- dartharva 1y ago
  Because Fintech in a many places outside of America has been downright awesome and has opened up entire new economies. India is the biggest example.

dmantis 1y ago

This is a very American-centric post. 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.

malthaus 1y ago
and in what fantasy world would a system primarily used by questionable countries/organisations/individuals ever become a global standard?
- dmantis 1y ago
  First of all, who says that it has to be a global standard? 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.
- atemerev 1y ago
  Questionable individual here. My bank accounts are all blocked now just for the reason of my nationality, nothing else. Crypto is currently my lifeline.

willguest 1y ago

> Actually improving people’s financial wellbeing, for example, will require us to pursue real, slow, piecemeal, democratic solutions. 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.

wilkommen 1y ago
I think you got it in one. Eventually there will have to be a sudden "falling off the cliff", but the main question is what will happen after that. If the right ideas are in the air, it's possible that the opportunity that the crisis presents could be seized for something good, similar to the way the Great Depression created the opening for the New Deal. The progressivism movement of the 1920s laid the ideological groundwork and ensured that the right ideas were in the air when the crisis hit. The best we can do is the same - make sure that the right ideas are in the air and be ready to pounce when the crisis hits and everyone is suddenly asking "how could something like this happen?"

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ckastner 1y ago

> PayPal never did seek a banking license, arguing that it wasn’t actually accepting any deposits [...] That worked in the U.S. European banking regulators saw through this ploy and forced them to seek a banking license.

nojvek 1y ago

I agree on most points with the author, but stablecoins have fundamental value to countries that are not US whose currency gets devalued faster than US dollar, or want to do cross border transaction. 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.

blessing4321 1y ago

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lily0987 1y ago

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