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I've been deep into crypto for years and I was a big stablecoin supporter. I was fascinated by the tech and I still am. But everything outside the tech itself i

• sfmz 3mo ago
  An emerging use-case is a bank account for AI agents. I read that Coinbase 'Base' Ethereum layer2 is popular for AI banking.
  • ses1984 3mo ago
    Or you could just give your agents a debit card number loaded with only as much money as you specify.
    • sfmz 3mo ago
      You spin up agents and want them to paid without opening a bank account... or spin-up hundreds of agents... or your country isn't very well integrated with western banking rails. I think there is more to consider.
      • ses1984 3mo ago
        You don’t need to open a bank account to get a prepaid debit card.
        • mothballed 3mo ago
          The amount of money you can load or receive into a debit card is limited without doing enough KYC overhead you could have gotten a bank account with the same effort. If you try automating bots to do KYC for debit cards what you'll be doing is basically looking like a money launderer and get all your accounts shut down.
        • lxgr 3mo ago
          This is highly country dependent. Anonymous prepaid cards aren't as widely available as you might think, and often they have very high user-paid fees.
          • ses1984 3mo ago
            Maybe it’s just my lack of imagination, but I don’t see a use case for giving agents money when they can barely be trusted to not break out of a sandbox and cause hallucinatory chaos. Let’s say for a minute this is a failure of my imagination. Does each sub agent really need to be able to independently transact?
            • lxgr 3mo ago
              I could see a future in which ad-funded web sites charge agents some tiny amount per request instead of outright blocking non-human visitors. Besides, you're already effectively giving agents money (tokens aren't free, and agents decide when to stop consuming new ones), this is just more explicit :)
              • ses1984 3mo ago
                Why not have sub agents talk to a payment service? Sub agents should ultimately be associated with a human or business entity, the human or business entity could provide a single payment service for agents.
        • derangedHorse 3mo ago
          Which reloadable debit cards have no KYC requirements?
    • sunshine-o 3mo ago
      I believe with x402 and USDC you can pay as low as $0.000001 per HTTP request with no fees. The existing "credit card" infrastructure is not designed to compete with that. Now some actors like Paypal could have come up with an HTTP 402 standard and implementation 25 years ago but they never did. I am not sure why.
      • jallmann 3mo ago
        > I believe with x402 and USDC you can pay as low as $0.000001 per HTTP request with no fees. On-chain transactions are still not free. x402 isn't settled in batches or rolled up anywhere AFAIK, so large volumes of tiny payments are still not cost-effective. Facilitators such as Coinbase only subsidize transactions up to a point: https://docs.cdp.coinbase.com/x402/core-concepts/facilitator https://docs.cdp.coinbase.com/x402/core-concepts/facilitator There are ways around this, but with tradeoffs.
    • lxgr 3mo ago
      If you're fine with the usual 0.20 - 0.30 USD of processing fees, you definitely can. Cards work well for many things; micropayments are not one of them.
  • pants2 3mo ago
    I recently set up an agent with a Base wallet and made a few x402 API calls. Pretty convenient!
• rglullis 3mo ago
  Exactly. Cryptocurrency is useful as as a backup system against failing/weak institutions. Just that. Like insurance, it was not there to make anyone's lives better but simply to become a safeguard to avoid complete collapse.
  • pjc50 3mo ago
    However, I think there's an argument that the existence of that backup, or at least its marketing, might of itself encourage people to make the institutions fail so they can profit from it.
    • rglullis 3mo ago
      That's a weak argument. If the institutions can collapse because a few powerful people can work against it, then the institution has already failed in the first place. Trump and the general rise of Populism is not the cause of the fall of Western democracies, it is a consequence.
      • mrhottakes 3mo ago
        You don't seem to grasp that the answer isn't "oh well, Western democracies were just going to fail I guess"
        • inigyou 3mo ago
          The answer to what?
          • mrhottakes 3mo ago
            The answer to institutional collapse, the topic of the post to which I replied.
      • felixgallo 3mo ago
        You're going to have to show your work on that one. Western democracies are suffering not because they are failing, but because they have been chipped away at for decades by fanatical right wing billionaires intent on eliminating taxes and securing their place in a perpetual oligarchy.
• Sharlin 3mo ago
  Technological solutions to social problems only tend to work when the problems are of the type "I wish it were easier to rid people of their money".
  • akoboldfrying 3mo ago
    Agriculture. Plumbing. The printing press. Electricity. Vaccines. Fiat money itself, which is a technology that is better than the technology of barter, which is better than each person having to grow or make every material thing they need.
    • jakelazaroff 3mo ago
      "How do we remove feces from our living spaces" and "how do we stop dying from pathogens" are not social problems.
      • dghlsakjg 3mo ago
        I can’t think of many better examples of social problems than sanitation and public health.
        • jakelazaroff 3mo ago
          In that case, what are examples of non-social problems you can think of?
          • dghlsakjg 3mo ago
            A broken TV. If my neighbour has a "removing raw sewage from living spaces" problem, it is very much a concern for me. If my neighbour can't watch TV, I don't care.
            • pixl97 3mo ago
              Even a broken TV can be a social problem in some circumstances. TV breaks because entropy doesn't like you = personal problem. TV breaks because manufacture designed it to fail 3 months after warranty = social problem.
• ozgrakkurt 3mo ago
  I live in less developed countries so it is actually useful for me but I see it the same way as you wrote here. Low-life businessmen ruined the technology outside of some spaces where there is strong tech leadership. They did too much damage to reputation of the whole industry They did the same butchering to LLM/AI tech.
  • netsharc 3mo ago
    Silicon Valley was a place of engineering invention, and then the money-people saw, "Oh, there's riches to be made here!"...
    • dghlsakjg 3mo ago
      Silicon Valley came up as a result of the military industrial complex in the Cold War. Money was always the point.
    • mrhottakes 3mo ago
      They explicitly built cryptocurrency as a way to hoard more wealth. It was the "engineers" not just the money people.
      • ozgrakkurt 3mo ago
        I worked at blockchain companies for 4 years and this is not true. The ratio of degenerate engineers is maybe 30% but business people is 80%. People I have worked with were much better compared to other companies I worked in like aviation or consulting
        • GlassOwAter 3mo ago
          Same here. I’ve met a lot of smart, passionate people in the space that are very respectable.
          • Isamu 3mo ago
• vlian2088 3mo ago
  >Outside of that, as an EU/US citizen I don't see why I'd hold stablecoins instead of fiat. because fiat can be taken away from you.
  • thomashabets2 3mo ago
    Hate to break it to you, but anything can legally be taken away from you by the justice system. And fighting the government can put you in prison, too. It's just LARPing.
    • deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
    • orwin 3mo ago
      > It's just LARPing. Usually LARPers are conscious that they don't have magic or any sword skills. I'm pretty sure the person who you respond too really think what he wrote.
    • mothballed 3mo ago
      Yet the government went out its way to ban bearer shares, bearer bonds, numbered anonymous bank accounts, large denomination currency, anonymous companies, and all the other methods of anonymous banking. Seems they were having trouble "taking it away by the justice system." For the same reason government across the world have pressured or banned exchangers of monero.
      • close04 3mo ago
        GP added the "by the justice system" where OP only said "can be taken away". Both digital and fiat currency can be taken away from you through courts, legislation, trickery, or coercion. Crypto is surrounded by vast amounts of misinformation, misdirection, or misunderstanding. So you get these myths and generalization propagated through lack of education. "I heard crypto is completely anonymous", "I heard crypto can't be taken away from you". Then someone gets tricked out of their crypto, or uses BTC to commit some crime and gets a quick reality check.
• lou1306 3mo ago
  > The only real use case that makes sense to me is giving people in developing countries access to a stable currency they can actually hold, trade, and invest in, meaning USDT or USDC. Outside of that, as an EU/US citizen I don't see why I'd hold stablecoins instead of fiat The logical conclusion of this train of thought (which I agree with) is that people who heavily invested in crypto may significantly benefit from weakening strong currencies and institutions. Make of that what you will.
• zmgsabst 3mo ago
  I use crypto for exchange between friends (US + EU) and myself (SE Asia). Our options are IBAN (slow!), WesternUnion (fees, denials, hassles) or crypto (10min, cheap). We chose crypto - because it’s the practical path from their bank to mine. CashApp and Coinbase interface with my actual bank accounts, on my end. If you don’t do international banking, then much of the utility is diminished — so I’m not surprised by your perspective. But once you try to move money between continents, even with ID and documentation, you’ll understand that Coinbase is a godsend.
  • whiplash451 3mo ago
    Aren’t there fees to convert fiat from/to crypto on both ends?
    • mothballed 3mo ago
      You can make the fees rather than pay them if you make the market. There are decentralized exchanges where this can be done ~trivially for even low amounts. The fees are for those who want instant gratification.
      • whiplash451 3mo ago
        That sounds like a lot of complexity for the average user.
    • zmgsabst 3mo ago
      Yes — there’s fees converting from/to fiat and when sending the crypto. You’ll generally have the conversion slippage and transaction fee regardless - so the difference is the second conversion. In practice, that isn’t too expensive and worth it for the speed; though that may change if you’re sending larger or smaller amounts than I am (in $1k-10k range). Edit: Replying by edit due to rate limits — but subcontracting and personal loans, eg, until a client pays. Being a consultant is hard; being a consultant with no support network is harder.
      • 3mo ago
• danielvaughn 3mo ago
  I got into crypto in 2017 when I came across the phrase "money is a technology". That idea fascinated me. But fast forward several years later, and it's obvious that money might be a technology in the sense that it's a tool, but more importantly, money is a culture.
  • over_bridge 3mo ago
    Or if you read Sapiens you'll know money is a story we tell each other. You can't literally do much with a coin or bank note or numbers on a screen but as long as we all believe it has value, it does. It becomes part of the culture, as you say. Crypto also has to tell a story about why it's valuable. There was a lot of anti government rhetoric and fear mongering (from libertarians) but the public never really believed the story was true. It was a lot of FOMO. NFTs failed completely to sell their story but crypto is still hanging on among its supporters. AI is telling a similar story about the value of tokens which is being well received
    • CodingJeebus 3mo ago
      > There was a lot of anti government rhetoric and fear mongering (from libertarians) but the public never really believed the story was true. The public never believed it because it runs squarely into the basic fundamentals that underpin the global financial system. The finance industry learned long ago that currencies have to be stable and predictable in order to be trusted, and therefore NOT financial instruments to speculate heavily on. There's been this reality distortion field that crypto can be both a currency and speculative asset, but that hasn't borne out. If your digital dollar can gain/lose 5% of its value in a day, how do you trust it to transact with? Crypto has been speed-running into many lessons we learned decades ago from the "Free Banking" era before the Fed, back when states ran their own banks, currencies, etc. Government got involved in banking management as a way to improve the stability and security of the financial system since things like fraud were rampant.
    • Ygg2 3mo ago
      > but crypto is still hanging on among its supporters From what I last heard about crypto miners, the price of mining is not enough to justify price of rig + electricity, so they are quietly switching to AI. Wonder how long the second scam will last.
• seemaze 3mo ago
  I highly recommend the recently published The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World's Most Powerful Money by Brendan Greeley. It's an accessible look at how individuals, governments, markets, and value all intertwine to create a stable and widely used currency.
• colechristensen 3mo ago
  >The only real use case that makes sense to me... Cryptocurrencies have a great and really boring application. You have to think "who needs a reliable ledger distributed among many entities?" The answer is institutional banks the likes of JPMorgan. They have a few cryptocurrencies, you need to be another large bank to use them. Big banks send each other large sums of money constantly back and forth. In no sense do they send each other "real" money, it's just accounting... a ledger. "Cryptocurrencies" are better thought of as mathematically proven accounting software than money. Plenty of organizations need to be able to keep track of money is between a collection of mostly-trusted peers. With cryptocurrencies they can ditch a lot of the transaction and accounting software.
  • viscountchocula 3mo ago
    But a regular database can do that with PKI. Crypto isn't just a reliable ledger -- it's a reliable ledger between an arbitrary number of mutually distrusting parties. Which doesn't really describe banks in a regulated, functioning economy.
    • colechristensen 3mo ago
      No, a regular database can't do that "with PKI", you have to write ledger software on top of it and you have to have one party operating the software. cryptocurrencies are the ledger software, API, and data store layer -- and you do need trust between peers because the JPMorgan will take actions to reverse transactions if there are problems that need fixing. It's not magical, but it is convenient for the actual ledger actions to be mathematically proven instead of the result of accounting rules in code.
    • packetlost 3mo ago
      Not that I don't agree, but PKI relies on a trusted authority which can be compromised. If you're running a trustless system, basically any party can be compromised but the blast radius is limited to just the compromised infrastructure and money, not the entire system.
    • derangedHorse 3mo ago
• graemep 3mo ago
  When people in a developing country cannot hold foreign currency it is a result of a deliberate decision by their government. That creates a number of issues. They may well be breaking the law holding stable coins. It means practical difficulties in buying stable coins (they need someone who will sell stablecoins in their currency).
  • mekdoonggi 3mo ago
    The fact that governments might not be able to stop people from using stablecoins affects the laws, though.
    • graemep 3mo ago
      The governments cannot stop people holding physical notes either, and they still have the laws.
      • deleted 3mo ago
        [deleted]
  • ianm218 3mo ago
    > (they need someone who will sell stablecoins in their currency). It's pretty hard to really lock people out of stable coins really. You really just need someone to sell you some type of cryptocurrency that can be eventually exchanged for stablecoins. You can even do "peer to peer" trades if the government really cracks down on holding crypto. I agree with the sentiment of this article but atleast some parts of the world with poor currencies like Latam have seen some benefit from stbales.
  • datadrivenangel 3mo ago
    Right! It's not that stable coins are decentralized, it's that the centralized holder is not in your jurisdiction and so your jurisdiction can't deface their money!
    • abirch 3mo ago
• giancarlostoro 3mo ago
  > neither practical nor particularly convenient My only take away with crypto is, think of that one movie "In Time" but instead of the whole time = currency concept and the arm clock, what if crypto could be applied to a physical piece of e-paper like thing, where it says what its worth, and its worth what it says, you can transfer it on a whim from the paper to your phone (to a wallet) and back and forth. If anyone figured that out, fully seamlessly, fault tolerant, that alone imho would be worth investing time and attention into. Basically make the crypto real and physical, something fluidly tangible to where everyone can hold it and understand it. No one can hack your wallet if all your "crypto" is not in it. You can spin up new wallet on a whim. The only real way I can think is something like how monero works, where whoever owns a coin can "decrypt" said coin (or that's my limited understanding of how monero works).
  • avanai 3mo ago
    I think you just described cash.
    • loughnane 3mo ago
      That's the idea---to my mind---that's worthwhile for crypto to work toward. Something that has all the traits of cash but that can be used over the internet.
      • giancarlostoro 3mo ago
        This. Something that elevates cash, can be cash, and go back to digital.
  • greyface- 3mo ago
    There have been a number of Bitcoin physical bearer instruments. Take a look at Opendime/Satscard, for example.
• snarfy 3mo ago
  As an outsider not paying too much attention, how do you beat the ledger problem? Crypto only works if there is a ledger. I don't want a ledger of every transaction I made. Seems like an insurmountable fundamental privacy issue.
  • tryptophan 3mo ago
    Ethereum based research projects are addressing this. There is a currently active and usable project called Railgun which allows for hidden balances and transactions. Aztec network is launching soon which is a fully private L2 chain. It has taken a really long time but it seems the next few years will bring real privacy.
    • inigyou 3mo ago
      Monero solved it
  • Ar-Curunir 3mo ago
    There are plenty of solutions to this problem. See eg the Zerocash paper and the Zcash chain, both decade+ old now
  • paool 3mo ago
    Framing the ledger as the problem seems strange. It's more accurately the solution. The problem being how you transfer value through the internet in a trusted manner. Re: privacy though, there's many solutions. Single tailored chains for privacy, mixers, encrypted tokens, permissioned chains, etc. In my experience, privacy, while important, is not something users actually care about enough to demand a solution for. Most web3 users today just want to degen and gamble, and they're okay with KYC to do so.
• __MatrixMan__ 3mo ago
  Crypto was initially interesting to me because scarcity based economics is failing us and crypto give us a way to explore alternatives. But so far, nearly everything we've built with it has just been a clone of some scarcity-based thing that already exists outside of crypto. Since then I've come to the conclusion that it's never worthwhile to buy crypto with fiat. Any scheme which asks that of its users creates too much continuity between the old way and the new way--it allows the illegitimately rich to continue to be illegitimately rich even after switching to the new system. Anything with that property doesn't deserve to be the new system. What we need is a discontinuity. A system that wants not your money, but your participation, and which doesn't acknowledge the value of your old money. Today's crypto isn't it.
  • bigfishrunning 3mo ago
    Isn't the whole point of an economy a method of resolving scarcity? Money is a proxy for participation; it keeps me from having to agree to paint the miller's fence in exchange for some flour.
    • __MatrixMan__ 3mo ago
      That's the perspective that our current systems are based on. And back when the majority of the problems that people were up against had to do with there being not enough of something to go around--when it took half of us working in the fields just to feed the rest of us--then the system worked relatively well. 9 times out of 10, when somebody got a loan (which is the event that injects dollars into the system) it had something to do with alleviating the not-enough-stuff problems that we faced. The quickest route to profitability had something to do with solving problems in ways that--by happenstance--let them stay solved. This is relevant since profitability is how banks decide whether to grant a loan, and loans are what cause USD to enter the system. Previously, we mostly had good reason to want people's ventures to succeed. But nowadays, most loans are for zero-sum ventures that have more to do with capturing a share of some fixed resource (attention/influence mostly), or building something that helps some of us at the expense of others (missiles, datacenters, planned obsolescence, surveillance, etc). It's no longer clear whether we're better off with the success or failure of a randomly chosen business venture. Maybe that venture seeks to harm us. The quickest route to profitability has changed. Now it's about making things worse for the many while benefiting the few (since it's the few who have all the money). Yet we're still treating dollars as valuable despite the fact that they're issued on the basis of profitability, a property that no longer has much to do with making our lives better. So I think we need a system that understands consent. When I accept some abstraction from my employer in exchange for my labor I need to be able to look at it and decide whether accpepting it helps people who are helping me, or whether it helps people who want to poison my drinking water for their mining endeavor. Dollars don't carry enough information to enable me to make that decision, and so far neither does crypto. We don't have to banish scarcity entirely before building monetary systems that are not based on it. Once we figure out the better way, it'll likely be crypto-shaped, except it won't ask you to buy it, it'll just ask you to use it. It'll be a rejection of the old ideas about value.
• TacticalCoder 3mo ago
  I'm not into it but I'm fascinated by the cryptographic aspect and the legal aspect of it all. > Outside of that, as an EU/US citizen I don't see why I'd hold stablecoins instead of fiat. Especially as an EU citizen: in the EU it is illegal, by law, to have stablecoin yield. So for example the HN unicorn Coinbase can give 3.5% yield annualized (or whatever the current yield is), automatically, to anyone in the US that owns USDC. But in the EU the very same Coinbase is forbidden, by law, from giving the same yield on the exact same USDC. Now I'm not saying the yield on EUR on a EUR bank account is exciting: what I'm saying is holding a currency losing to insane inflation and which doesn't give anything back is wild. And it's only for stablecoins: for example as an EU citizen on my brokerage account, where I have real USDs, they automatically yield when they're idling. So it's not that you cannot get yield on currencies in the EU: it's the way they categorized stablecoins. Now as I understand it there are ways to get yield on stablecoins in "smart contracts" but that's another can of worms for IIUC atm there have been scams upon scams upon hacks upon thefts upon neverending shenanigans. So yup: stablecoins as an EU citizen, not good.
  • pjc50 3mo ago
    > as an EU citizen on my brokerage account, where I have real USDs, they automatically yield when they're idling. "money market fund". If they're yielding, they're holding bonds. Normally this distinction doesn't matter, but we're deep into financial plumbing here.
• JimsonYang 3mo ago
  >the only real use case that makes sense to me is giving people in developing countries... The markets hasnt accepted that. In gaza the cost of using crypto for foreign exchange far exceeded the cost of using cash, or prederably a US bill. People just simply trust paper bills in developing areas
• baby 3mo ago
  Remittances is the other interesting one and why libra/diem was even on the table. I was trying to send some money to my parents the other day and it’s still slow and expensive.
• jmyeet 3mo ago
  The fascinating thing for me to watch in real time is Crypto Bros discovering in real time exactly why the financial system works the way it does. It didn't happen by accident. It's 5000+ years of incremental changes. Reversible transactions? Feature, not a bug. Expandable money supply? Feature, not a bug. Fractional reserve lending that essentially creates money? Feature, not a bug. I remember saying this about Google Wave: it was a solution in search of a problem. Cyrpto specifically and blockchain in general is absolutely a solution desperately in search of a problem. And I honestly think not enough people were honest about their motivations. They saw Bitcoin go through the roof and were eager to be on the next rocketship, which never happened (well, there's Ethereum but it kinda happened at the same time although it started later). It's been a sea of shitcoins and rug pulls ever since. Anyone rmemeber NFTs? Just another scam on top of a scam to sell more crypto. Sometimes there's an advantage to an outsider's perspective on a problem space. It's the essence of disruption. But way more often than not, it's just snake oil salesman looking for a quick buck. And trying to disrupt the financial system without understanding it has shown itself to be a dismal failure, kinda like the graveyard of "Google killer" search engines in the 2000s and early 2010s.
  • KellyCriterion 3mo ago
    > this about Google Wave: Na, thats not true - a lof of things that were advertised for Google Wave are now standard functions in MS365 & Google Docs, even if the product failed, it brought some innovation - hard to tell this yet about Crypto :)
• derangedHorse 3mo ago
  From a stablecoin perspective holding USDC or USDT is almost like having a bank account with a bank who, for the most part, allows you to maintain your privacy as an individual. They don't need a name, address, phone number, etc. They also run on infrastructure that exists beyond any single jurisdiction and spans countries and continents. This means that bank account can be used anywhere that has internet and people willing to transact. No government can keep you within their confines by holding your funds hostage nor can political leaders (or others with positions of power) use those controls to silence public outcry or civil disobedience. > It's actually riskier in every meaningful way That statement is only true to you, not everyone.
• jmspring 3mo ago
  I've played with crypto enough to be amused, like you I like some of the tech - especially the Hedera eco-system. Dabbling in crypto helped me help the wife start a plant store we had for a couple of years. It's always been a hobby. I think things like decentralized IDs (DID) - while not directly crypto related, often land in tech discussions of such - and the like could likely be useful for some of the AI related identity work going on at the identity level. Some nice loss harvesting in the past will help with some other financial moves down the road. I'm definitely checking in now and then, but mostly see it as background noise.
• BlueTemplar 3mo ago
  'stable'coins are a lie though. They just hide the risk, they do not make it go away. (At least bank accounts are insured up to a certain amount.)
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• onel 3mo ago
  The kind of coming around story that you rarely see on hn. Props to you for writing this