Posted by ibobev 14 hours ago
But at the same time there is also finally real finance happening on-chain too. Backpack launched a SpaceX token at IPO that can be moved between on-chain and your brokerage. I think Coinbase announced their on-chain equity offering will have the same capability. Just yesterday Bailie Gifford launched a tokenised fund where the actual register of record is on-chain. I still think crypto has significant potential as financial rails, and that does seem to be being explored by real financial players now too.
Yes it won't be quite so decentralised, but say a number of major banks all spin up a node for say a JPM asset trading blockchain, it becomes semi-decentralised, so they have some advantage of a using a more secure shared ledger, but they also retain more control and thus probably more acceptance within banking, as big players can keep a walled-garden of sorts.
What is the actual societal value of this? Do you seriously believe that such a token helps price discovery?
Without this it's always just a something to speculate on and shift "real" money with.
Also, proof-of-work has inherent but not intrinsic value. Gold and silver have utility, beauty and scarcity. Imagine if a coin could guarantee tokens in terms of locking in future AI compute for yourself (future proof-of-work.) Perhaps micropayments could skip the whole "what's this going to be worth in the real world" type thinking too.
So bitcoin has value like a spare tire does. Most of the time it'll just add fuel costs and reduce car performance, but when you need it and you don't have it you'll wish you did. So the value is really somewhere in between its boom-bust price cycle that was predicted early on. I mean, it's just an insurance policy in case something goes wrong with fiat.
On that note, it should really be buy-hold-forget and use only when you absolutely must. Just like insurance. Anything else and you're setting yourself up for disappointment or a windfall that may never happen.
Also, by integrating real-world assets into the blockchain via tokenization, crypto-currency loses some of this purity. It's a different use case and viewpoint and some may even say it is antithetical to the underlying purity. Yet, by making crypto more stable in terms of usage patterns, and generally more usable as a whole, its real-world value should in theory become more apparent. More government adoption and acceptance would also help.
You may not easily be able to walk across a border with a bag of cash or gold coins, but you can with a piece of paper or memorized URL. So what's that worth to someone? Far better than nothing at all.
The show doesn’t really rely on not knowing the twist. And even saying there’s a spoiler for season 1 will probably clue most people onto what the twist is anyway
(WARNING: The above comic contains the same spoiler as the article, more or less.)
But honestly I feel the Darkest Timeline is more apt, ala Community.
Dont read anything about the corruption in this country, because it might not be entertaining as 10 year old TV show. You need a healthy entertainment diet of non-corruption content, so that you don’t feel the need to contribute to democracy.
The article isn’t a light refresher on corruption, it literally has suggestions of how to change cryptocurrency investment for the better. It is frankly very indepth and lengthy and very good. But one wouldn’t know that if they skipped over it because of few lines might hurt their entertainment viewing-surprise ego.
You made it seem mysterious, but it's spelled out explicitly in TFA:
> the meticulously designed paradise she has been living in is in fact an engineered torture chamber
edit: Ah, I see. You left this comment after having your last response flagged.
> so I'd suggest not reading unless you've already finished season 1
That’s pretty dismissive!
Yes I left this comment as an attempt at a new healthier approach to calling out bad/unhealthy comments. Not going to flag a rules debate.
> so I'd suggest not reading unless you've already finished season 1
Looks pretty dismissive unless you finish watching a tv show not entirely related to the content of the post to me.
How is it not a complaint to complain that theres a minor spoiler from a tv show in an article and suggest people not read it?
I'm out of the loop on this one. Is he talking about some crypto thing?
Stablecoins are not backed by a central bank. Instead their source of value comes from a private company that holds actual US dollars or USD-equivalent reserves (like treasury bills, etc).
3-4% of billions (USDC alone is $80 billion) would itself be billions of dollars of annual interest. Easily covering the operating cost of these companies.
However, they don’t keep it all. Nobody is going to let you hold their cash in size without getting a slice of the interest. All the big players (like an exchange holding USDC of its patrons) cut deals with the stable coin issuers for a revenue split of that interest.
Maybe lack of capital is a factor, but doesn’t that only come into play if redemptions are large? If it acts as a currency in circulation, there can be very little actual capital backing it (like how fractional reserves work for regular banks, IIRC).
No, but that's hilarious. Good catch!
I don't think "wildcat banking" would be known as that if the banks hadn't been poorly capitalized (as in, they didn't have the money). If the banks had actually worked out, we'd just be calling it "banking".
Today, stablecoins have a hilariously simple way to print money: just buy treasuries, money market funds, or whatever. We're not necessarily going to see them collapsing due to poor capitalization.
Yes but the problem is there are already a lot of US dollars and the pandora box was opened since the end of WW2 at least.
Is the US dollar you hold in a bank outside of the US the same as the one in the US? no...
Are they all insured and backed by the Federal Reserve? absolutely not.
In a sense if you are abroad the USDC you get from Circle on a blockchain are much closer to a "real" dollar than most of us can get their hand on.
Stablecoins for the first time offer a reasonable way for the global poor to store value in dollars, or in the form of any relatively stable currency.
Obviously this comes with all kinds of issues, but it's still better than the original situation where "savings" simply didn't exist except in the form of physical dollars or gold bought at a significant premium.
Crypto is not as reliably anonymous as cash. Anything with a distributed ledger is pseudonymous so if one transaction can on your wallet can be linked to you, so can all other transactions, including historical ones, to that wallet.
I really don't think I need to explain the obvious difference between physical US dollar notes and USDT.
I'll point out that in most of the world a $100 note is only worth $100 if it's in basically mint condition, the value falls rapidly as condition degrades.
Even banks struggle with this https://meduza.io/en/feature/2025/05/30/old-money-new-proble...
Goes to show how viable cash is as a store of value for most of the world.
I have lived in, and briefly worked in a bank in, in a country where people do use USD, GBP etc. notes as a store of value, sometimes in large amounts (you hear about that when they get burgled!).
Anyway key point is your USD better be mint and at least 2018 or they will refuse it... Same at currency exchanges in most of south east Asia that have their own currency.
Trump is a pro crypto president in the sense that he is making it official and a lot of actors in finance are fighting it because it is killing their own lucrative scam.
The whole Trump memecoin and World Liberty Financial is shady but really a side story.
The bottom line is if you hold USD a lot of "legacy" actors are making money on your back. With stablecoins Tether, Circle & co join the party.
Bingo.