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Posted by ibobev 21 hours ago

Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place(www.stephendiehl.com)
384 points | 490 commentspage 6
jasonvorhe 14 hours ago|
> politicians can't be trusted, shitcoins will cost you

More news at 11!

akoboldfrying 18 hours ago||
> A defender will say that gold is no different, a price that refers only to itself, and that we do not call gold a fraud; but gold carries a floor of industrial demand and a monetary role thousands of years old, and Bitcoin has neither.

I'm always interested to see how anti-crypto people try to differentiate gold from crypto, and so far I've never seen anything convincing. Gold's industrial utility as a good electrical conductor could not have begun before electricity was discovered, but it was valued just as highly for millennia before that. The "monetary role thousands of years old" claim has no force at all, because it does not even attempt to explain what it is about gold that caused it to acquire this role -- and identifying some relevant property of gold that crypto lacks is a prerequisite of any argument that attempts to differentiate the two.

falsemyrmidon 15 hours ago||
Gold is shiny and can make nice jewelry and other things shiny.
drptech 16 hours ago||
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reducesuffering 16 hours ago||
It's quite damning how much crypto bs YCombinator funded. At least 70+ companies. Their reputation has nosedived
nprateem 16 hours ago||
Jesus. Finally. I told you so.
m0llusk 18 hours ago||
The article speaks of doom and nihilism, but isn't this another example of reversion to the mean?
broodbucket 20 hours ago||
Really wish we could go back to saying "cryptocurrency", it is incredibly depressing that the world has decided that "cryptocurrency" is more relevant than "cryptography"...
pb8226 20 hours ago||
cryptocurrency is too long for the people using it for marketing
ForHackernews 20 hours ago||
100% @dang can we edit these sort of titles for clarity?

Cryptography came first and has millions of practical applications, and will only become more frequent fodder for discussion as quantum computing advances. If any discipline deserves claim to "crypto" it's -graphy.

(I'd also accept cryptozoology as the one true 'crypto')

saranshsharma 16 hours ago||
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Ouuyuuyyu123 20 hours ago||
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olalonde 14 hours ago||
Surprised to see him writing about this again. He spent years completely consumed by his hate for crypto, tweeting around the clock, before suddenly rage-quitting social media. I assumed he had permanently unplugged for his own peace of mind.

The irony is his background as a former "blockchain" startup founder, right during that mid-2010s era when people who missed the early Bitcoin boat desperately tried to make "enterprise blockchain" happen. It reads like a severe case of cognitive dissonance reduction. Having spent years trying to make the wrong iteration of the tech happen while missing the actual wave, he embarked on an endless crusade to manifest a collapse just to retroactively validate his own poor decisions.

ElenaDaibunny 20 hours ago|
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