people’s answers to “we get rid of crypto, then what” always devolve into wishful utopian avoidant fantasy mumbo-jumbo and like dude there are actual real-world issues that cryptocurrency is addressing whether you like it or not. what is the practical alternative and how do we implement it

Damn if only we had a decentralized network of globally distributed peers to make our financial systems more secure and resilient. Is anyone working on this?

and if that's what frustrates you, you're fucking weird as well

"problematic substance use is correlated with increased rates of anxiety and depression, and young men who engage in it are more likely to slide into full-blown substance use disorders" the rise of sports betting is hugely problematic, but this isn't a revelation by any means.

"This is not my normal spot but I'll remember where I put it"

Card cheats have been using xray tables for decades now. It was so common that casino playing cards now contain a carbon infused sheet of plastic in the middle to prevent this type of cheat.

4/ Real cypherpunk: write code that resists control. Build decentralized tools. Minimize trust, maximize freedom. The original cypherpunks just built — they didn't brand themselves or organize conferences about it. The work was the point, not the label.

TradFi loves this narrative because it enables them to continue being entrenched middlemen that skim 290 bips off txns, vendor-lock you to their proprietary systems, and act as permissioned finance gateways. They also know that won’t last forever, so they’re tokenizing and building L1s (Stripe)

her tireless work of begging the US to kill Venezuelans

I'll say it again - this push to get retirement savers into private equity and private credit funds is just the big money using your 401(k) as exit liquidity. They're handing you the bag not the returns. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

I find it truly amazing that we've invented cross-border, near instant, global, internet based, uncensorable, decentralized, nearly feeless payments and yet people see it as the boogeyman

I've been reading a bunch of AI skeptics lately, and I'm noticing how closely they resemble another kind of technology skeptic I know well — the bitcoin skeptic. Some patterns:

if someone has a pet rock, nobody asks whether the rock is sentient. but if you kick the rock you are definitely an asshole.

Where are all the sarcastic Bitcoin "store of value lol" posts now? What happened?

Trumpnomics: Get tariff money from US consumers on Chinese goods. Our farmers can’t sell their products because the Chinese refuse to pay our tariffs. China buys from farmers in Argentina instead. We send Argentina $20 billion. Then we pay our farmers to throw their crops away.

Everyone who actually understands the technology has been screaming at anyone who even pretends to listen about this inevitability for years. All financial companies will be blockchain/crypto businesses. It was always going to happen. All stocks will be tokenized.

Maybe shutting down the government and then turning it back on will fix it

you are allowed to dislike cryptocurrency, you are not allowed to be this stubbornly misinformed about it; get smarter or shut up

- Trump spends half a decade attacking NATO and alienating the EU, emboldening Russia - Russia starts a literal war with Ukraine, China and Iran finance it "It would be so funny if EUROPE starts the war that definitely isn't already happening"

New from 404 Media: airlines are selling *5 billion* ticketing records to the government for warrantless searching, per new docs we obtained. ARC is a data broker owned by United, American, Delta, etc. Then sells peoples' travel info to ICE, Secret Service, FBI etc www.404media.co/airlines-sel...

Every small business owner should support Universal Public Healthcare. Small businesses are at such a disadvantage compared to corporations when it comes to providing health insurance. How am I supposed to create a diverse risk pool with myself and two employees?

When many "crypto people" got started in the industry cryptocurrency was just an open source experiment, and you literally couldn't make any money doing it. Some people saw a problem and set out to fix it. From the very beginning it was about making the world a better place with better money.

"Objectively good people with good judgement" "racist" Marcus Hutchins is an objectively stupid person with bad judgement.

I'm confused - are we condemning political violence or are we memorializing Charlie Kirk?

Don't forget the part where they start censoring transactions if you sell content/products they disagree with via the point of sale systems they make you pay for.

The left needs to get over their irrational hatred of cryptocurrency and start advocating for its use in fighting back against this regime. How long until they just start taking the money out of Democrat's bank accounts? They already did it in New York.

Wait til this guy hears about USD

Now that the government owns part of Intel expect the clipper chip to make a comeback. The government has been very transparent in their desire for access to our encrypted data and communications. Now they have the means to make it happen.

Everyone is building the same tools and inventing the same processes over and over and over. Open source, open protocols, open processes can save us from so many headaches.

what the fuck is happening

it’s good actually that the data the internet archive has is available and this can happen. open data is good. reddit blocking internet archive has nothing to do with your concerns about ai and everything to do about them enshitifying for more money while screwing you

Listen, yeah, “how many B’s in blueberry” is not a good LLM benchmark because of how they work. But it’s an excellent way to expose how they DON’T work, and that is important to laypeople who cannot, in the current hype bubble, correctly determine what they can or can’t rely on an LLM to do for them

Bluesky: the premiere social media site for technologists that hate technology.

This is false. "Tokenization" simply means bringing those existing securities on-chain. This would actually give investors increased ownership over their equities, streamline shareholder voting, and enable self-custody for all.

As Alec Muffett put it, this is a race to the bottom for our data, disguised as a “child safety" effort. These shiny technical “solutions” are just cover. What’s really happening is companies caving to government pressure to turn the web into a surveillance machine that tracks us at every turn.

"Crypto is being taken over by fascists." You spent the last 8 years telling everyone around you that crypto is only for criminals. You have gone out of your way to attack the technology and anyone who supports it. What did you expect to happen? You laid the groundwork for them.

"I will NEVER use crypto." Lol yes you will, whether you know/accept that yet or not. Banks tried to fight this hopeless fight for over a decade and lost. You sound like a boomer raging against the internet.

You need a 100% trustworthy society for TRUSTLESS protocols to have merit? It'd be easier to take many crypto detractors seriously if they even slightly understood what they're talking about.

you don't care if its a scam; you just hate the idea of anyone escaping the hole you're rotting in. your "ethics" are just envy dressed up as virtue, and you'd rather torch a lifeboat than admit you missed it. morality is just the mask you wear to justify dragging others down with you

Good news for Alex: there is a marvelous technology called “a tree” and unless you’re putting solar on high slopes you can effectively disappear its aesthetic impact (which unlike pig farms is exclusively visual if it exists at all) with a small strip of them. Most solar farms near me are invisible!

here's to more years of people going "your worries were misplaced, our normal payment infrastructure is fine" despite constant evidence to the contrary

this is a silly argument and makes you look like a fascist im not even joking

Maybe we could make some sort of peer-to-peer digital currency. Something decentralized and censorship-resistant that lets people spend their money how and when they want. Is anyone working on this?

Compromise is great when closing a deal, working together, finding dinner, weighing product feature ideas. It’s terrible when it comes to your values, what you believe is important, who you are, what you are proud of. Listing the latter is crucial for not losing yourself.

If you are in favour of end-to-end encryption on the grounds that people should be permitted to do math and permitted to have privacy, you should also be in favour of AI and LLMs on the grounds that people should be permitted to do math and to analyse text statistically. Alas, not everyone agrees.

Go woke (solar + storage) or go broke (no power at all, plus a higher cost if you get your hands on a turbine).

And "underbanked" use it even more. Which makes sense because it has only gotten harder to purchase crypto without a bank account in recent years. That aside, one of the first rules of crypto is not to tell people you own crypto. These surveys are probably somewhat lacking in reliability.

It's not just to "buy something nice". The young people investing in crypto today are so disillusioned with the modern financial system/job market/economy that they see crypto as potentially their only chance at retirement, a home, and a family. Cryptocurrency is hope for many young people.

You should start a company if you’re unreasonably compelled to do it. You haven’t stopped obsessing for a month. If you don’t, you’ll regret it forever. Otherwise, you won’t maintain the motivation when you run into the next few years of emotional devastation.