Crypto has become the ultimate swamp asset

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;HpY1R" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;HpY1R</a>

The history of crypto is pretty much a story of technical people creating something interesting with a cyberpunk&#x2F; open ethos - then the financial industry realizing it can be exploited to make money in ethically dubious ways, while simultaneously destroying the philosophy behind it. The bitcoin paper is still one of the most elegant technical documents I’ve ever read, a decade+ since it was published.<p>I’m not sure why this simple narrative isn’t more common, but one guess is that the media is largely dominated by institutional players (deeply plugged into finance) and the simultaneous “death” of cyberpunk &amp; cypherpunk as original culture, rather than just a video game aesthetic. Makes me wish that Satoshi had released bitcoin in 1995 or 2005, when that culture was still alive.

I&#x27;ve followed crypto since late 2011, and the ideology today is completely detached from what it used to be. Back in the day you had crypto maximalists that mainly viewed it as freedom from authority, regulations, and traditional banking. No more expensive fees for sending cash, no more third parties like PayPal to charge fees and potentially freeze your money. Detaching your wealth from political systems.<p>Yes, a lot of techno anarchist and ancaps were part of the scene - with grand dreams of defi taking over the world.<p>These days it has just evolved into play money for finance bros and hedge funds, and more lately, a mechanism for circumventing corruption for the powerful and wealthy.

That&#x27;s the thing where if you have significant assets your family members get kidnapped until you irreversibly transfer those assets to criminals, right?<p>I&#x27;m not sure how crypto continues to gain mainstream adoption in the face of <i>that</i>, no matter how much excitement there is for it in the current US administration.<p>My previous argument was that a technology where losing your password means you lose your net worth was incompatible with how human beings actually work. This kidnapping thing appears to be getting a whole lot more media coverage than that.

Crypto should be taking off in use in the AI age. Right now I have credits I paid open AI for so I can use their API. I have anthropic credits, I have some credits in a video generator app.<p>A2A is becoming a thing, and now it&#x27;s a realistic thing to potentially expose an agent on a public endpoint to do useful work. Agents working with agents is a very clear future direction.<p>But everything is a closed ecosystem. But with the addition of a few extra fields to an Agent card (chain name, accepted tokens, cost) and perhaps a transaction addition to the task&#x2F;send interface. We could build a network of agents working for agents. Compatible with each other. It doesn&#x27;t have to be all on-chain. It&#x27;s just the economic layer. You host the agent, the agent accepts payments. The agent makes payments. All the crypto tech we need already exists.<p>Use USDC, don&#x27;t have to worry about speculation driving up costs. Use a network like SOL, AVAX, SUI and the transaction will be finalized in seconds.<p>Credits should be transferable, and not locked in little ecosystem.<p>We could take it one stop further. Prices could be dynamic. If GPU usage is high, cost should be high. If demand low, price should be low. Outages are a pricing issue, not a technical issue.

The next logical step is US Treasury Bonds to be redeemed in Crypto. The current administration is proposing a 2026 budget that adds $5 trillion in new debt (more spending than revenue). Jerome can&#x27;t print money that fast.<p>Even the Fed is counting on the &quot;economy to grow faster than the debt&quot;. It&#x27;s like a fiction world. I fully expect a &quot;crypto equivalence&quot; executive order for things where the US can muscle trade partners.

I would be interested to know from a developer working in Crypto about how is the day-to-day work experience compared to working in a similar role in, say, a hedge fund. The latter is fast paced and I have heard that the former is too but would be interesting to hear from people actually in the seats.

Where would the crypto millionaires spend their money? They have to chase some real world assets such as homes, jacking up prices for those. So, for someone who invested in the real world assets, they see their asset value going up. It hardly matters where you invest. It&#x27;s all in the same pond.

I just think its wild you all have subscriptions to the economist

Crypto was a huge mistake. It should have been rigorously regulated right out of the gate to the point of being unusable for anyone. I have yet to see a use case that doesn’t amount to buying drugs or defrauding rubes.

What I&#x27;m always missing with these takes is the &quot;what if&quot; component. Nobody really dares to paint the whole picture in articles like this. Authors seem to go as far as to find the moral infraction, and then stop. But that doesn&#x27;t do what is happening justice.<p>No, crypto does not need regulation. Law-based order needs crypto regulation. That&#x27;s a big difference already. But we can go further than that. What if we don&#x27;t get crypto regulation, what happens to law-based order exactly?<p>Trump is not the kind of guy to build businesses and create wealth. He more like kinda goes through them. He&#x27;s not the guy to invest, he&#x27;s the guy to cash out. Right now, he&#x27;s cashing out of the US economy. Lots of real value is there for him to extract that is completely unprotected.<p>Trump is right. All those assets exist, and he can take them, destroy them, and liquidate them. He has that power. He is permitted. It is a programme, and his execution is successful. There&#x27;s no point saying &quot;but he can&#x27;t do that, it would be unethical&quot;. Sure it&#x27;s unethical, dumb, and nonsensical, but at face value, he <i>can</i> do all of that. No point in saying &quot;but he can&#x27;t do that, America would never be the same&quot;. That argument is reactionary, of course everything was going to change anyways.<p>So, let&#x27;s face it. A president that is not going to miss his chance to join the true billionaires club (10+ b), a ruling class of industry leaders like it existed 120 years ago. Whether he stays president doesn&#x27;t even matter. Government programmes are going down the drain, America&#x27;s influence in the world deteriorates, trade volume breaking down, a less smart military will have to deal with more conflicts.<p>The only question in that turmoil is going to be what constitues a winner. Right now, everybody is buying crypto like lottery tickets, and it becomes self-fulfilling. Mid-term it might be Florida real estate. Long term? Who knows.<p>I&#x27;d actually like for somebody to really paint this picture and fill in the details. Stopping at the first inflection point that is somewhat scary is unproductive, we&#x27;ve been reading those takes for a year now.