Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place

thrownawaysz

>Meet Mike. Mike is a college freshman who is exposed to crypto through social media. He downloads Coinbase, buys ten dollars of CumRocket because his friend group is in on it, watches the price move, and feels for the first time the dopamine rush of gambling on non-economic random walks. By his sophomore year he is onto harder drugs: 0DTE options on triple-leveraged single-stock ETFs he does not understand, traded on a gamified brokerage built to look like a video game. By twenty-two he has a Kalshi account, because betting on the outcome of a presidential primary or a reality television show winner has been reframed as participation in financial markets. By twenty-four he has hit rock bottom in the sportsbook, firing off ten-leg parlays on Tibetan ping-pong and third-division water polo at two in the morning because the games he has actually heard of no longer move fast enough to feel like anything. Mike believes he is investing. Mike is gambling. Mike is on the express train to a gambling addiction, and he is meaningfully poorer at every stop along the way. tbh that reads a bit like the war on drugs propaganda we got in school back then. You don't want to try the devil's lettuce cause in 2 years you will be a homeless heroin addict in San Francisco, or worse!

titanomachy

> A shadow dollar system, newly blessed by federal statute, is quietly migrating the savings of the global poor onto the balance sheets of a handful of opaque private companies. I'm out of the loop on this one. Is he talking about some crypto thing?

coreyh14444

Has been since 2017 IMO...

SquareWheel

Note that this post includes a major spoiler for the show The Good Place . The show is fantastic, so I'd suggest not reading unless you've already finished season 1, or have decided it's not for you.

pjc50

> The public's trust in markets is finite. Every dollar lost on a self-referential game labeled a market consumes a small piece of that finite trust, and the consumption over fifteen years has been considerable Yes, and not just in crypto. People have started to view a high-trust society like a rainforest: a natural resource that has lots of life-sustaining positive externalities, but you can just burn it down to make a quick buck instead. This has been bad since the GFC, and accelerated by the modern rightwing influence sphere. There's a very real tendency to people to go "I don't trust mainstream source <X> for <slightly valid reason in one case>", and then immediately jump to totally trusting some random youtube or tiktok conspiracy theorist.

retired

The global stock market has been outperforming Bitcoin for a while now.

d--b

> The price of a meme coin reflects only the collective belief of meme coin holders that they will be able to sell to a greater fool Author is at times a little too emphatic, but he has some sentences like this one that are really efficient in conveying the idea.

broodbucket

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"...

jdw64

Actually, this industry routinely runs what you'd call "hero marketing," and what makes it especially dangerous for young people is that they're being sold success stories by actors playing people who don't exist, fictional characters who supposedly got rich through crypto. 1.A tiny handful of success stories are pushed to the front. 2.The vast majority who lost money are made invisible. 3.It manufactures the expectation that this time, you could be the one. 4.The price movement itself becomes the reward stimulus. 5.The platform, the exchange, the issuer, and the early investors all hold an advantage in fees or liquidity. The problem is that this is identical to gambling. But it's dressed up as "finance." The industry obscures the fact that crypto functions as gambling by making people think of it as a new kind of financial asset. Of course, crypto is technology. It's true that there are technological components, blockchains, smart contracts, and the like. But just because something contains technology doesn't mean the mass marketing around it qualifies as technology investment. Anti-counterfeiting technology is also technology. That doesn't make putting money into circulating counterfeit bills an "investment in currency security technology." By the same logic, the fact that crypto contains technological elements is being used to justify the marketing structure built on top of it, and that, precisely, is the deception. And for all the talk of decentralization, the reality that USDT and similar tokens end up tethered to a single dominant exchange, heavily coupled to nation states, essentially proves that true decentralization is impossible in practice. This is only natural. Decentralization makes trading inconvenient, so people gravitate toward a single centralized exchange. And at that point, what exactly is the difference between that exchange and a government?

titanomachy

> At no point in this pipeline does Mike's capital touch productive enterprise. This is an interesting economic/philosophical angle. What is the logical conclusion of this? What happens as a higher fraction of people deploy their capital in zero-sum games? Is "deployment" even the right framing? A bet doesn't necessarily "tie up" capital in the same way as a real investment (you could place your bet moments before it's settled). Buying crypto does tie up capital, sort of, although in theory you could invest crypto-denominated assets into something productive. My capital is in real estate and (mostly US tech) company equity. Is society actually better off because I put my capital there instead of letting it sit in a bank account or crypto wallet?

rvz

I think we have a clear idea on what sort of crypto is useful (stablecoins) and which ones are not (memecoins, Bitcoin). As we have seen with Stripe [0], Shopify [1], PayPal [2] and many others have all figured out its utility is in stablecoins like USDC, which you can send them worldwide, same day, 24/7 in seconds close to $0 with no room for speculation and pay for things and soon agents will do the same. [3] We get that the author is still upset about Cardano ruining his own crypto startup (Adjoint Inc.) in 2017, but I think we are way past the "crypto is scam" chantings and the companies that I mentioned would agree. [0] https://stripe.com/en-es/payment-method/stablecoins-and-cryp... [1] https://www.shopify.com/news/stablecoins-on-shopify [2] https://www.paypal.com/us/digital-wallet/manage-money/crypto... [3] https://tempo.xyz/

kriro

The fun ahead will probably be capable LLMs + smart contracts. There are probably a lot of issues that can be discovered.

INTPenis

I've been sharing author's view for quite a while now, namely that there must exist a market of goods to give a currency real value. But I must contradict the author, because there is a market of goods, and bitcoin is indirectly involved in it. Namely the dark web market of drugs. People love drugs, and they use a lot of them, drugs turnover a huge amount of value. And right now people are buying bitcoin, because it's often safe to buy, and exchanging it for monero, that they then use to buy drugs. I'm very much interested in this market, and how it affects crypto.

PaulHoule

The weird thing about it to me is that it lumbers on. There was that time I’d dread going to parties because that crypto guy was there. That time Bloomberg got its best writer to write a whole issue of Businessweek about it a week before the SBF fraud broke. Then there was that weird time between when crypro brown jumped on the AI bandwagon before Ezra Klein did. And now the crypto bros are still talking… to each other. Still looking at the price of Bitcoin obsessively. And the rest of us hardly ever hear about it.

himata4113

Cryptocurrency is very much a double edged sword, on one hand it enables people to transact monetary value bypassing for-profit operators such as western union and paypal as well as hinders corrupt government institutions from confiscating or otherwise devaluing what you own. Of course this also allows people with harmful intentions to do the same, bypass centralized systems that keep fraud in check, mitigate theft and whatnot. But all I know is that the only reason why some of my friends are able to work remotely from their country is crypto currency as that is the only way they're able to get paid without 30% to 40% being lost in fees as well as being stored in a currency that might lose a majority of its value overnight. They work real, productive swe jobs and earn enough to support not only themselves, but everyone around them as well making the place they live in a tiny bit better.

rob74

> Each one, taken alone, would have been a bleak, dystopian fever dream ripped from the pages of a William Gibson cyberpunk novel. Or rather, a totally outrageous parody of a William Gibson cyberpunk novel. If this wasn't real, I probably couldn't stop laughing about it. But unfortunately, it is...

alehrs

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 is just trash, scams, and gambling. I've come to believe that "pure" decentralization is neither practical nor particularly convenient. 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. It's actually riskier in every meaningful way, and I already have access to every form of investment I could want. It's genuinely fascinating to think about a technology that can empower people who otherwise have no access to financial tools. But that comes at the cost of millions of people around the world gambling with money they can't afford to lose, convinced they're investing their way to wealth.

nytesky

Isn’t this related to financial nihilism where normal people can’t invest or earn enough to grow money for basic life costs like housing and college with standard investments or jobs. They need a moonshot, hence gambling has become normalized. It isn’t even about the White House or crypto per se, it’s a desperate embrace of risk to catch up.

SonOfLilit

I wish I could just read the prompt rather then the very long article full of tiny mistakes that was generated from it.

epolanski

We definitely live in depressing times where all decency has long been lost. Just yesterday the US president has Tweeted the he "loves bombing the shit out of Iran". The language is disgusting, what's happening is disgusting, from prediction markets and their disgusting shills/cultists trying to sell you that price discovery has positive social impact, politicians and administrations blatantly involved in scams and corruption, the US threatening its allies, civil liberties and privacy more and more dying around the world, the US kidnapping foreign leaders and half the world clapping and pretending it's not happening. Every day there's more animosity, nationalism, protectionism, people blaming globalism ignoring the huge benefits and prosperity it brought, computer algorithms (AI) quickly eroding the only positive and creative edge humans really had. It's just sad to see the state of the affairs and the increasingly selfish direction the world is taking.