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Fintech dystopia
158 LasEspuelas 95 7/29/2025, 1:57:44 AM fintechdystopia.com ↗
I feel like at this point there isn't anybody defending stablecoins who isn't using them primarily speculative investment/trading. There has yet to be a usecase for distributed ledger that isn't solved better by a centralised ledger other than niche counter-culture solutions whose users are typically blinkered to the fact that they are already a self-selected techno-elite who can't bring their utopia to the commons. That ended a bit more nasty sounding that I intended, apologies.
The problem stablecoins are solving are self-inflicted: KYC to open a bank account, restricted nationalities, account freezes, capital controls, taxation over-reach, etc.
At some point someone figured out that if they start over, there is a lot of “value” to be unlocked out there; and paid/lobbied/sponsored the right person to execute on that.
Although the current government is having a good go at reducing the value of the currency, it's barely budged on the chart.
what about situations where centralized ledgers won't serve you? e.g. someone who wants to buy drugs, or sex workers want to get paid. And you mention "niche counter-culture solutions" but I don't think it's so niche - in 2002, the government of Argentina stole 2/3rds of everyone's savings by forcibly converting their dollar-denominated bank accounts into pesos at a terrible exchange rate. Not having to worry about this because you have a trustworthy government is nice, but it puts you into an elite class of your own.
Do cryptocurrencies provide value to people living in third-rate hellhole countries? Perhaps, because they are connected to the outside world. Ideally you could just have a foreign bank account that your country cannot touch. If the big governments gang up on crypto exchanges, then crypto will be worthless. The only reason they don't gang up on the exchanges seems to be that they (the people in government) use crypto for nefarious activities and money laundering.
The technological innovations of cryptocurrencies make for good thought experiments or puzzles, but serve as a distraction from their inevitable uselessness.
Yeah, it's basically Uber for finance/banking/etc. Reap the free real estate created by rules and regulation by..skirting the rules and regulations.
It also adds indirection, which in turn allows all the parties involved to point fingers at each other Spiderman-style. "Oh I thought $X was responsible for $COMPLIANCE." Eventually, y'all get audited and shape up but that's a years-long process. And in that time you've grown and grown and finance/banking/etc is pretty sticky. Kaching :)
And I’ve never felt clear on how people trust wallet, hot or cold — at some point they connect to the internet for transactions, and all the vendors seem suspect. I really doubt most users are building their wallet from code reviewed cryptographically signed source… but maybe I’m wrong?
I mean look at something like the Rabbit R1. I'm an AI researcher and I saw my peers get fucking excited about it because it was a leap ahead of all the state of the art research we knew. Sorry, but what? It takes time for research to get into a product, sometimes years, even in tech, even in the fast pace AI world. Like you think they put what normally takes at least one $10k GPU and put that into a $200 device? That they could leverage GPT and not have a subscription fee? You're not going to beat ChatGPT by using ChatGPT lol.
Somehow stuff like this keeps happening and we never learn our lesson. Author is right, they're just chasing. And the irony is that that chase is actually preventing us from getting what we're really chasing
Why is this even on hn?
If you want to read proper critic on blockchain, read Molly White essays instead
https://blog.mollywhite.net/blockchain/
I'm not afraid of looking like I don't understand - I simply don't understand. I've tried reading a few "yellow papers" for crypto projects and they are so abstract and full of jargon that I never come away knowing more than when I started reading.
If anyone has a good resource for getting into the technical details of crypto please let me know. I would like to gain a full enough understanding that I can finally decide for myself if it's revolutionary or overhyped.
In some cases, this is by design. The project is nonsensical and/or a scam, and the white paper is an obfuscatory smokescreen to provide an illusion of sophistication.
A lot of what we do might be sophisticated in some far corners, but at the end of the day the end results can be trivially explained.
"Taxi ordered from a phone app, "Sleep in other people's homes", "Restaurant delivery service with GPS tracking", "Exercise bike with a screen showing workout videos", "Someone else shops for you", etc.
Unfortunately with crypto, a lot of it is trivially explained as "obfuscated scam"
I don't think anyone ever claimed these were complicated or sophisticated, though? They're straightforward user-facing apps. A more comparable example might be cloud services or a good chunk of security products.
Blockchain is pretty simple. There's a database, organized in a way that you can add records to it but you can not edit past records - or if you try to, everybody would know you did. There's a network of people maintaining this shared database, as a payment ledger - basically, this database for them says "X has $Y amount of database-money". People participating in maintaining this database get paid in the same database-money. They have incentive to do it properly, otherwise their database-money aren't worth shit. They also have incentive to steal if they could, but since they can't edit the database without other people noticing (who aren't interested in having db-money stolen from them) it's hard. That's the basic level of cryptocurrency systems, very shallowly and simplified, of course. If you want to know the math and protocols, there are full college degree programs dedicated to it (I am not kidding at all, there are). There's even free courses on Coursera and such which deal with the basics.
The second level is allowing to do other, more complicated stuff with the same database. Like keep ownership records for other things (that's basically NFT). The next level is turning it from passive database into a computation engine, so you can make computations that will be reproducible over the database. That's ethereum contracts and such. There also side aspects - like privacy chains, where the information who owns the money is encrypted, so you can prove you own the money but somebody else would have hard time seeing how much you got and where it came from (it's usually very easy in most chains). Etc. etc.
Whether it's revolutionary or overhyped - I have no idea. That's kinda societal question, certainly all the above (and more) can be useful and you can build useful stuff on top of it. Would some people use it? Probably. Will everybody switch to it from existing ways of doing things? I have no idea, but I suspect no. But I am nobody, so it's worth nothing. A lot of people smarter than me thought there's a use case for certain things, and spend a lot of time and money building stuff, and nobody every used it. Take Meta - the whole "metaverse" thing, nobody even remembers it now. There are many things like that. Is crypto one of them? I dunno. We'll see.
Fundamentally, we've been making digital versions of everything. We have digital phone calls, television, bookkeeping, document writing, drawing, etc.
One thing we didn't have digitally was a currency.
Why would we want a digital currency? For similar reasons to all the other stuff above. It's more convenient. When you "transfer money" from your bank account to another, your bank has to physically move the associated cash from it's vault to the other banks vault, by hiring secure trucks, people, and so on. If the money has to cross a border, that's even more of a hassle, now you have to physically cross a border with a truck full of cash. When a bank "holds onto your money", they need a big vault full of cash, they have to count it, account for every dollar, physically safeguard it, etc.
This is a huge cost, inefficiency, and a big challenge of banking, and it's one reason transaction fees and banking fees are so high.
Now we have an idea of why we might want to make a digital currency. The biggest issue with making one is how do you solve the "double spend problem". That is, if I have 1 unit of a currency and I give it to you, how do we guarantee I no longer have that unit after it was given to you? In a physical world, I'm giving you the actual unit of currency, but in the digital world I'm giving you a copy of it, it would be easy for me to keep my copy as well and have an infinite money glitch.
The solution to that is simple, you have a source of truth that processes the transaction. That source of truth records that I had 10$ and you had 10$, I gave you 1$, and now I have 9$ and you have 11$.
That's easy enough. Here comes the second problem, who would trust owning that source of truth? Would you trust me keeping the official source of truth log of how much money everyone has? I could easily add myself a few 0s to my account, or remove some from yours.
Would you trust the government of your country? Of another country? A big corporation? A US charity?
This is where crypto comes in. Crypto says, nobody would ever trust a single entity, but what if everyone could join a network of nodes that together form the source of truth? Not owned by any single person, but the union of everyone who wants to join the network, and you could join the network, I could join it, anyone is free to join it, and we can all validate and check each other's work to make sure no one else on the network is fudging the numbers.
And now a lot of complex cryptographic math comes in to from this network.
>
> This is a huge cost, inefficiency, and a big challenge of banking, and it's one reason transaction fees and banking fees are so high.
That's absolutely not how this works though. Banks perform electronic transfers and most of the money is accounted for in databases. The problems are slow, antiquated, technology, which is made worse by the amount of regulation surrounding it that makes it hard for new contenders to enter and drive down prices via competition.
Cryptocurrency is trustless, but there is an interesting tangent about if you _do not_ want a government to control monetary policy.
That’s not at all what happens!
Transfers are done digitally, physical cash does not move between vaults or bank branches.
That's several centuries out of date, I'm afraid. Even before computers banks didn't actually do that, but now they certainly never do that. They just change records in their books - it has been paper books once, now it's just database files. I mean, banks do move cash (still do) but not when you transfer money from account to account, it has nothing to do with that, unless when you're running a massive cash-based business (which most banks hate btw, for many reasons).
Payment settlement is a solved problem and very rarely involves physical cash transfer. Most of this is just numbers moved between accounts which commercial banks have with a central bank.
While I'm sure some of this is true for some banks at some point in history, this is the kind of understanding of a given industry that results in TechBros reinventing buses or juicing machines.
> This is a huge cost, inefficiency, and a big challenge of banking, and it's one reason transaction fees and banking fees are so high.
The reason banking fees are so high is because they charge what the market will bear, and most of the banks customers are a captive audience. It doesn't cost $2 to perform a transaction at an ATM; it costs pennies, if that. Banks should be paying you for holding, and putting to use, your money.
That hasn't been true for, uh, centuries. It's like literally the entire point of banking, to allow financial transactions to take place without having to physically haul around collateral anywhere.
(And if you want a digital version of what banks actually do, it's called SWIFT, and has been around since checks Wikipedia 1973).
See https://www.bbc.com/news/business-38499883 and elsewhere.
It’s really telling how poor the knowledge of financial history and the existing state of the art in traditional financial tech there is among people in the crypto-boosting space. Many of the “innovations” they claim have been around in traditional finance for hundreds of years.
For example, there have been a lot of novel or interesting projects centered around cryptography, consensus, decentralization, anonyimity. On a sociological level, there are a lot of interesting social/economic experiments unfolding in the DeFi world as we speak.
But I think that is where the truly interesting or valuable contributions to humanity as a whole end, and the vast, vast majority of it otherwise is just speculation or scams. It is hard to find that signal in the noise, but it is there, if you look.
This will break, sooner or later.
When external buyers stop buying treasuries US will have to massively inflate its money supply, taking bondholders and a bunch of other groups to the cleaners. Such events have a lot of collateral damage, which may fit the definition of financial blow up. But I would place us much further away than 6-12 months, likely at 5-10 years. If there is a viable alternative to US treasuries, potentially sooner, but still not in 12 months. My 2c.
And I am talking about myself here. My only excuse is that I simply don't use my money. Which is not necessarily a good thing either.
Repeat after me. Do not use technology to try to solve people problems.
I am saying the solution to make people smarter or empower the people. Buy now pay later, credit cards, and all these bespoke algorithms is just an illusion to make people feel better when they get ripped off.
When I was growing up, I didn’t understand check cashing places, payday loans, the layaway counter in the stores, home equity loans, reverse mortgages, auto leasing, and such.
And looking back, I’m amazed how much nonsense is out there. These are more traps than tools.
Someone responded like "lol, sure, we can find some sociologists to start programming our apps", and I thought Damn. That's really missing the point. And it seems so arrogant. Like, not only do we laugh at the idea of people doing our jobs, we also need to laugh at the idea of the relevance of their fields.
Yet we really should depend on their insights to further our field, in my opinion. No profession truly stands alone, just like no person does.
I think we'll get better about this over time. Right now we've definitely got some growing pains.
Even in computing, a profession dominated by scientists and engineers, has a lot of failing. Even the damn SPEC benchmarks don’t know to average numbers correctly.
These technologies didn't fix the problems. There is too much regulation, you can't do anything without a license. The only solutions are political, not technological.
Everything feels like a scam within a scam. I feel dizzy just thinking about it. I'm completely demoralised. Everything related to career feels pointless, sisyphean because of the bureaucracy and monopolization. Any work that pays well is useless at best, harmful at worst. It's either illegal or impossible to do anything which might provide value to people. Even if all the hurdles could be removed, I'm not even sure I want to contribute... For whose benefit? And I feel totally disconnected from the broader society around me.
I basically completely checked out career-wise. I'm good at faking though so I just fake it. I just started bullshitting my way through life. I hate it but everyone is just eating it up and loving it. What can I do? Just give the people more of what they want I guess. Value creation doesn't pay, bullshitting pays... People are living a lie and they love it when you build on top of it. If you just say the right words, they will deny their own eyes; this is what COVID taught me and I can see this in my day-to-day life. It's depressing, they are good people, that's why they assume good faith. I was just like them before, living in a bubble, I understand, I'm no better than them, just less fortunate. If they saw what I saw, they would probably do what I do. Many would do worse.
I feel like I need therapy from being this way. I have bills to pay though. I think I did everything approximately right but I've been ridiculously unlucky. I was operating on limited info and incorrect assumptions. Now, I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place.
It's illegal to be homeless in my country. It's illegal to live in a tent on 'your own' property, you are not allowed to build your own house without some expensive license and approvals... You can't do shit within your means. All the things which seemed unimportant to me before are now the centre of my life and on that plane of existence, I see scams all around.
> Bradley Lott-Tillery, 24, from Arizona also entrusted Yotta with his savings, thinking his money would be protected by the federal government. “I emailed [Yotta], made sure it was FDIC insured. Of course, they emailed me back and told me, yes, it’s FDIC insured, which we now know is not true,” Lott-Tillery said.
> While the banks with which fintech companies like Yotta and Juno partner are FDIC insured, this only kicks in when a bank is found to have failed. Since the intermediary Synapse filed for bankruptcy, but not any of the banks, the money is not covered by the regulatory agency.
https://businessjournalism.org/2025/03/synapse-collapse/
(their money was "insured" in the same way depositing money in a random guy's bank account is insured: it's not insured against the guy! these bank-shaped companies managed to convince a bunch of people that they were close enough to banks and about as safe, and then it turned out they all handed the money over to the same fintech company to interface with the actual banks, and that company went messily bust)
The regulation is there to reduce the amount of scamming and con artists. It's the same reason we have Blue Sky Laws.
> Everything feels like a scam within a scam. I feel dizzy just thinking about it. I'm completely demoralised. Everything related to career feels pointless, sisyphean because of the bureaucracy. Any work that pays well is useless at best, harmful at worst. It's either illegal or impossible to do anything which might provide value to people. Even if all the hurdles could be removed, I'm not even sure I want to contribute... For whose benefit?
None of this is because of regulation. It's all because of greed and unchecked grift and profit capture. Technology is making the world worse because of greed and capturing profit, not because of regulations. The work most of us are doing is harmful because of greed and capturing profit, not because of regulations. Everyone is living a lie because of greed and capturing profit, not because of regulations. These uncountable scams are all because of unregulated greed and profit. People on HN are mad, but they're acting out against an imagined "regulation boogieman," not what's actually causing all of the shit.
But it's hard to fix greed. The solution to fix greed is way more radical, it's violent. The greedy will defend their interests with violence when confronted. The only non-violent solution I can think of is to let the system collapse, under their own direction. That's the only way the greedy would relinquish enough control to allow people the freedom to get things going again. There was a bit of this after COVID but it wasn't enough.
I just hope people can maintain their sanity through this. I hope it's not going to be an endless cycle of society repeatedly rebounding off from rock bottom... Never actually lifting itself out of the muck but basically always scraping rock bottom with only short temporary breaks.
As a developer, the system and code complexity we have to work with is increasing to the level that it should be considered mental assault. You need to develop a kind of apathy to get through life.
The regulation + limited liability combo takes away fear. The big companies doing harm love regulations, they breathe a sigh of relief when regulations are introduced. 'Regulatory clarity' they call it. They barely even know what harms the regulation is trying to prevent. They are disconnected from that.
I think this is successful in its goals
Liquidity providing on concentrated liquidity pools is something I would like to see in the high volume US equities market
But will realistically only exist on tokenized platforms that trade their surrogates
It’s extremely lucrative and was only in the domain of market making firms before this technology
A lot of these things are lucrative until they're not. If they are inherently lucrative then that profit will diminish as people catch on.
back to what I'm a fan of: CLMMs (Concentrated Liquidity Market Maker) is a very competitive field. The level of profits depends solely on volume and amount of capital participating. You are counting on other capital getting bored and moving away, as well as volume rising. Thats the game, it will always be the game. Its already "lucrative until its not" so its not really a gotcha or that insightful for those passing by. I'm glad you have some experience with it.
Of all of the supposed use cases for NFTs, this is one of the silliest. If you've ever looked into video game modding, one of the things you tend to realize is there is nothing close to a standard model format for art assets, so it's an insane amount of work to get an item in game A imported into game B, and that's only considering the work in mapping the visual design--the work that goes into mapping item properties is in some cases just "there's nothing you can do." (And this is despite there existing just three software packages that gets used in practice to make this stuff!)
I understand why that would have been a road block in the last, but my hunch is that this type of problem (mapping visuals and item properties) is something AI would make quick work of.
I empathize with the author, I really do, but you can't care about someone more than they care about themselves. If anyone has had the supremely unpleasant experience of trying to get loved ones to work out, they know. The last time someone (democrats) tried to tackle healthcare, they lost scores of seats all down the ballot.
https://www.quorum.us/data-driven-insights/under-obama-democ...
Human history tells us that we don't make it through alone. We thrive on social structures and forming coalitions. Sometimes we get down and our friends and family put in work to pull us back. Your claim is the mental equivalent of "I can't lift someone up more than they can lift themselves up." Sorry, but if all they've got is bootstraps then you bet I can lift them up high into the sky while they can only lift themselves as high as they can jump. I'm pretty sure most people can't jump onto my shoulders and I'm confident none could jump that high and stay without support. Stop asking people to fly and look down at who's shoulders you're standing on
You can't get most Americans to care about anything they consider "socialism", and if you try too hard you'll get Trump.
Democrats losing support can be explained by several reasons that have nothing to do with tackling healthcare. It can be the fact that it ended up being a weak half measure in comparison to the strong desire for a universal healthcare system. Or completely unrelated to healthcare altogether, like the Hilary Clinton scandal fiascos.
One problem with this argument is that insurance companies disagree and nobody with any power in the US seems to want to move away from the "insurance provider" model.
The claim then is that people don't care enough about having public healthcare (or are actively against it) for it to be a politically popular goal.
What crypto is already useful for is not to replace the cash in your pocket and your savings account. It is useful to replace SWIFT and Fort Knox.
What crypto will be useful for in the future is uncertain. But uncertainty does not mean pie in the sky. How the internet would be used was uncertain in the 70s.
Yes, nerds were already excited about the internet in the 70s. Have a look ath the "Mother of all demos": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos It takes decades to iron out the details of how to use fundamentally new technology.
Fear of change. Is there any new technology that HN is in favour of?
But it seemed pretty obvious to me more than a decade ago what cryptocurrency would be useful for. I remember the ideas flying around in the early days.
It's been a bumpy road...but then, I also remember through the late 90s (and especially after the dotcom crash) when there were countless takes on how the Internet (and PCs in general) had been vastly overhyped. "Computers were supposed to eliminate paper, but we're using more paper than ever! We were supposed to do all our shopping and get our news from the internet, but Sears is thriving and I still get my daily newspaper every morning!"
Somebody could absolutely have made a book out of all the overpromises of the "Internet Superhighway" era.
The path to general use for cryptocurrency has been, and will continue to be, rocky. Moreso than the net. It inherently involves money--lots of money--and so it's been rife with scams. "Nigerian Princes" on steroids.
But I can tell you guys: before the rush of investors and crazy bubbles, before the scams and collapses, long before hucksters like Trump got involved, there was a group of people to whom the potential of cryptocurrency seemed obvious.
As I pointed out last time, Bitcoin was released at roughly the same time as the iPhone. Nobody needed to wait for use cases for the iPhone: the global economy immediately reoriented itself around the smartphone, because it delivered massive amounts of obvious value to customers. If this isn’t happening around cryptocurrency, at some point you have to face facts that it’s because the value isn’t there.
Having no other way to do these simple things, from my point of view, it is not a problem of hundred thousand people in Venezuela, it's a valid problem of tens (if not hundreds) of million people around the world.
IMO The author significantly underestimates how limited and inaccessible the current financial system in the world is.