Comment by sigmoid10
3 hours ago
>Estimated total impact: ~$6.3B, with ~$3B frozen on-chain so far, in coordination with our blockchain partners
I always find it amusing to read this. Why would you even bother with a decentralized currency that can move freely across the globe when some centralized institutions can always interfere in the way legacy banks used to do with your money? Either they are misguiding you about the core value of their product or their ability to execute traditional interventions in cases of theft. You can't have the conveniences of both at the same time.
Exactly.
It's called the oracle problem. It's the Achilles heel of the whole idea.
And it's unsolvable. As soon as you want to trade some coin for something real, you need an oracle.
Wanna buy a flat in a world where (for argument's sake) even the ownership of that asset is tracked on a blockchain?
Let's say I come home from holidays and someone else lives there.
How do I then prove it's mine? Because it says so in some computer?
Someone has to believe that is true and let me enforce that ownership tie.
Those persons (a judge, the police, even if robots by then) are the oracle.
And a more common scenario than theft is btw legal ownership transfer.
What if I die somehow before giving the blockchain keys needed for that to someone?
How will my brother inherit the flat?
Oracle.
You're mixing up two issues. The need for oracles is a "hard problem" but it's not the problem in this case.
USDC has a central issuer that can freeze funds because that's the only way you can currently have an asset that "looks like" dollars on a crypto ledger. Someone gets a dollar, mints a unit of the bearer token, and pinky swears they'll redeem it. It's a systemic concern that calls into question the legitimacy of the system, but that's not an oracle.
>> Those persons (a judge, the police, even if robots by then) are the oracle.
they are not. The oracle is always a computer. It is a record in gov db that says you own something.
Judge and the police are the enforcers.
"Oracle" being the cover for crypto bros who dont want to admit they need "the legal system" to fix thier mess. Its all idiology and freedom when you are poor but once you actually own something of value, like a flat, suddenly you want lawyers and police to keep you safe from bad people.
At some point it clicked to me that crypto people don’t really care about the utility. Main purpose is creating new players in the world with immense amounts of power. In the end, it did produce a lot of rich people out of thin air, and I guess, served its purpose.
No? Cryptocurrency has a ton of utility: it simplified ransomware attacks, enabled the deployment of supplychain attacks to steal funds from unsuspecting users, made illegal gambling accessible to everyone, memecoins, efts and safe storage for any stolen or illicidly gained funds until they could be laundered and the list goes on likely exceeding the character limit.
The biggest benefit is that you can only withdraw what you need into the real world, if you gain millions of dollars you can life off that money for the rest of your life with tiny withdrawals of $2000~$5000 or so serving as a stable stream of income which allows you to have risk free investment into real-world activites that would normally strain your finances and induce sunk cost fallacy.
It's another wealth transfer. No new money is generated.
No new money was generated, but new utility was generated.
Before cryptocurrency, there was no decentralized way to transfer value on the internet.
1 reply →
> At some point it clicked to me that crypto people don’t really care about the utility. Main purpose is creating new players in the world with immense amounts of power.
There are many types of crypto people. Some of them are not crypto people per se, but people who saw crypto as a means to an end. Among them, there are plenty of people who seem to be invested in sheer fraud.
It's also important to note that there are many sides to the scheme. There's for example the instant transactions side, and the long term bet in scarcity. For example, Russia has been leaning heavily on crypto to circumvent sanctions due to their invasion of Ukraine.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2025/08/russias-use-of-...
> In the end, it did produce a lot of rich people out of thin air, and I guess, served its purpose.
It was not out of thin air. This is literally a grift where the people holding the bag saw their money find its way to the pockets of those who got rich from it.
>the people holding the bag saw their money find its way to the pockets of those who got rich
This is the key issue. Crypto by itself created little to no actual additional value. Especially when it devolved into just another centralized currency with less government oversight. So the whole thing was a zero-sum game. People only got rich because they made others poor.
Why would Russia need crypto, when they can trade with China or buy through middle men in Dubai or similar places ?
2 replies →
Stable coins are not Crypto, they are just built on top of crypto to avoid normal financial regulations.
> Why would you even bother with a decentralized currency that can move freely across the globe when some centralized institutions can always interfere in the way legacy banks used to do with your money?
Regulatory arbitrage. Not all centralized institutions are fast enough to actually make use of the theoretical capabilities available to them.
> Why would you even bother with a decentralized currency that can move freely across the globe when some centralized institutions can always interfere in the way legacy banks used to do with your money?
Cheaper international transfers could be a specific valid use case. But I presume risk is too high for my taste.
Based on my 10 seconds of Googling, for transactions under $100, Bitcoin is actually more expensive to transfer.
Crypto bros sure are quick to inform law enforcement and centralized financial authorities if their self governance fails
The usual "Governments are evil until I need to be rescued" libertarian shuffle.
I'd bet most of the frozen $3B is stablecoins and tokens with an admin freeze function. Tether and Circle can blacklist an address in minutes. Nobody can freeze BTC or ETH. So the money they got back is the part that was never decentralized in the first place, which supports your point from the other side