Thread by @Pinboard

The whole thread is great. Criminal activity is what keeps the cryptocurrency bubble inflating (with money laundering the principal use case). The basic critique of crypto is that if it doesn't work, there's no point to it, and if it works as advertised, it attracts all the crime

https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1395687848230199296

There's parallels here to the E2E debate. If you build unbreakable anonymous messaging, criminals will use that. Conversely, there are sympathetic people who use cryptocurrency to evade oppressive governments. The difference is in the tradeoff.

For E2E, the benefit of thwarting mass surveillance so far outweighs the costs that we accept them. But there's no benefit from cryptocurrency that balances out being able to shut down Atlanta and get anonymously paid, or launder hundreds of millions of dollars across borders.

And let's not even start on "smart contracts", the next wave of cryptomania. In the best case, smart contracts are a way to weld unpatchable bugs in code directly to your bank account. In the worst case, they're an obfuscated C contest where the winner gets to take all your money

The state of the art in computer programming in 2021 is such that we can't secure a light bulb. But VCs now want to port five hundred years' of contract law into immutable code and hook up to grandma's retirement account. blog.checkpoint.com/2020/02/05/the…