Thread by @Pinboard

Because Bitcoin especially (through the Tether fraud) and cryptocurrency more generally is a pyramid scheme, of course Wall Street and venture capital need it to go mass market. It's the only road to getting out of their current investment at a profit politico.com/news/2021/05/3…

I think it's time for us in the tech world to speak out and make it clear the emperor has no clothes here. Cryptocurrency is sustained by a mix of money laundering, vaporware, fraud, ransomware, gambling, and delusion. It has no social benefit except helping end first dates fast

What we especially need to stress to regulators is that there's no relationship between the technical claims of cryptocurrency and our now over 13 years of experience. It's not decentralized, it's not a currency, it's not a store of value, and it's not a promising technology

Cryptocurrency solves no problems that it didn't first create, and most of those it doesn't solve. Smart contracts are neither of those things—at worst they're an API for fraud, or as @qrs put it, self-funding bug bounties at best

https://twitter.com/qrs/status/1395784294451265536

I think most of us in the industry gave cryptocurrency a long leash because it's full of technical cleverness and seemed innovative just on those terms. But it's time we recognize that cleverness is being used as bait to defraud more people and perpetuate a con. Enough is enough

The two things people need to know about cryptocurrency are completely non-technical:

1. If it doesn't work, it's just an easy to lose casino chip
2. If it works, it creates an end run around all financial regulation, and will be dominated by uses those regulations try to stop

Some of those financial regulations are unjust. People can send remittances in crypto to relatives in repressive countries, and you hear their stories from boosters. But people also want to move billions in untraceable crime money around. Guess which traffic predominates

The third path out of this dilemma is to legitimize cryptocurrency by bringing it into our existing regulatory structures, at which point it becomes indistinguishable from technologies that do the same thing at a fraction of the complexity and one millionth of the resource cost.

The only reason proponents have to domesticate cryptocurrency is to maintain a situation like the status quo, where part of it (like Coinbase) sits in the legal economy, the rest of remains in the illegal economy, and pathways between the two continue to function smoothly.

Remember the playbook that Uber used:

1. Promise a revolutionary technology ("self-driving cars are coming"!)
2. Use that promise as a pretext to ignore all regulation
3. Make a fortune
4. Drop the tech story

Same goes for crypto

We also have to address the root reason that cryptocurrency exists, which is that there is a corrupt, overfinancialized casino economy that favors the rich, 2008 proved that the system is rigged so they can never lose, and ordinary people will continue to search for a fairer deal

A lot of young, idealistic people are getting caught up in cryptocurrency because they want to build a better world. Their talent and optimism deserve a better outlet than this scam money, and we all need a better alternative than the status quo

A lot of intelligent observers look at cryptocurrency, see that it makes no sense, and reasonably infer that they must be missing something profound on the technical level. Tech culture has a nice tradition of not deriding new ideas, but we need to break it here and speak out

From the outside (like from Congress's point of view) people see a trillion-dollar new tech industry, a lot of proponents who of course argue this is the next big thing, and some critics. They don't see the huge silent majority of tech people who know it's a scam. That's on us

This thread about cryptocurrency made it to the top of Hacker News and then got flagged off in about seven minutes, start to finish. Just to give you an idea of the polarization on this issue among nerds, and why people with doubts stay quiet

Many people in replies are saying "bullshit, there's no billions in laundered money moving over the blockchain!" Right-because it can't handle the volume! The big money laundering is crypto-adjacent and done through projects like Tether. Only ransomware *has* to use blockchain