I'm not saying this is the same thing the author is proposing, but... I'm reminded of a quote from one of my favorite book-series:
> One of the Patrician’s greatest contributions to the reliable operation of Ankh-Morpork had been, very early in his administration, the legalizing of the ancient Guild of Thieves. Crime was always with us, he reasoned, and therefore, if you were going to have crime, at least it should be organized crime.
> And so the Guild had been encouraged to come out of the shadows and build a big Guildhouse, take their place at civic banquets, and set up their training college with day-release courses and City and Guilds certificates and everything. In exchange for the winding down of the Watch, they agreed, while trying to keep their faces straight, to keep crime levels to a level to be determined annually. That way, everyone could plan ahead, said Lord Vetinari, and part of the uncertainty had been removed from the chaos that is life.
> And then, a little while later, the Patrician summoned the leading thieves again and said, oh, by the way, there was something else. What was it, now? Oh, yes... I know who you are, he said. I know where you live. I know what kind of horse you ride. I know where your wife has her hair done. I know where your lovely children, how old are they now, my, doesn’t time fly, I know where they play. So you won’t forget about what we agreed, will you?
-- Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett
This is also the story of cryptocurrencies. From Silk Road to ETF-wrapped investment products where no actual crypto ever moves when you trade it. For 99.9% of crypto investors, the Patrician knows exactly what kind of horse they ride.
Soon the deal will be complete. Starting next year there will be an acceptable level of securities fraud and pump-and-dumps in the US, with the SEC looking the other way while crypto banksters and their political allies con the public.
I started in crypto just three years ago, and while it's a bit more alternative, overall it's just business.
Sure, I get paid in all kinds of tokens, and it's nice to see some coins rise after I get paid, which makes freelancer work feel a tiiiiiny bit more like being and employee with stock.
But it's just a job like any other. I write articles, I write code, I talk with clients, investors, users... And at the end of the day I get paid.
> “I get paid in all kinds of tokens, and it's nice to see some coins rise after I get paid, which makes freelancer work feel a tiiiiiny bit more like being an employee with stock.”
This is the very definition of a security in US law. These tokens are unregulated penny stocks. (Of course you and your employers may be in another country and this doesn’t apply.)
It certainly doesn’t seem like a big crime. And maybe your employers are the good guys. But everyone knows there are also tons of bad actors in crypto who sell junk tokens to retail investors who lose their savings.
This happens all over the world: millions of Nigerians have invested in crypto, but it’s almost exclusively into tokens created by local influencers that end up being worthless in a few years. That’s the overwhelming global reality of crypto, not the stories of noble dissidents receiving Bitcoin.
Yes, it's mostly a shit show.
NFTs, meme coins, etc.
I don't understand most of that.
I keep to my niche, build with stuff I think is interesting, and keep away from most of it.
Does it bother you that there's no actual value creation at the bottom of it?
I used to work for financial traders, and while I was there I'd justify it to myself in the usual terms: the traditional commodities markets increase liquidity and keep prices low for people doing actually socially valuable things, like growing wheat or turning it into food.
But honestly, even then that could have been accomplished with 1/10th of the effort and smarts that was put into trading, and it was mostly driven by greedy people and/or fools, so when I got out of that industry I was glad to be shut of it. Crypto strikes me as yet worse, in that there's no underlying value, just a circus of greed.
I don't know much about fintech, just that token incentives motivate people to host service I'd like to use.
Proof of work for stored data sounds like a reasonable use case for me.
> there's no underlying value, just a circus of greed
At least it keeps the clowns occupied.
The crypto industry is extremely untrustworthy, but for me, I don't think "there's no actual value creation at the bottom of it" is more true of e.g. Bitcoin than USD.
Assume USD is somehow attached to food, shelter, and other necessities (for the record, I agree that it is, but only indirectly). Those necessities are the things we need, but we don't need money to create them. We just need energy and physical resources (which, technically, also just require energy). All money is an accounting system built on top of the physical processes that we use to grow, gather, hunt, cultivate, shape, and build matter.
So there's nothing weird, to me, about money being built almost directly on top of energy usage. I think it makes sense.
Most money is built on top of gold or other precious-but-unnecessary materials, which I can't say seems more attached to real value than energy. But even if we assume 1 unit of money is 1 day's worth of food, who's to say that unit of food is actually a necessity for the holder? That food is a specialized form of energy; energy which has been used and which can't be unused. The food itself is an accounting of entropy. But it (mostly) can't be converted into shelter or other necessities, only traded or stored. So, again, I don't see "this money is an accounting of energy used" as outlandish, but reasonable.
Let me conclude, however, by roundly rebuking crypto grifters and the majority of the industry. They're generally not operating on the arguments I've made above anyway.
All currencies are built on trust. The reason the wildcat banking era failed was lack of trust. The reason various national currencies failed was never about resources, but lack of trust in the government behind the currency. The USD has been a very strong currency because it's backed by a stable government with a strong economy and has a stoutly independent central bank, which has built up enormous trust as a custodian of the currency.
I grant that the rhetoric of Bitcoin is about energy usage, but it doesn't work that way in practice. The most obvious use is the rise of Ethereum and its shift to proof of stake rather than proof of work. But there's plenty of other evidence. David Rosenthal has some good evidence there, like:
https://blog.dshr.org/2024/10/it-was-ten-years-ago-today.htm...
https://blog.dshr.org/2024/05/sufficiently-decentralized.htm...
Well, yeah. I avoided the subject of trust because it wasn't the subject of the comment I was responding to. It's a different component of money.
Money depends entirely on trust which is a form of belief. But it only matters because it accounts for energy. Because there is nothing to trust in if money can't be exchanged for energy. We trust that our paychecks will buy food because our society is usually fairly robust in that respect. We trust that the US government will go to war to prevent the USD from being deprecated, which lets us continue to use USD.
There's no trust that Bitcoin can always be exchanged for any arbitrary good or service - whereas USD can be turned into anything you want. Bitcoin will always account for some energy usage, but so will starting forest fires. The difference is that nobody is ever going to trade me anything of value for starting a forest fire. That's the trust element. But starting a forest fire leaves just as real an impact on the universe as mining crypto, as mining gold, as building bombs to threaten grifters with.
That also doesn't make much sense to me. Money existed long before energy was a significant commodity. Like, thousands of years before.
There's ransomware hackers in some countries who also write reports while getting health insurance and paid parental leave...
Fair.
You could say the same about anything, let's pick cars.
"There are people driving cars to commit crimes, like bank robbery!"
Oh no! Now all cars and their drivers are criminals, I suppose? Grandma driving to the grocery store surely is up to no good?
I think the claim being attempted is that crypto is mostly used for crime. Yet is that true? How many transactions happened yesterday? And how many were nefarious?
That's not the right question. There are three buckets.
The biggest bucket is going to be purely financial trades. This is true whether you're trading wheat or copper or oil or whatever. Anybody who thinks they can make a dime but doesn't actually want any of the underlying is here.
Then of the rest, you split by social value. For the traditional markets, most of these trades will be socially positive. Wheat buyers and wheat sellers are mostly making things that people actually want and benefit from. Anything like that is in the "positive social value" bucket.
The third bucket is socially negative. In the traditional commodities, this includes the people who were trading nickel but just swapped in rocks, and other kinds of fraud. Or if you were a terrorist who was buying oil to dump it on the Great Barrier Reef, that'd be there too.
Most crypto trading is in the first bucket, because that's true of almost any financial market. People who need the underlying don't trade much compared with people who are seeking financial advantage. But of the rest, unlike traditional markets, most of the non-financial trades are socially negative. Cryptocurrencies main non-trading uses are things like ransomware, scams, pump-and-dumps, rug pulls, and money laundering, plus other efforts to evade the controls of the traditional financial system.
So the right societal question is: Ignoring the financial traders, what's the ratio between the socially positive and socially negative uses of the underlying?
This is a great way of looking at it imo
I made no specific claim about "crypto" one way or the other. My point is that to decide if some activity is legal, or moral, etc., you have to look at what is actually done.
It's not enough to look at whether the day-to-day work "feels like a normal job", or "looks like a normal job" from the outside. You can have a highly respectable job while interacting with people who all look like stereotypical movie mobsters (e.g. prison social worker). You can also sit in a respectable office all day wearing a nice suit while committing genocide.
> "He was just a little villain. An old-fashioned craftsman, making crimes one-off. The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present–they are real."
-- Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold
Totally unrelated. But first Discworld, now this?
I need your book recommendations, or reading list :)
Pratchett and Bujold are pretty much my top-two, which extends the the degree to which I feel compelled to share quotes. Both are rather character-oriented and often I find things (jokes, references, turns of phrase) on a re-read that I didn't catch the first time.
My main caution is that I wouldn't start with Pratchett's earliest works--there are already bunch of suggested reading-order guides out there. I spent a decade thinking Pratchett was overrated because I started with the wrong book. (IIRC The Colour of Magic seemed just too much of a parade of absurd situations for their own sake.) I like the City Watch books (starting in Guards! Guards!) and Small Gods is a decent stand-alone.
For Bujold, the Vorkosigan series is the flagship, where I'd put the Curse of Chalion (fantasy) as a second.
Thanks!
I can definitely recommend the Vorkosigan series by Bujold. That quote is from the first one, and echoes here and there throughout.
Thank you!
> I think the claim being attempted is that crypto is mostly used for crime. Yet is that true?
I mean... whether it's true or not, it sure _looks true from the outside_.
What it looks like from the outside has little bearing on the underlying reality, but it's extremely relevant to questions like "will I be viewed with suspicion for having worked with this" or "is my company likely to end up subject to restrictive regulation".
Assuming (I genuinely do not know) that the crypto industry has got legitimate uses which are not dwarfed by illegitimate ones, it has got a _massive_ image problem - because "everyone knows" it's for crime.
It's actually stranger than that. The legal cryptocurrencies are often worse than the ones that lack respectability. Take for example, Greyscale's Chainlink Trust. It would be hard to find a more respectable cryptocurrency investment, yet I did some analysis of it about a year ago, and concluded they were selling Chainlink to their customers at approximately 8x the price on Coinbase[1]. Chainlink isn't likely to pull an 8x an time soon, and even if it does, trust investors wouldn't see the benefit, because Greyscale can simply seize those gains. There are two one could think of this in traditional market terms:
1. You can think of Greyscale as an arbitrageur between on-chain Chainlink and trust shares, where they'll be trying to purchase Chainlink at times when the difference between on-chain Chainlink and trust Chainlink is maximized.
2. You could also think of Greyscale as being able to print "shares". They can't print shares for free (i.e. they are legally obligated to purchase on-chain Chainlink) but they control the supply part of the supply:demand ratio. They can simply purchase on-chain Chainlink when the supply:demand ratio for trust Chainlink is higher than on-chain Chainlink, which takes money from trust Chainlink investors by diluting their shares. In theory the market will trend toward rational (i.e. eventually on-chain and trust Chainlink will trend toward a value that is equal, adjusted for the value of legal integration) but until that happens Greyscale is positioned as the only player that can take advantage of that temporary irrationality.
Cryptocurrency has always been an application of caveat emptor where the caveats can be hidden in the code or the economics, or both, but with the integration into the legal system, it's now possible for cryptocurrencies with solid code and economics to scam the public with legal caveats.
The average person was always at a disadvantage with cryptocurrencies, but I fear with the addition of legal respectability, even someone like myself who can read the code and has a solid understanding of economics can no longer be sure of my crypto investments.
I'm finding lately that options trading has the same high variance (high upside potential is why I wanted into crypto investing), without a lot of the parts I don't like. Particularly, I'm doing it with my Roth IRA money so even taxes are easy.
[1] These numbers have almost certainly changed since I did this analysis--I know HNers like to correct people, but consider that before you correct me here.
I've never read the book, so perhaps I'm missing the point, but -- surely then the Guild points out they've always known where the Patrician lives and where his wife had her hair done and so forth? And the Patrician says, ahem quite right what was I thinking? We'll maintain what we agreed.
I mean, in US urban areas back in its heyday, everyone knew who the mafia were. But that didn't prevent them from doing their mafia thing.
In the books the Patrician is a politician who was trained as an assassin (who have their own guild, and after many incidents refuse to take contracts on the Patrician because it's not worth their life).
What he's doing there is turning the thieves into the watch - they have a permitted level of theft they can do, normal people can buy "guild passes" which immunizine themselves from even that level of theft, and the Thieves' Guild comes down exceptionally hard on unlicensed thieves.
And the Patrician is unmarried.
They're quite fun to read as Pratchett has a good handle on the "balance of power" negotiations that the Patrician engages in; he plays various power groups off against each other in such a way that he is always the second worst problem to deal with, and taking him out would make it worse.
The most important factor in that the Patrician (Havelock Vetinari, as a joke on the Medicis) ensures that almost everyone agrees that his continued rule is marginally better than upsetting the status-quo... And in some cases allows opposition to succeed just enough to make people regret it.
Part of this rests on the ancient Guild of Assassins, which requires a certain amount of style and also has a very very dim view on anyone threatening their monopoly on killing-for-profit. Their price for going after Vetinari is high enough to discourage most bidders, and Vetinari is a skilled (mostly non-practicing) alumnus that can largely protect himself from them.
______
> “I see you're very comfortable here,” said Vimes weakly.
> “Never build a dungeon you wouldn't be happy to spend the night in yourself,” said the Patrician, laying out the food on the cloth. “The world would be a happier place if more people remembered that.”
> “We all thought you had built secret tunnels and suchlike,” said Vimes.
> “Can't imagine why,” said the Patrician. “One would have to keep on running. So inefficient. Whereas here I am at the hub of things. I hope you understand that, Vimes. Never trust any ruler who puts his faith in tunnels and bunkers and escape routes. The chances are that his heart isn't in the job.”
[...]
> "You see,” he said, “it’s always the case, is it not, that should a city be overtaken by violent civil unrest the current ruler is thrown into the dungeons? To a certain type of mind that is so much more satisfying than mere execution."
> “Well, okay, but I don’t see—” Vimes began.
> “And you look at this door and what you see is a really strong cell door, yes?”
> “Of course. You’ve only got to look at the bolts and—”
> “You know, I’m really rather pleased,” said Lord Vetinari quietly.
> Vimes stared at the door until his eyebrows ached. And then, just as random patterns in cloud suddenly, without changing in any way, become a horse’s head or a sailing ship, he saw what he’d been looking at all along. A sense of terrifying admiration overcame him.
> He wondered what it was like in the Patrician’s mind. All cold and shiny, he thought, all blued steel and icicles and little wheels clicking along like a huge clock. The kind of mind that would carefully consider its own downfall and turn it to advantage. It was a perfectly normal dungeon door, but it all depended on your sense of perspective.
> In this dungeon the Patrician could hold off the world. All that was on the outside was the lock. All the bolts and bars were on the inside.
-- Guards! Guards!
One of the best sonic games ever made, sonic mania, wasn’t made in-house by sonic team, but a handful of fans making fanwork.
Sega’s choice to treat their fanwork seriously and make them second-party developers rather than shutting them down was not only an immeasurably good thing for both the project and its fans, but a measurably, handsomely profitable move for Sega.
I've just finished reading the Doom Black Book - https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbdoom/
The number of ports of Doom that were made by fans and only licensed after the work was done so it could be sold is surprisingly high. Randy Linden on the SNES is an interesting story (and the very chip he used was also a similar story at its inception).
> It’s almost always the case that infringement happens negligently (that is, because of the vagaries of the internet, the infringer doesn’t always realize they’re infringing someone else’s work).
I disagree with this. Everyone knows they didn't make it - they know it belongs to someone. They just don't want to give anyone else anything for using it, so they hope either it happens to have been released to public use or the creator can't be bothered to chase it up.
The insanity of "destroy free work" as proof of concept to keep what you got. IP as a moat vs IP as a eco-system mycelium constantly producing new growth is pretty psychotic as concept from a growth perspective.
Most infringement is probably caused by sites that scrape content and automatically repost it for SEO optimization. Cron jobs are the ultimate infringers.
As an atomised creative professional, copyright is not designed to help you. So it is not surprising that the "expected" mechanism for exercising your rights is not the most successful one.
Someone should forward this article to the C-suite at Nintendo.
Except that Nintendo is huge. Nintendo doesn't need an influence with 300 followers.
This works, sort of kind of, for mid-level creatives who aren't struggling to make rent (and thus need the money) and aren't huge (so don't need the exposure).