this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2025
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Crypto is actually really useful for buying drugs and other illegal products and services. People have legitimately made a lot of money as well if they weren't falling for the stupid scams. You should see the price of BitCoin or Ethereum these days.
Not saying it's ethical to run a lot of these given their limited usefulness and very high costs. But saying they didn't make people money, were all scams, or didn't have a use is objectively wrong.
That's some wildly disingenuous goal post moving when describing what was meant to be The Future of Finance™ at the time.
Like saying yeh, AGI was a pipedream and there's no disruption of technical professions to be seen anywhere, but you can't deny LLMs made it way easier for bad actors to actively fuck with elections, and the people posting autogenerated youtube slop 5.000 times a day sure did make some legitimate ad money.
check their recent post history. it’s all old school, Ayn Rand, bro you don’t even watch Bullshit?, internet libertarian takes and it’s fucking delicious, like eating a Big Mac straight from the time capsule where someone buried it
there’s some kind of new reality / competition show in this. I’m thinking mixture “you can’t eat that many burgers!” challenge shit, preservation/archivist commentators, and organic chemists and good dieticians as adjudicators
all of actual large scale uses of crypto as it stands today are money laundering, sanctions evasion by nk, iran and russia, securities frauds and other financial crimes from hundred years ago repackaged in cyberpunk wrapper, and a couple of other ways to scam cryptobros