alt Hacker NewsI wasted years of my life in crypto
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The original promise of crypto was lost a LONG time ago.
Instead of being a true rival to FIAT, it became a thing with a toxic-as-hell commumity, fraud, and basically its nothing more than a high risk stock. The risk is NOT only "will this go up or down" but you have a high risk of being robbed, as have happened to millions of people.
Maybe there will be a better alternative in the future, but right now bitcoin is not it.
I've never understood the initial arguments about Bitcoin, no matter how many times they've been explained to me.
The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database. How anyone, especially many intelligent people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top of such a unwieldy piece of technology is beyond me. Maybe it goes to show how few people understand economics and anthropology and how dunning-krueger can happen to anyone.
Now the uninformed gambling on futuristic sounding hokum? THAT is easy to understand.
That being said, I'm sorry the author had to go through this experience, the road of life is often filled with unexpected twists and turns.
In recent months I changed views and shifted from the desilluioned "this is a casino" mindset that is described in this article to a "we need this now" one. An example in this article [1], the US can now unilateraly decide to prevent an individual anywhere in the world from having a functioning financial life and this because of the quasi (western) duopoly that is Visa and Mastercard. Nothing against the US in general, this is simply too much power to put in a single decisional entity, whatever/wherever it is. The "crypto" related systems now seem like a needed extra option to the current payment system (the same way cash is almost always an alternative to credit/debit card payment and vice versa)
[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/11/19/n...
I got into crypto back in 2011/2012. I used PayPal and bank wire transfer extensively back then, as I bought and sold a lot of stuff internationally - so to me bitcoin seemed like the natural next step, and a godsend to people like me. At my height, I had 100 BTC.
Eventually big events in my life happened, and I sold my coins out of necessity. I found myself unemployed, separated, and broke - so I sold everything I owned. I cashed in around $40k or so from the coins, which helped me pay off my debts and get a down payment for my house. To be honest, I personally don't know anyone from way back then that became filthy rich off crypto, most sold off their stuff when every boom cycle started again, afraid that it would be the last one...the people I know that became rich, were those that went all-in on crypto around 2017/2018. They dumped everything they had, and managed to 10x-100x their investments.
Of course, had I held onto those, I'd be set for life now. But hindsight is 20/20
But with that said, I remember around 2017/2018 when the first "real" boom occurred - that's when everyone pretty much abandoned ideals, and went into it for the money. Lots of people made life-changing money back then, and the idealistic dream was pretty much dead. "Store of value" won the war, and soon after "moon lambo".
At least for me, the writing on the wall was clearly that crypto would evolve into just another financial instrument that big finance would pump and dump periodically. Though I could not foresee a crypto-friendly US gov. entering the picture.
All of this was obvious 8 or so years ago during the first real boom when cryptos pants fell down. All hype no usecase. Here we are now how far along in (20 odd years?) with how many smart people making a genuine concerted effort to build something useful (literally millions over the years?) - and still the only useful thing anyone has ever done with blockchain is buy drugs and have a good time.
As I say, crypto is only useful if the whole world is already on the chain. Until then you need to trust outside sources which undermines the entire deal in trustlessness and undermines it in performance.
> your bank account would just hold USDC or Bitcoin, and you could send a billion dollars to anyone in the world in a few seconds. That belief is powerful and I still ascribe to it.
These statements still surprise me to this day. If you're a good person engineer, why does sending money in seconds need blockchain? There's parts of the world where this is commonplace and free as well.
I don't believe cross border was there in 2010 or so but why not implement that feature in an existing system instead of building out a parallel universe
The most interesting insight here isn’t “crypto bad,” but how years in a speculation-first ecosystem warp your intuition for what real value looks like.
When incentives reward casinos over products, even talented builders end up optimizing for the wrong game. That lesson applies far beyond crypto.
It's not a complete waste. 8 years is a lot of time spent learning to build a tool that, sure, might not have been "good" but it was still time spent building a tool. Those skills are applicable elsewhere, and perhaps the most important thing to realize is that at least the time wasn't spent on NFTs.
My question is, which real-world problem is actually solved by crypto? All I know is transferring money over the border gets much easier than pre-bitcoin era.
Sold most of my BTC off at $120k, but kept a chunk not as an investment but as a sort of emergency fund that could be useful if for some reason I ever find myself needing to transact without using cash, bank accounts or credit cards.
GNU Taler is a working implementation of "digital cash" in the spirit of Ecash. Since it doesn't come with its own currency, it cannot be used for gambling. It is quite telling that it has seen essentially zero adoption in the "crypto" scene.
Glad to hear the change of heart here and the guts it took to write it up. I know that's not an easy thing to do, and it likely burned some bridges.
The point about it being gambling, and therefore, taking advantage of idiots, yeah that rings true. The mass proliferation of gambling and the true compulsive addiction and ruin of mostly young men, it's hard to look at oneself and state that they caused that pain for other and their loved ones.
The next step is, of course, to do the very hard part: use the money gained for good. The author mentions that they are a hypocrite for only speaking out after making their money. They need not be so. Finding legitimate ways to use the ill gotten gains for good is a bit of what they built their skills in, after all.
I hope to someday see the next post of theirs detailing how many people they helped and how many lives saved, families reunited and made sound again, based on how they used this new wealth for good.
They are very far from the end of their story, but the midpoint, so to speak, has been passed.
Cynically reduced, tfa reads as: "I don't like what the population is choosing to use their brand-new Freedom for", but claims to say: "The promised freedom did not materialize."
If crypto allows people to do something that was previously not possible(order drugs in the mail with the convenience of amazon, invest at consistently insanely chaotic conditions, run multimillion hustles with total impunity) versus doing something that was possible already, just re-skinned(make bank transfers), then it's really no surprise what will see better adoption. The biggest value-add is in the degenerate stuff.
One correction. Crypto is not zero sum. It is a potential minus 100% sum for all the players involved. Maybe with exceptions of the folks making cash from the transaction fees.
I don't think the author should be sad. He helped push an industry that lets people move value around freely without third parties being able to choke them off. That alone is pretty powerful. The people gambling with it would probably be gambling with something else instead. As for not learning to create something users want, nothing will prevent him from starting now
I've talked to people that, around 2023, were still very deep into the "we are the revolution. open source decentralized finance will free humanity" belief, while it was obvious that more and more of it was blending with institutions and dubious characters. Pretty odd (but massively interesting as a sociological pattern).
Guy who was "enamored by the whole idea of Bitcoin being a private bank for wealthy individuals" is shocked to learn that the system "will lead to the long-term collapse of social mobility for the younger generation".
He's now wiser than the average Randian acolyte, but still seems to think this structural feature of capitalism is somehow unique to cryptocurrency.
HN generally views blockchain tech negatively I've found, but I'll leave this here for the inevitable: crypto if a casino and has no real use.
https://kaveh.page/blog/what-is-blockchain-actually-used-for
I’d hesitate to say it’s wasted. Aren’t these some of the most complex, electronic, decentralized systems in human history? That skillset is going to be more and more important the more and more computers there are.
Okay, so if your time felt wasted, that must mean there were better uses of your 20s.
But, how else would you have driven towards your goal of building a new financial system?
Crytocurrency was the initial use case for blockchain, but blockchain is not limited to cryptocurrency.
Did he at least make good money though? It's so strange to me that someone can get a sense of purpose from building something specifically for wealthy people tbh
Considering the transaction time and cost, crypto never made sense. As fast as I can tell, it's been pure speculation since its inception.
You feel old when you read "crypto" and your first tought is about cryptography.
What stands out to me is how many smart people spent their best years optimizing around the constraints of a system that was fundamentally misaligned with real-world demand. The tech is fascinating, but incentives turned the whole space into a gravity well for speculation rather than creation.
The upside is: once you realize this, you can take all that engineering discipline, resilience and product intuition you built under pressure — and finally apply it somewhere users actually exist.
I always wondered what "clever" people expected from crypto, apart from getting rich quick schemes. Boring.
We had such know-it-alls still with their pimples from Frauenhofer and Max Planck giving presentations. Even back then, 99% percent of the audience were skeptical, but sadly too many decision makers are just emperors with no clothing. There were so many immature, useless loud speakers given a junior professorship because old morons have FOMO too. That must have sucked for the valid academics with proven achievements. I'm glad I'm not one of the ones waiting in queue. There no single project having any sign of impact, naturally. While that can be said of a lot of academic work, crypto: more buzzwords, even less delivered.
I know which school I'd count on to not be based on gambling if I had to choose between a distorted view of libertarianism (and Aynd Rand) and the more pragmatic and sound principles of folks like Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett.
For more enjoyable snippets like this, I recommend https://x.com/coinfessions/
> "I was a politically motivated person when I was a teenager. Of all the books that radicalized me, it was the Aynd Rand books (Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged) that did."
A heartfelt "Thank you!" to Ken on account of having at least the courtesy of saving cool people's time by putting the Origin Story into the first sentences.
Wrong. People who use crypto as a casino - that is, "invest" into it or "trade" it - are a numerical majority but they aren't those who make actual money there. Actual money is made by those who use it for:
- Tool/facilitation of "brick and mortar" crime, as well as some cybercrime (moving drug money across borders, way to pay ransom in a way difficult to track, etc).
- Tool for scams.
- Hacks, including (but not limited to), on-chain hacks.
I know a lot of people who made 9-digit sums in crypto. None of them invested or traded coins (none were from the 'crime' category either). Most typical kind of people are those who did hard-core (hundreds of thousands of accounts) sybil attacks on ICOs and launchpads in their heyday in 2017-2021. So it was scripting/scraping/cloud deployments using residential proxies/buying passport scans on darknets.
Also those who ran Solana nodes from massive sybils too (up to 200 people - it's 1 node per person so one has to have many persons). While that probably qualifies as speculation/"trading" Solana, servers being little but a booster, so in part it was "casino".
I heard some people were talking about using crypto to build a full State on it, this is doomed to fail.
Let's say you loose your wallet. What do you do next? You call your bank to block your credit card and to take an appointment with the administration to make a new ID, driving license etc. The cash in your wallet is gone but everything else isn't. The process is annoying but at the end of the day you'll be fine.
Now if all this is based on a private key and you loose it, you're completely done, you're just not part of society anymore.
No one will ever embrace this because humans are messy and make mistakes all the time. Crypto and blockchain are so resistant to mistakes that for this specific case it's just not good at all.
> It would be a lie for me to say that I joined crypto without any financial motivation. As a reader, it may sound hypocritical to you that I decided to swear off the crypto industry, now that I have made enough money. Yes, maybe I am hypocritical. But maybe I also just feel sick about contributing to the cesspool of financialization and gamblification of the economy.
If they truly feel sick about it, they should donate the money they made (or the vast majority of it). Otherwise, hypocritical is right.
> Look at what they do, not what they say
It's unhealthy to ascribe religious or ideological ideas to money. It's a tool. Ideology needs to preach, to influence minds.
Crypto is not necessarily just a casino; the tech has value but there is no mass adoption of the currency as of yet.
We'll probably see mass adoption of crypto if a crypto can become a store of wealth
i would have expected more adequate comments on HN, unfortunately it's mostly boomer-minded condescending gibberish from people who don't understand bitcoin, hfsp
Ah yes, more bitcoin hate on the orange site, quelle surprise.
Wait until you learn how much of life is gambling + entertainment. Is working for one of the many SV SaaS companies really that much different?
crypto means cryptography
This is about cryptocurrencies, not actual cryptography.
From a developer perspective, a big part of crypto’s problem is that complexity becomes a way to hide centralization.
Everyone talks about "decentralized bridges" but them end up as centralized swaps wrapped in jargon.
The hard problems aren't being solved, they’re being obscured.
I've always been intrigued by the whole "decentralized and fixed supply" argument around Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies.
But the more I look into it, the more I wonder: if one Bitcoin can be split into 0.1, 0.01, 0.001 or even smaller fractions for transactions, doesn't that kind of undermine the whole “fixed total supply” idea?
Also, sure, cryptocurrencies are decentralized in theory and the transactions are hard to trace. But at the end of the day, anyone holding crypt is still very much under the control of governments. You can't magically escape regulations or enforcement just because the currency is "decentralized." It's an interesting tension between theory and reality that I don't think enough people talk about.
I'm sorry this guy feels like that, and I agree that there are tons of fraudsters and casino players in the current crypto scene.
It also doesn't surprise me to read the reactions in here, as most of HN users are from the US or other first world countries.
For people like me who were born and have lived in developing countries or countries were we cannot fully trust our banking/monetary systems, Bitcoin IS a tool to escape possible problems. I'm old enough to have been in 3 monetary crises in my country: 1985, 1994 and 2008. I'm old enough to have seen countries like Argentina, Venezuela, Spain, Lebanon, Greece experience bank runs. And when that happens, only the rich and connected can do something, while individuals like us are left holding the bag and paying for the errors of others (Americans may remember the 1% movement, occupy wall street).
So, no. Bitcoin is and still will be a useful thing for me and a lot of people. First word.country citizens may not understand it, until it becomes too late .
Wasting your 20s sounds like you did nothing in your 20s. Instead you actively made the world worse by building a casino with power hungry technology.
“The gamblification of the economy” is the real story here. Crypto, prediction markets, and omnipresent instant gambling apps are poisoning more and more of our society and draining money from folks in an entirely unproductive way. These things promise a quick path to fortune but the only people making money are the fraudsters or the platform owners (often the same people). Serious regulation of these things is long overdue, and no, forcing them to advertise gambling hotlines is not sufficient.
As OP says: He was radicalized.
I like some aspects of Ayn Rand, I like some aspects of crypto. I like some things Elon did.
One takes in info, incorporates it into ones world view. One does not go nuts following just one gospel as absolute truth.
This piece has nothing to do with Ayn Rand, or Crypto. It's just another example of how, when you're young, some oversimplifications can make you feel like you really understand the world. It's important to guide the young ones through this phase. I also remember putting down Atlas Shrugged thinking I'd find THE WAY. But it's the start of a learning process. Models (as in the models of the world we build in our heads) are useful, but always approximations. One needs to learn to appreciate that. For me that came with age, OP is going through something similar.
don’t view it as a waste
you understand how to construct complex & stimulating games that people will play compulsively for money. that’s good.
next, craft games for which you can guarantee a house edge. should be small yet assured.
you’re already an experienced casino game developer
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/01/31/end.html#section...
Vitalik touched upon this briefly in an other-wise long and wide-reaching essay. I think its a good treatment of the topic that the author is talking about. He categorizes the ecosystem broadly into 4 cohorts- [token holders] (which includes investors, speculators, etc.), [pragmatic users] (actual end-users who spend crypto to buy stuff), [intellectuals] (who give the vision and ideology), [builders] (of blockchains, apps, etc.) - These 4 groups come together but with different motivations and there is a gap in understanding between them. Indeed, there is even resistance against trying to reach an understanding - one which plays out in the comments section of every crypto-related post on hn. The author of this twitter-post clearly falls under [intellectual, builder] and has been disillusioned by the speculators from [token-holders]. Yet the [token-holders] are a vital component (as are the other groups) as they fund most of the development and adoption. Ultimately these 4 groups have more in common than not. The challenge going forward is to balance the occasionally conflicting needs of all the 4 groups, which includes checking the excesses of each group, while try to achieve a consensus. (Vitalik provides a nice diagram that maps out what that would look like). Crypto is an experiment in economics and economics is a science as well as a social-science. Anyone looking for a good solution must seek to understand and address the psychology of all the actors involved.