by nailer | 2026-02-17 13:26:28+00:00
Hold on a sec…this won’t have the on screen graphics or text obviously but here you go.

Transcript:

I've been a member of Hacker News for 19 years since the site was called Startup News, and a lot of the criticisms it makes about crypto are correct, but they're also about a decade out of date.

(intro)

So I've been regularly contributing to Hacker News for a really long time. There was a particularly a five year period where I had a company that worked in TLS that would post articles about, HTTP, HTTPS, brotli, gzip, NGINX, Apache that regularly made the Hacker News front page. I work in developer relations now, and even before that I was a computer journalist writing for magazines. I generally get a technical audience and I know that Hacker News hates crypto and it's actually fine to hate crypto. It's totally reasonable. But I think the reasons they hate crypto are about a decade out of date, and it's a little bit strange.

I get why people hated crypto. because I hated crypto too. When I had my TLS company, the smart people I met at any conferences to do with [00:01:00] InfoSec or cryptography, all have the same sticker on their laptop, and rightly so, a bunch of get rich quick assholes had taken a term crypto that is used to describe a pure science that is thousands of years old, spanning from ancient Egypt to Dan Bernstein and reused it, to describe large, obnoxious men that wear dive watches but can't dive. And it always seemed like if you read the docs and asked the right questions, the cryptography community was genuinely very helpful. So the hatred of blockchain seemed entirely justified.

But times changed. The academics that were spending their PhD a few years ago working on experimental techniques like fully homomorphic encryption, are now running blockchain companies providing those same techniques to companies building financial software and reaping the rewards.

But Hacker News is still strangely outdated. And again, I'm not saying it's wrong to hate crypto. You can hate anything you like, but the reasons they give are really strange. It's like someone turning around and saying they don't like node.js because of callback hell and no strict typing. Yeah, it was true. It's just not really anymore.

So take this recent Hacker News post. It's to a paywalled fortune article that wraps a free X article from Y Combinator saying that their startups will now be able to receive their funds in stablecoins. The comments are strange.

The top comment in the article is saying, Hey, you're already running a startup that's risky. Why are you making another investment? These are stablecoins. They're backed one to one by dollars and bonds. It's not an investment to hold a balance in stablecoins.

The next highest rated comment is startups can't legally pay their employees in crypto. Startups can legally pay their employees in crypto. The follow up comment is like, yeah, but you have to pay tax. Well, yes. Obviously.

It's probably not fair to pick apart individual comments since these sentiments are pretty common for all of Hacker News. So I want to just go through a quick list of points to bring you up to date on what has happened in crypto in the last decade.

1. Stablecoins are regulated

So the first thing is that stablecoins are regulated. There's a thing called the Genius Act. It [00:03:00] basically says that if you issue stablecoins in the United States, they must be backed one to one by US dollar currency or by US government bonds. That's actually more capitalization than your bank has. You are probably familiar with USDC. USDC is the most popular stablecoin on Solana. There's also something called Tether, USDT, uh, that's not genius compliant. So Tether has actually had to make USAT, which is their 100% collateralized US-based stablecoin from Tether.

2. There are low and zero-cost offramps

A lot of people had pretty reasonable questions about how do you get stablecoins into a bank account and whatever savings that you are making from using stablecoins are removed because these off ramps charge a lot of fees. Everyone you see in America probably has a Solana address that you can send them stablecoins to with zero off ramp fees. In the crypto tab of the PayPal app in their phone, they'll have a Solana address. You just send stablecoins to that address. If you have 1234.56 coming in, and then you put that in your bank account, you'll have [00:04:00] 1234.56 in Chase or Wells Fargo or whatever else.

3. There are insured stablecoin products that provide more interest than your bank

So why do people even hold stablecoins? I actually held a lot of stablecoins last year because I was getting married and I needed money to pay suppliers. The reason I held it in stablecoins rather than my bank was, because I earned 5% interest on it. There's an app in the app store called Lulo. It's basically a crypto savings account. And before you ask, yes, it has insurance. So I was very happy to park that money in Lulu and earn 10 times the interest that I would've otherwise.

4. You can loan against your assets using Apple Pay (capital gains tax)

Next thing you might want to do is buy some assets and get a loan against that. It's a very common pattern from high net worth individuals. You buy assets, then you get loans against their value. There's an app called Pyra that allows you to do that, and then have a card that you can use anywhere that accepts Apple Pay, where you can buy things. and get micro loans against that collateral. Full disclosure, I was doing this manually with Kamino and PayPal and a bunch of things in between before Pyra came out. So when it was released, I invested in their seed round.

5. Moving stablecoins US->Europe is much cheaper, compared to wise.com

Moving US dollars to Europe is about 0.55% on wise, which is [00:05:00] generally considered one of the best traditional money transfer services. Swapping USDC to EURC on Jupiter is a fraction of a penny. Moving the EURC into your European bank account costs about 0.10 or 0.15% depending on your bank. That's still vastly cheaper than wise.

6. Retailers pay 1-3% of revenue to card companies

For retailers, it's not always worth the one to 3% of the value of every transaction that you pay to a credit card company just to be able to receive cards. Yes, you get a fraction of this back using rewards and you also get insurance. When was the last time you used insurance on a coffee?

7. Cards don't handle small payments. Crypto does, well.

What about helping people sell their things on the internet? This very Fortune article asked me to subscribe to Fortune for a dollar a month. They probably couldn't make it too much cheaper because the minimum payment you need on a network like Stripe is 30 cents. But blockchain payments can be nothing fractions of a cent. The X402 standard allows a website to ask for a payment, a user to make a payment, and to do things like having Fortune sell me this individual article [00:06:00] for say, 5 cents, which I would happily pay, and which I would more likely pay than the $1 a month subscription.

8. You get to work practically with cutting edge cryptography.

Final cool thing is just the actual hacker aspect of it.
The idea that I can go and take two encrypted values, run arbitrary Rust on them, and then get a result but none of the machines in the MXE network that's performing multi-party computation, no one who's running those nodes, no one who works for the company that runs that network or wrote that software can see those values. That's amazing.
I use MPC pretty regularly and I am like a senior software engineer. I'm not a cryptographer, I don't have a maths degree or anything else like that. The idea that I can process data without the machine that is doing the processing, being able to read the data is amazing. Honestly. I love that. And I don't get it anywhere outside of blockchain.

In summary:

Look, I don't want to pretend that crypto is magic, that there aren't vast quantities of scammers, that people don't frequently tokenize rubbish, or that there's always an easy path between traditional finance and [00:07:00] blockchain. Those are all valid points, but blockchain is as much financial tech as whatever Stripe has released recently. And if you're gonna criticize the technology, you should do so based on what it is now, rather than what it was a decade ago.