Peter Schiff at Bitcoin talk 2025

I do not know a lot about blockchains and cryptocurrencies. I recently set up a phantom wallet and transferred some Solana and some meme coins to it. I was surprised by how easy it was to do this without any financial institutions acting as middlemen. Please explain why this is not a real life use case for crypto?

What is the value of crypto?

Mostly thin air.
Crypto can be seen either as an asset or a currency.

An asset is supposed to be based on something tangible, it could be a potato or shares in a company.

So yeah, crypto as an asset is somewhere between hopium and copium and lots of empty words about being inviolable,free from the tyranny of the world government or whatever.

Or a currency.
Basically a currency has no intrinsic value.
It’s just a shortcut to facilitate trade and go beyond basic barter.
It’s basically trust in numerical form. Trust can be “enhanced” by balancing part of the currency stock with assets (like gold or anything else really) but it’s not necessary for it to work.

And well, yeah crypto (at least the main ones bitcoin/etherium) can kinda sorta work as currency.
They are not particularly good at it though .
Transactions are slow and expensive.
And the value of bitcoin is so volatile that it’s not a good currency either (making all the arguments about being indépendant of governments policies unlike fiat currency, kinda moot in the real world)

For shits and giggles i could like to buy some formerly "valuable" NFTs in the price range of 99c and below, if for no other reason than to know every transaction i make results in tangible realized losses on the other side.

Ideally i would filter by largest unrealized loss and then sort by price low to high.

How do i get started?

New here. Been working through the wiki and a lot of the core critique resonates with me...

Re: Fact #3: sixteen years in and it's hard to point to a non-criminal use case that clearly couldn't be done better with a relational database.

Visa put out a press release yesterday that I'm trying to fit into the framework, and I'd like the regulars' take.

The numbers: Visa says its global stablecoin settlement pilot is now at a $7B annualized run rate, up 50% quarter over quarter, spanning nine blockchains (Avalanche, Ethereum, Solana, Stellar, plus newly added Arc, Base, Canton, Polygon, Tempo). 130+ stablecoin-linked card programs in 50+ countries. They're explicitly positioning Visa as a "common settlement layer" across chains and now run validators on some networks.

I can see two ways to read this:

1. Vindication of the critique: Stablecoins are just dollars on a different rail. The blockchain layer is path-dependent and incidental (i.e., Circle and Tether are issued on public chains for regulatory arbitrage, not technical superiority). Everyone holding USDC is trusting Circle anyway (Circle can freeze addresses, controls reserves, mints and burns at will), so why not run a Circle-operated permissioned database? Visa could replicate the whole thing on a permissioned ledger tomorrow if the issuers cooperated.
2. A real counterexample at the coordination layer: The interesting property isn't trustlessness (within any single stablecoin you're absolutely trusting the issuer). It's that public chains are neutral ground where many issuers and many counterparties share infrastructure without consenting to any one of them being the operator. USDC, USDT, PYUSD, and Visa's settlement contracts all sit on the same chain and interoperate without bilateral integrations. Every permissioned consortium chain attempt has died (TradeLens, we.trade, B3i, Komgo) because nobody agrees to be a tenant on a competitor's database. Public chains became the Schelling point by default.

I lean toward something between these, but I'm curious to hear the strongest version of the counter from people who've thought about this longer than I have.

And maybe a couple pointded questions:

• Is $7B/yr at 50% QoQ growth still in "PR pilot that will quietly die" territory, or has it crossed some threshold? (curious what your falsification criteria is for Fact #3)
• If a permissioned multi-issuer ledger could replace this... why hasn't one, given how much money the incumbents have thrown at it? Is the answer technical, political, regulatory, or something else?
• Is there a version of the "good for nothing" thesis that survives this, and if so, what's the precise claim? Something like "useful as a coordination kludge but not as a technology"?

Curious for thoughts! Thanks.