Crypto in 2026: Oh, This is the Bad Place
May 25, 2026
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Crypto in 2026: Oh, This is the Bad Place
Open your favourite Doom News App any morning in 2026 over your morning coffee, and the only honest phrase that should come out of your mouth is, "Oh, this is the Bad Place." Because the world has gone truly mad. The president of the United States is running a memecoin out of the White House, and the top two hundred and twenty holders were flown to his golf club for a private dinner with the seating chart arranged by purchase volume. A federally licensed commodity exchange is taking retail bets on whether the U.S. military will assassinate a foreign head of state, and reporting suggests the heaviest order flow is coming from accounts sitting inside the kill chain. A shadow dollar system, newly blessed by federal statute, is quietly migrating the savings of the global poor onto the balance sheets of a handful of opaque private companies. Each one, taken alone, would have been a bleak, dystopian fever dream ripped from the pages of a William Gibson cyberpunk novel. Together they now appear as the new normal, and the vocabulary we use to do policy analysis is going to have to update to match the interesting times, in the proverbial sense, that we now inhabit.
A short note on the title before we begin. In the first season finale of The Good Place, a whimsical and philosophical sitcom about the afterlife, the protagonist Eleanor realizes that the meticulously designed paradise she has been living in is in fact an engineered torture chamber. The Bad Place is the show's name for hell. The afterlife she occupies will not let her swear, so her line on the discovery comes out in the show's comedic substitutions. "Holy motherforking shirtballs," she says, "this is the Bad Place." The implied joke of the show is that hell is not a fire pit. It is a world so relentlessly, hilariously awful in its absurdities that you cannot help laughing, and the laughing is what eventually clues you in that you are in hell. Like a world full of prediction market contracts on whether our government will extrajudicially assassinate the head of state of another country, traded by insiders sitting inside the kill chain, that is not worth reporting on anymore because it's barely the craziest thing this week and it's only Tuesday. We now live in this particular form of hell. This is the Bad Place.
But before any of that, let's go back to first principles. Wind back to your Econ 101 class in the halcyon years of undergraduate naivety. You are nineteen, hungover, half-asleep in the back of the lecture hall, and the professor at the chalkboard is explaining what a market is. A market, she says, is a price discovery mechanism for goods and services whose value comes from outside the market itself. The price of wheat reflects something about the world. The price of a share in a public company reflects expectations about real cash flows. The price of an interest rate future reflects collective views about real monetary conditions. In every case the market is a measuring instrument for an underlying reality, and the participants take positions on that reality. That is what makes markets epistemically valuable, and that is the property the crypto industry has spent fifteen years obscuring in our discourse.
The instruments that now constitute the so-called crypto market lack the property entirely. The price of Bitcoin measures only the price of Bitcoin. The price of a meme coin reflects only the collective belief of meme coin holders that they will be able to sell to a greater fool. The price of an Iran-strike contract reflects only the trading activity of accounts with access to classified planning. The price of a TRUMP coin reflects only the willingness of access seekers to pay for presidential time. A defender will say that gold is no different, a price that refers only to itself, and that we do not call gold a fraud; but gold carries a floor of industrial demand and a monetary role thousands of years old, and Bitcoin has neither. These are self-referential games whose prices contain no information about the world that anyone who lacks privileged access could find useful. They have nevertheless been given the regulatory rail, the institutional dignity, and the legal vocabulary of markets. The public's trust in markets is finite. Every dollar lost on a self-referential game labeled a market consumes a small piece of that finite trust, and the consumption over fifteen years has been considerable.
One legitimate use deserves acknowledgment before it is set aside. A dissident under a hostile regime, a citizen of a country whose banking system has been turned into an instrument of political coercion, a saver fleeing capital controls aimed at the government's enemies, these are real people for whom a censorship-resistant payment rail is a genuine good, and the strongest case for crypto has always lived here. But this...