> "children are forced to only earn crypto onchain"

What use do children have for cryptocurrencies? Buying items in World of Warcraft?

> "I know children that have a few hundred $ in their joint bank account but $100k in crypto onchain and just waiting till they turn 18 so they can cash out without telling their parents."

This entire post reads like some weird crypto-bro FOMO propaganda. To "cash out" they'll need a bank account which will accept their shady funds, and they'll have to prove they paid their taxes for it like everybody else. Until then, they can't do anything with it.

> This entire post reads like some weird crypto-bro FOMO propaganda.

Its intended to be devoid of opinion to the extent possible which is probably why you don't recognize it.

Your thoughts on what they can do are incorrect. The only thing a child still cannot do is enter into a real world contract and have it be enforceable. But in environments that require zero, or less, or different kinds of non-contractually enforced trust, with a crypto balance sheet the children can acquire goods, services and investments, they can access capital, they can pool investments and share proceeds, they can hire and fire other real world humans, they can acquire real world assets where merchants accept crypto or use a payment processor that does. And this is what some or many are doing, the path of least resistance and beyond the wildest aspirations that any multinational trade deal could ever achieve. So I’m not sure what standard you can really rely on here aside from being unaware.

If you weren't aware of a crypto centric form of wealth, where the fiat dollars are the novelty to be temporarily held, then you’re a decade behind.

The only thing new here (circa the last 2-3 years) is that its much easier for the children to earn the initial crypto, given how robust that economy is.

They’ll cash out when they are 18 if they need to. No different than people only taking money out of their stock and bond holdings for large purchases. Except its a hybrid where they earned the investments directly instead of having to initially purchase them.

I'm asking for specific and concrete examples that would demonstrate what use do children have for cryptocurrencies - and you respond by using the same vague promises of a revolutionary technology intermixed with keywords from investment and financial jargons, sprinkled with a bit of FOMO propaganda on-top.

Kids could buy and trade items in World of Warcraft or Club Penguin for 20 years now. They collected and traded marbles, then Magic: The Gathering, Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh cards. Music albums and candy. Kids will always find a "currency" to play with, depending on what's trendy and hip right now.

Children have the same use adults do. The subset of adults that use crypto natively, maybe "crypto onchain native" sounds like vague jargon to you but nothing I said were promises of a revolutionary change, this is what is happening right now.

You are the one that doesn't understand and this is not the thread for you to learn that, what example would you like to see if it was? The only education offered is that children are using it, instead of spending year after year acting confused of its existence like many people I know here do. Gen Z and Gen Alpha looked at tools available and picked them up instead of attempting to interface with the caste system we normalized towards people under 18, its simple and all that's happened. So, that's different because we don't have to wait 15-20 years for new generations to enter the economy and see what happens, they are active and autonomous nodes in just a few years for better of for worse, but making an opinion about that requires noticing and acknowledging that its occurring.

To really illustrate the disconnect here, an example is that What you are saying relies on you not knowing how to borrow against your crypto with a lending smart contract and purchase other things you want with it. It relies on you thinking these are buzzwords instead of actual etymology and additions to the lexicon that can coordinate people to do the same thing because they understand a shared concept, concepts you personally don't know yet.

I'm not sure what answers you are looking for.

But they understand that they can accumulate wealth, the majority of which can be useful for a later time, without running into the liquidity issues that accumulating marbles and trading cards have.

How old do you think I am? And how out-of-touch with the technology and the industry do you think I must be? Let me assure you, your presuppositions and biases don't make your points come across any better.

> "Children have the same use adults do."

This can't possibly be true, because kids and adults have different needs and are in different stages in life. I can't take the rest of your comment seriously when it's based on this claim.

I'm still waiting for concrete examples for uses children have for cryptocurrencies, and for some proof that this is somehow different than any other fad we've had before. I'm not denying kids will find random "currencies" (reference my previous response) to play with, but I'm absolutely discarding the idea that cryptocurrencies offer anything of meaning to children.

There's another comment under this very thread claiming that there's "code written by a 13 year old managing billions of capital in crypto". This too reads like typical FOMO propaganda. That somebody can "manage billions of capital in crypto" is an absolute meaningless claim, and it's easy to see how people that lack the knowledge and the context about the technology can be FOMO'd into spending money on this based on such grandiose vague statements.

The reality is that anybody can start their own "blockchain" and "manage trillions of capital in crypto" if they want to (why stop at billions when you can be so much richer?). Posting these claims doesn't resolve core questions such as "what do they use the cryptocurrency for", "how do they benefit from doing this", "what is the path into 'cashing-out' and extracting value from the cryptocurrency back into the traditional financial system", "how do they get other people to participate in their ecosystem", "how do they ensure their blockchain survives years into the future", "how do they protect themselves against common pitfalls that can undermine the cryptocurrency", "how do they protect themselves against fraud" etc. Ironically, those questions don't just apply to children by the way - they apply to pretty much every other use-case of crypto being touted today.

You're really worried about people spending money on something. How does people earning or managing other people's money inspire someone else to have confidence to spend money on something? In what way would it be "FOMO propoganda" (which doesn't mean false, by the way) to spend anything?

This entire thread isn't about spending money, its about earning money from organizations that already have wealth in the crypto space. These things don't happen on blockchains people spent up on their own, they happen on blockchains with larger saturation of attention.

Yes, a 13 year old could manage be managing hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. You won't reach your standard of proof here, information appears where there is a benefit to that information existing publicly. There is no benefit for that. The applications are fairly simple and simply isn't an oversaturated space yet. Easy.

> I can't take the rest of your comment seriously when it's based on this claim.

Since you probably shut your brain off again at my first sentence, here is just a stream of thought to your "core questions" in no particular order. They extract value by taking a percentage of volume that passes through their applications. Their applications can manage unlimited sums if people like it. They get other people to participate by being active on forums and social media. The audit system and insurance industry is the protection against fraud, or none at all. They don't launch their own blockchains, bad assumption to begin with, the applications solve problems on existing ones or just provide entertainment. Children cash out when they are 18 by opening an exchange account at that time, this was answered earlier, they can acquire property, make investments, and get access to capital before they are 18, also answered earlier. Pretend to be a US child and look it up on youtube and ask around on TikTok and discord and see where you get.

You are more right than wrong there...

I know under 18 year olds behind a pseudo name running large capital and lending pools in crypto. All it takes is writing smart contracts and deploying them. Voila, you can run your own automated lending or exchange pool.

Flash loans are something I have seen 13 year old kiddos experiment with using crypto. It's unbelievable until you see it.

Code written by a 13 year old managing billions of capital in crypto.

Many are even public and probbed up by VCs like founder of rari capital and many startups connected to them.

I think this is getting even truer for real world stock market.

Kids are increasingly investing using custodial accounts.

https://www.joinbloom.co/ - teen stock investing funded by YC.

There are many of these popping up

A lot of claims being made here without any actual proof.

You need a bank account to buy cryptocurrencies. You also need fiat money to buy it. In the US at least, you need to be KYC'd to buy it from an exchange with fiat.

It's really tiring hearing propaganda like this, that easily falls apart under even a little bit of scrutiny. Like "banking the unbanked", it's lies being told that try to sell people on how cryptocurrency is enriching people who'd otherwise be poor, and opening opportunities to people who otherwise would not have them, but it's nothing more than preying on people's greed and FOMO, to pull in more suckers to fleece.

Earning cryptocurrency does not require a bank account or KYC.

Read that again until you understand it and tell me why you don't understand that.

The whole post distinguished the difference between buying versus earning. If you dont get that yet, you’re in the wrong place.

This place is about critical thinking, and skepticism, especially around wild and unlikely claims, is part of that.

The point is that this story is almost certainly a fabrication, especially since it has wild claims of teenagers making small fortunes. There's no evidence such a situation has happened, and it's extremely unlikely that it's common enough to be a thing we need to be concerned with.

What evidence would satisfy you?

How common does it need to be to matter? Several thousand teenagers with six or seven figures of liquid crypto assets is still over a billion dollars deciding if a new product or service gets off the ground.

Why do you think you need to be concerned?

Where is the evidence for these teenagers? I mean, there's no evidence at all from what I can tell, except for the op saying it's "a real thing I totally didn't make up to give you FOMO".

Second time asking, what would you like to see?

If I gave you a screenshot from an instagram comment, what would your rebuttal be?

Would you like an interview with that teen?

Would a discord server full of them satisfy you?

Do you want them to sign addresses with high balances to show they control it? Because thats not going to happen.

The same issue would apply to any segment of the population. Nobody is going to do any of that so how would you prove it for any segment?

If you can go make money in crypto by simply showing up to a chat room looking for workers, but aren't interested in doing so, think about who is. Think about who is then trading these juvenile things. Think about which colorful sensory assaulting NFTs are a hit and which aren't. Match that up with the admissions of people saying "yeah I'm a teen and accumulated and bunch of crypto and flip NFTs to accumulate more". At a certain point there is a consensus you can just rely upon, for your own participation in the economy. That's whats happening here.

I just re-read everything about this particular event through this lens and it is absolutely horrifying how much it fits. It reads as if kids are using crypto in a similar way they would if they were to play a game, with the difference being that through this game they can cash out eventually.

Right yes, they can accumulate like a game often times by playing games, but just as easily by moonlighting as a community moderator or launching their own projects. many do like the financials sector and use the defi space.

If its any consolation, I don't think this knowledge is known enough yet for unscrupulous marketers to be specifically target children and their money, as opposed to merely selective evolution of which goofy projects attract an audience at all. But yeah this will increasingly be something to watch for and assume, also remember that it will be other children marketing to each other more and more, in comparison to adults taking advantage (which will also happen). Not that there will be any way to tell who is taking advantage of who.

One of the more wild things I learned in the past year came from a reasonable explanation for something I have observed for years: why is Venmo vs Cash App so radically split among racial lines? Because, to some order of approximation, they are, and I would bet many people reading this comment can reconcile this with their own experiences.

The explanation as it was described to me (though I have a difficult time verifying its accuracy): Cash App was very early on the "all-in-one banking" experience, whereas Venmo spent years as a value-addition to a bank (account/routing number) you already had. Socioeconomically disenfranchised portions of the population, which statistically bias toward Black Americans, gravitated toward Cash App because they didn't otherwise have bank accounts. Then, network effects kick in, as they always do.

Again, I'm not 100% sure on the veracity of those claims, but it makes sense; and it mirrors a similar trend across age groups. Older people use Zelle (a fully bank-sponsored product). Millennials (of any race), being the middle child, split the difference, and oftentimes have Zelle, Venmo, Cash App, and some Crypto. But all of these "official" apps still have age restrictions, and as they've matured have been forced into more customer risk mitigation, which primarily serves to do the same thing the banking system has statistically done to the black american population for decades; limit access to financial services (even if its for what we old people would call a "totally valid reason" like "dude you're 12", its still limiting access to financial services).

Capital moves mountains. The crypto markets, in aggregate, represent an absolutely massive amount of capital. Its biased young. Its very difficult to legally liquidate into the traditional financial system; but within the crypto ecosystem, its more liquid than any financial instrument ever invented by mankind. It attracts scams (like any financial product does); it attracts idiots (through virtue of being able to serve: anyone); but even among projects like this one, their idiotic understanding of how their actions could integrate with the traditional system of laws is counterbalanced with rather intelligent understanding of distributed financial systems, corporate governance, data structures, algorithms, and most of all, an undeniable love for a piece of cultural history.

Anytime anyone bashes crypto; the reasons may be legitimate; Check your age. You sound a lot like my parents wondering why my Chase account doesn't appear in their Chase home page, so they can send me money every Christmas by just clicking "transfer money". Your criticism may be totally valid and legitimate: but irrelevant. That's the curse of getting older; inescapable, undeniable, and one day you just don't matter anymore. This world isn't your's; it belongs to our Children.

Yes, very good observations.

The network affects are at play here too. Influencers who cover crypto projects begin skewing younger and younger are filling in documentation and awareness far far better than any developer would.