Hilary J. Allen

@profhilaryallen.bsky.social

1.4K followers 320 following 530 posts

Law professor at the American University Washington College of Law (but all views expressed here are my own); author of Fintech Dystopia and Driverless Finance; mythbusting crypto, AI, and other fintech

Internet serial: fintechdystopia.com .. more

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Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · Aug 29

"Let's Get Skeptical," the final chapter of Fintech Dystopia, has dropped
fintechdystopia.com/chapters/cha...
Covering
- How much the abundance agenda and VC output suck
- Silicon Valley subsidies we can take away
- How to laugh our way into Silicon Valley skepticism
- A plan to actually fix finance

A picture of Olivia Newton-John with the caption "Let's Get Skeptical"

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 17h

I noticed this too - I wondered if they're being bombarded by AI scrapers, but I don't know enough to know whether that's a plausible explanation

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 3d

I really enjoyed my conversation with Titi and Zakiya at Dope Labs. Talking about the limitations of fintech, financial inclusion, and our crypto-captured Congress.

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/d...

Is Financial Technology Helping or Hurting? - Lab 125

Podcast Episode · Dope Labs · 02/01/2026 · 29m

podcasts.apple.com

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 3d

Coinbase and Ripple might need some of that Fairshake PAC money back…

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 3d

This is my beat. It all depends on how interconnected crypto and the traditional financial system have become.

See:

driverlessfinancebook.com

fintechdystopia.com/chapters/cha...

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 4d

💯

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 4d

Let's catch up!

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 5d

My guess is some kind of combination of people being goldfish and Upton Sinclair's "It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It"

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 5d

Kind of like my crypto critique

fintechdystopia.com/chapters/cha...

But all of these aspirations are based on fundamental confusion regarding the “decentralization” that blockchains offer. A system needs to offer more than just the opportunity for decentralized control to actually be decentralized. Blockchains, and many of the things built on them, are technologically decentralized systems in the sense that there are lots of nodes involved, but if one person can control lots of those nodes, or some nodes are more important than others practically speaking, then control of the system will become centralized and all that effort that went into technological decentralization will be for naught.

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 6d

Also: crypto's potential to cause a financial crisis is seen as a feature and not a bug

www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/u...

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 7d

Non-USD stablecoin volume is about $1.5 billion; USD stablecoin volume is about $300 billion (if DefiLlama's nos are right)

The USD market is the ballgame - but not because Americans use them for real-world payments. Criminals and gamblers just like their USDs

fintechdystopia.com/chapters/cha...

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 7d

My working title for this op-ed was "Better the Devil You Know": www.ft.com/content/b986...

Donald Trump’s crypto embrace is a threat to Wall Street

Stablecoins will increasingly challenge bank deposits as a riskier place for people to park their cash

www.ft.com

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 8d

First, this is great news. Second, does this help explain what's happened to crypto prices lately? (Pig butchering scams use crypto for payment)

The Wall Street Journal @wsj.com · 8d

The arrests of two alleged ringleaders of transnational scam networks in Cambodia have led to thousands of workers—many of them trafficked—being let go from compounds across the country.

High-Profile Arrests Spark Exodus of Scam Workers in Cambodia

Thousands of people—many of them trafficked—have been let go from compounds in a shake-up of the deeply rooted “pig-butchering” industry.

on.wsj.com

Reposted by Fabián Muniesa, Hilary J. Allen

The Wall Street Journal @wsj.com · 8d

The arrests of two alleged ringleaders of transnational scam networks in Cambodia have led to thousands of workers—many of them trafficked—being let go from compounds across the country.

High-Profile Arrests Spark Exodus of Scam Workers in Cambodia

Thousands of people—many of them trafficked—have been let go from compounds in a shake-up of the deeply rooted “pig-butchering” industry.

on.wsj.com

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 10d

Nothing says "we're so decentralized and intermediary-less that we need Congress to pass new legislation to accommodate our decentralization and intermediarilessness" than a crypto exchange intervening to prop up crypto prices.

Molly White @molly.wiki · 10d

Binance bitcoin bailout

Headline: Binance to shift $1 billion user protection fund into bitcoin amid market rout Binance will convert the stablecoin holdings in its $1 billion Secure Asset Fund for Users to bitcoin over the next 30 days, with plans for regular audits

Reposted by Hilary J. Allen

Molly White @molly.wiki · 10d

Binance bitcoin bailout

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 12d

(To be clear, I know why Congress passed GENIUS. They were paid to)

fintechdystopia.com/chapters/cha...

In 2025, Congress is pushing crypto legislation as if it were America’s number one priority. In July, a stablecoin bill titled the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act, or GENIUS Act, was signed into law (as I said, I fricking hate these cutesy acronyms; I sometimes suspect that more work goes into the acronym than the actual legislative text). I spent a lot of time in Chapter 3 talking about how dangerous this stablecoin law is, particularly because it is poised to allow the largest tech platforms to effectively become our banks, but also because it applies only light-touch regulation and makes bailouts all but inevitable. Members of Congress were made aware of these and other concerns, and a bipartisan majority voted to pass the GENIUS Act anyway.

For some Democrats, the fear of the crypto industry’s money cannon was just too great for them to oppose the law. The Lever reported on an influential group chat among crypto industry and Democratic party insiders where the industry folks made it clear that “if Dems bail on this [bill], they will get 0 dollars going forward…It would be political suicide for them not to support it.” The same group chat also featured a comment that Democrats “need to win the next election, which means we can not afford to alienate a very vocal and wealthy group of donors.” No doubt some Dems genuinely believed they needed to compromise on crypto in order to be in a position to fight the rise of authoritarianism, but that approach seems kind of short-sighted in light of the reality we discussed in Chapter 7 – that the Silicon Valley elite are pursuing authoritarianism through crypto.

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 12d

www.linkedin.com/pulse/stable...

Stablecoins in payments: What the raw transaction numbers miss

Blockchain data indicate huge transaction volumes for stablecoins, but most of that isn’t real-world payments. Here’s what the data really show.

www.linkedin.com

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 12d

gizmodo.com/illicit-cryp...

Illicit Crypto Flows Climbed to $154 Billion in 2025 as Nation States Evade Sanctions, Report Finds

As the Trump administration is adding rocket fuel to sanction enforcement, it's also been legitimizing crypto.

gizmodo.com

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 12d

A bunch of new reports coming out confirming what's long been obvious if you cared to look: stablecoins are for crime and for crypto speculation. Congress' bipartisan passage of the GENIUS Act for stablecoins was a huge abdication of the public interest.

fintechdystopia.com/chapters/cha...

In short, the predominant legal use of stablecoins is not for payments, but for speculative trading. They aren’t as stable as they claim to be, and the stability they do have arises from free-riding on the US banking system and monetary policy – and as we’ll come back to, if stablecoins are able to keep gaining market share, these parasites might eventually endanger their hosts. Stablecoins are typically unavailable to those without bank accounts…and so we come to the question that I keep screaming about stablecoins (in my head, and occasionally on social media), WHY ARE WE EVEN DOING THIS???

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 12d

Gallego has fundraisers with Marc Andreessen. I'm not sure it's realistic to expect him to leave said Nazi Bar.

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 15d

In support of your points:

fintechdystopia.com/chapters/cha...

You’ve probably heard about GenAI tools spitting out what are sometimes called “hallucinations.” This does not mean that they have ingested shrooms. Essentially, it means that the tool is telling you – often in an extremely authoritative and weirdly sycophantic manner – something that is factually incorrect, or citing to a source that doesn’t exist. This happens because GenAI tools don’t actually think or know things in the way that humans do, and so the output generated is not an answer that has been reasoned out as a correct response to your prompt. Instead, what you’re getting is essentially a highly sophisticated autocomplete tool – Bender and Gebru’s “stochastic parrot.” But sometimes the most statistically likely response is also spectacularly wrong.

Headline after headline, study after study have shown significant inaccuracies in text generated by GenAI tools. Google’s AI-generated search results told home cooks to make their pizza cheesier by adding glue and to cook chicken to the balmy internal temperature of 100 degrees; OpenAI’s model answered that there were only two “r”s in the word strawberry (which was particularly funny because “strawberry” was OpenAI’s codename for the model). People have fallen ill from eating mushrooms that AI-generated foraging guides said were safe. A 2025 BBC study of AI assistants found that “13% of the quotes sourced from BBC articles were either altered from the original source or not present in the article cited.” Researchers from Cornell University, the University of Washington, and University of Waterloo found that “even the best models can generate hallucination-free text only about 35% of the time.” I could keep going, but instead I’m going to point out how much this sounds like anchorman Brian Fontana – colleague of Ron Burgundy – describing his new cologne Sex Panther (“made with bits of real panther, so you know it’s good”). “They’ve done studies, you know. Sixty percent of the time, it works every time.”

There’s no indication that things are going to get much better (for GenAI, or for Sex Panther). The researchers from the Universities of Cornell, Washington, and Waterloo also found that “despite the promise of certain methods to reduce or eliminate hallucinations, the actual improvement achievable with these methods is limited.” In addition, the supply of text available to train GenAI tools is likely to degrade as it is increasingly polluted with poor quality AI-generated content, which is affectionately known as “slop.” And still the AI industry tries to paint a rosy picture, assuring us that they’re always just a few steps away from solving the hallucination problem – hell, OpenAI’s Sam Altman tells us we’re not even that far off from sci-fi style “superintelligence.”

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 15d

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

― Upton Sinclair

Also: www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/a...

Will the AI Bubble Trigger a Financial Crisis?

Hilary J. Allen explains how dashed hopes for the technology could trigger a dangerous chain reaction.

www.project-syndicate.org

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 17d

Awesome! Congratulations!!

Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 18d

BNPL can be more expensive than a credit card, and users sometimes have BNPL transactions denied when they need it most - act accordingly.

fintechdystopia.com/chapters/cha...