I fancy myself as a somewhat esoteric idea person, and so when I first discovered cryptocurrency a few years ago, I was very excited to explore the mind bending ways we can build __NEW__ things.
Instead, JPEGs and skeuomorphic representations of traditional financial vehicles in web3 space.
I'm hoping this crash and those in the future rid the space of the toxic backrooms these $30,000 jpegs provide access to and get us to collectively work on building really exciting cool new things.
What do you all think?
This came off as pretty bitter. I apologize, but I am bitter, and I'm having a shit couple weeks.
What real math is involved in predicting the stock market? I understand there is a lot of theory behind TRYING to predict it, just as there is a lot of study in trying to predict trends in the stock market, which is why you are better off investing in groups of stocks as opposed to a singled stock (there you go, that's the grand total of what I know about the stock market). But so far as shorting stocks (betting that they'll fall) and buying stocks (betting that they'll rise), there isn't much real math, is there? Isn't it all just a gamble? Not even a statistical gamble, like dice or cards, but a public market analysis with the uncertainty of public trading and public sentiment thrown in, not to mention the hope of government bailouts on occasion?
I don't see a huge amount of difference in crypto except for physical assets, which don't cover the stock price for public companies, generally.
Now, how horribly wrong am I? I'm willing to admit I missed the mark, entirely as I don't understand trading. That's what my broker does.
For what it's worth, you seem consumed by your envy. Accept that crypto investors, even the most stupid ones, took a risk you didn't take and were rewarded handsomely.
You shouldn't be, these cryptobros have been orchestrating general scams, rugpulls, hype scams, pump and dumps and all this having an effect on normal people's lives.
Do not be sorry.
crypto bros are finally getting a punch to the mouth
"What good is envy? It’s the one sin you can’t have any fun at." - Charlie Munger
> It's less that I'm glad the market is crashing, and more that I'm glad that the insufferable homeowners are finally getting a punch to the mouth. Seriously, these people are the worst. Your average "home investor" has no skills, no mathematical foundations, nothing. Except for pure stupid luck, and the ability to spew inane economic babble 24/7. And yes, they think they are much smarter than you, because they achieved better financial results than you did while only doing 1/1000 of the work to get there. I truly hate the fact that these people are so rich. It makes me want to move to Alaska and just try to ignore society for the rest of my days.
> This came off as pretty bitter. I apologize, but I am bitter, and I'm having a shit couple weeks.
Not trying to criticize you too much; I'm more reflecting on this text because this is how I catch myself feeling about people who have participated in the inflation in the bay area with respect to homes.
The crypto stuff is just another bubble, sticking to fundamentals will still lead you to (well earned) success. Bubbles come and go, skills and financial acumen are forever.
Never mind that their processes are a bureaucratic hell and it takes 100 of their engineers to implement the same thing which just 1 really good engineer working for a startup could implement in the same amount of time - Look at Whatsapp as an example; before they were acquired, they had hundreds of millions of users and only 55 engineers in total... Facebook has over 10K of them and gets a lot less done...
Talent outside of big tech is not unusual; it is the norm, but most startups which are full of talented engineers don't go on to become Whatsapp because the market doesn't care about technical talent above a certain (rather low) threshold.
Everything is a lottery. Any appearance of meritocracy is an illusion crafted by media and PR firms in an effort to keep the system from falling apart. Only extremely lucky, delusional outliers think that the narratives make sense nowadays.... Through a lot of people who know that the narratives don't make sense still pretend that they do.
what sickens me more is all these companies jumping on the crypto.nft.metaverse bandwagon, like f off seriously.
A significant fraction of young single men feel a deep compulsion to indulge in risky behavior with a potential high reward in order to make a name for themselves or earn their place in society. I don't know if it's genetic, cultural, both. But for many young dudes, it's not enough to simply work a good job and enjoy their leisure time.
Men like this are the free radicals of society. If the society can't find a healthy productive outlet for their drive to compete, take risks, and seek fame and adventure, then they will just do outright dangerous shit with potentially large collateral damage.
For most of human society, hunting, exploring, dangerous jobs, and war were significant outlets for this. They gave men a way of doing something courageous that their culture held in high esteem.
But today, we have domesticated animals, explored every square inch of the Earth, automated all of the risky manufacturing and resource-gathering jobs, avoided large-scale war outbreaks (and used technology to reduce military casualties and fatalities). There are simply less paths available for a young man who feels like he has nothing to take pride in unless he succeeds in some bold risky adventurer.
For a while, videogames functioned as a simulated output for that impulse. I think that's why many gamers flipped the fuck out during Gamergate when they felt that their avenue to satisfy that urge was being invadaded and taken from them.
It was, I think, a driver of the rise of the alt-right, doomsday preppers, and Trumpism. This impulse elect a wildcard as President, burn it out down and start over because in a world of chaos, there is maybe an opportunity for the bold.
And now, I believe, much of the crypto world is driven by that exact same impulse. Young, overwhelmingly male, "crypto bros" desperately looking for some unexplored frontier where they can build something new and forge an identity for themselves.
The problem is that there is no there there. It's all a house of cards. No actual new value is being created, so it's just crypto bros competing with other crypto bros in what will likely end up being a zero sum game (except for all the unfortunate other investors who get sucked in).
Even if crypto all collapses, the core problem will remain. These dudes will just find something new to slake their thirst for risk. Hopefully it will be on something less destructive to society.
My dislike of bitcoin is mostly due to its enormous energy usage. And the scarcity of GPUs.
I senserely hope your weeks will get better.
> I truly hate the fact that these people are so rich.
Envy is fairly toxic
Amazing that this is the top comment on this thread. HN is so anti-crypto now it's almost comical
> pure stupid luck
I say
> A bigger idiot
The security of your average software developer job is strongly tied to market cycles.
If you want a place to direct your hate and bitterness, I would do it at the architects of the BOOM/BUSTS cycles that keeps happenings and destroys people lives.
Luna went from $100 to 1 cent.
UST was also meant to be a stable coin, it was sold as being equivalent to stacking your money in a savings account, just stable currency that follows the USD value. Lots of people took their money OUT of many coins, and moved it to UST for "stability" thinking that their nest was safe during the storm. (Of course their trust was misplaced as it was not equivalent to keeping your money at the bank, but that's what they were led to believe)
It's equivalent as if banks were bankrupting all over the place in the United States with no bank insurance from the government.
No common measure comparaison with the SP 500 being down for a few months (or even a few years).
Of course, the fundamentals have been horrible because the economy has been in a bad way for several years (certainly, after March 2020, but it wasn't great before then) but the stock market has been divorced from the actual economy longer than that.
Here's some pretty charts:
Wilshire 5000 / GDP Ratio https://www.longtermtrends.net/market-cap-to-gdp-the-buffett...
Dow / GDP Ratio https://www.macrotrends.net/2574/dow-to-gdp-ratio-chart (Yeah, the Dow is a horrible index, but check out that period from 1966 to 1982. The 1970s were not a happy time, either economically or financially.
The architects of boom/bust cycles are...you. I hope you picked up on the lessons from 2000 and 2008 and saved some of that six-figure average software developer pay.
I've been DCA'ing ETH for a few years now and have somehow managed to both not make it my entire identity, and not constantly complain about the people who do.
The only time I hear about crypto outside of my crypto-specific social spheres is people dunking on crypto and NFT's completely unprompted. We get it, you don't like it, move on.
Also, if you make software developer salary, you should absolutely be hedged against losing your job, having plenty of savings in reserve to last you well over a year.
I used to be a huge believer. Brian Armstrong gave me my first Bitcoin in 2011 at District in SOMA. Electricity was included in my rent so I bought 10 video cards and mined for about two years on 5 systems. At a company I founded, I use Bitcoin to pay for food and drinks. According to the Barista, I was the first person to ever pay for coffee with Bitcoin at Coupa Cafe (despite having to stand there and wait 10 minutes while the transaction cleared).
But nothing has come of it. All the years of promises and applications, nothing. Ether DApps, sure, but how much of the modern internet runs on those? I also mined StorJ and Monero for years. Apart from a way of making money and storing value, crypto is useless. Processing fees are way too high to even be considered as a replacement for payments not to mention other barriers such as the ability to integrate with antiquated point of sale systems entirely designed around credit/debit and cash.
So I put all of my holdings into a retirement account and don't worry about the price. But I've given up on crypto and everyone who babbles on endlessly like they know something I don't about how it's going to change the world. So even if Crypto loses its value some, I'm glad because the lack of easy, effortless gains will disappear for a lot of those people and most of these short term hucksters will fade away. I'll gladly exchange crypto's price for less crypto bros. My cost basis is around $150 so I have a long ways to go before I care that much.
This entire viewpoint made a lot of sense until this final sentence. Your point is that you’re okay the market crashed because your cost basis is 150$ and BTC is still at 28.5k$?
That said, regarding your perspective on crypto's limited utility, I just want to point out there's a crypto few folks have paid attention to which actually addresses your issues head-on: Nano is a feeless and PoW-less crypto which has been around for a few years and was started by one of the early contributors to Bitcoin. Nano is not a "hot coin." It's seen little market speculation and it's not programmable and riding the smart contract wave; it does one thing well: transacting. It's free (as in truly and completely free, fee-less, zero cost), near-instant (<1 second transactions/validations), and green a(~0.1Wh per transaction, or for context about 1/6 millionth of the energy cost of a single Bitcoin transaction). It's also decentralized, without being mined/staked, so it's not controlled according to the interests of miners/whales.
This seems to me the holy grail, so I'm always surprised that discussions of crypto on HN don't mention it or even that that veterans like yourself don't seem to know about it. Maybe it's still too young/obscure? But I think it will see significant interest post-crash as it fulfills the initial promise of crypto—it's money you can by a coffee with, send across borders at zero cost, make micro-micro payments with, etc... you know, like real money, just better.
> Apart from a way of ... storing value
Do you think USD (or some other fiat) is a good medium for storing value? If not, can you see that your latter claim invalidates the former?
Whether or not you need that will depend on where the world goes. A CDBC social-credit system world presents a lot of incentives to use something else.
And if you do need it, you need it ahead of time. Good luck trying to learn and set up networks from scratch when they are considered illegal etc.
Saying that "crypto has not lived up to its potential at all" merely 12 years after Satoshi mined the first bitcoin is laughable if anything. It took 15 years of the internet to have Facebook. It took 27 years (!!) of the internet to have something like TikTok. How can you say that crypto will amount to nothing ?
Let's take the reverse and say they were on the right side of the bet and made millions and left everyone else behind to wallow relatively "poor".
Would they feel sorry for those who didn't take the bet?
I don't really see it as that interesting or sad, I see it as unnecessary.
Some do, some dont. If it was really something more like “all people are susceptible to suicide when numba go down” I’m not sure what I would think, maybe I wouldnt be in this game at all, prioritizing my own self preservation instincts above this particular kind of chase for financial security. Hard for me to say.
My level of empathy comes from not being sure its worth prioritizing self preservation at all. Like, I notice we all are like “suicide, stop that thing” I mostly just see happenstance. Its happenstance I have self preservation instincts and its happenstance others do not.
And then when you add Terra, Luna, Anchor to the mix. Its like, so you were chasing passive income on TikTok and didnt factor in your self preservation instincts? Ok. Cope, or don’t.
1) It's the internet (a subreddit no less!) - who really knows who lost what, and who is contemplating suicide.
2) If we take it at face value -- that people have lost their life savings and are contemplating suicide -- the real issue isn't a change in material circumstances, it's shame. Ashamed of their own stupidity and greed, they find it hard to imagine living with the knowledge that in their heart of hearts they knew better.
3) That is why the endgame will be the creation of a villian. Making people whole or at least providing some relief isn't the important part. The important part is helping people convince themselves it wasn't their fault. They were victims. The government, the banks, CNBC are the bad guys.
Stocks, cryptos, houses: people kept buying no matter the price, even though, it was so obvious that those prices were not sustainable.
And we are finally seeing a proper correction. I think, houses are next in line.
I don't agree about houses, either. It seems unsustainable, yes, but I'm having trouble finding the broken fundamentals. It seems like the only 'fix' for prices is building more housing, and that isn't a correction.
Housing market might correct a little but you won't see a $1M Los Angeles house going down to $300k. Maybe $925k but no further than that. There is no time in human history housing crashed and never came back. It moves down a little, then goes up again. Remember 2008.
How do you feel about the recent spick in inflation? I have also been sitting on some cash for a year, and its buying power has definitely fallen. I find it now hard to see if prices will fall or wags will go up, so the cash I have will be of less relative worth.
There is still a ton of air down below :-)
If you go in, do it gradually in small trades, don’t try to « time the market ».
And, what's worse, is that the real grifters and crooks will walk away clean once again. There isn't enough time or justice in this universe to nail them all and that's a crime in itself.
There will always be people trying to scam people, and always people who get scammed. It's hard to feel bad about an inevitability.
I get it if it's someone you personally know - but otherwise - it's just how the world works.
It's like getting sad when a cheetah catches a gazelle.
It’s always the little guys who lose their shirts. The big guys who caused the problems get celebrated.
A peg broke = a stable coin people thought was anchored to USD (ie= a safe place to park your money) suddenly lost 70% of its value overnight.
Luna going from a market cap of close to 100 billion to basically worthless in a few days is like 50 Mt Gox incidents in terms of wealth destruction.
Bitcoin has market cap swings larger than the loss during Mt Gox in minutes these days.
Especially the co2 concentration in our air, wild fires, droughts etc.
I'm looking forward to burning less resources for just hashes.
I'm also getting tired of having the same fruitless discussions.
There are a lot of people who have never thought about a ton of implications of crypto.
Real issues are ignored, unknown, or just never even mentioned.
you do not understand or don't want to understand why those hashes are necessary. Are you okay with burning resources for running a bloated financial system or sponsoring "innovators" out of public money? Are you okay with the money you worked hard for to literally lose value due to inflation? Are you okay with a society where if we stop producing and consuming all but things we really need we will be rewarded with a financial crash?
The other day I was driving through a rougher area of town and noticed an old, grubby "Buy bitcoin here!" sign out in front of a convenience store. IMO about the time that started becoming A Thing, the writing was on the wall. I predict tulip mania will end relatively soon.
If you're glad the crypto market is crashing, I think that speaks more about you than the crypto market.
The behavior exhibited by those insufferable cryptobros (who I am not a fan of either to be clear) isn't much different than that of techbros having some of the highest paying salaries in the world with a matching ego, working on some vaporware juice package squeezer or creating incredible amounts of social discord through social media and data harvesting, or the degenerate gamblers of wallstreetbets memestocks like amc or gme, or any of the pandemic stocks that are down 75-90% right now. People spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on jpgs is not much different than people spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on bananas taped to walls at Art Basel, I could go on and on.
A lot of the smugness and resentment comes from a response to human behavior which has not been exclusive to cryptocurrencies, so I don't get the fixation on this one thing, it isn't even like cryptocurrences are some ubiquitously salient thing, you can very easily filter it out from your life and social media feeds and hear next to nothing about it.
People that are "glad" that the marked is crashing are usually into 2 camps: 1) bitter that they did not invest / did not see its potential while it was small - and they somehow feel vindicated when crypto is doing bad _and_ 2) people that are on their moral high horse talking about global warming, Ponzi schemes and Argentina.
IMHO, none of these 2 positions is okay and it speaks volumes about the character of the people that adopt it.
It is no coincidence that last year when bitcoin achieved unheard of highs and many obscure cryptos, including at least one that was started as a joke, achieved multibillion market caps was also the year when many power companies around the world found themselves suddenly without the ability to provide sufficient power to demand.
Sure there were other reasons. But crypto was part of it. And probably the most important part because it is the most drasticaly rising source of power demand.
You see power demand is usually not that hard to predict. It depends on boring slow changing factors, like population numbers, number of households, GDP, average temperature, etc. So power utility commissions and power companies had a relatively easy time predicting demand and keeping up with demand.
Then crypto comes. And then the price of crypto skyrockets to the point that people can really print money by plugging in computing devices in their wall sockets.
All of a sudden power demand goes up much faster than power companies can handle. And we have high power costs, power outages etc. OF course there were other factors, such as extreme weather events, etc. but the higher power costs persisted even after the extreme events were over.
There are official estimates floating around the web that crypto uses about half of percent of worldwide power. I suspect the real number is much higher. Crypto power use is hard to estimate because a lot of crypto power use is done secretly.
If bitcoin actually crashes to very low numbers (like 3 digit dollars), then we will see a dramatic reduction of power use, and all the experts and power utility commissions will be surprised how much power crypto was using all this time.
Seriously? Crypto is to blame for the inflation? Not the reckless money printing that has been going on for years?
Power demand did not go up faster than the power companies can handle it. The whole grid is designed to have a certain capacity and there is also a financial level power companies can use to regulate consumption (if consumption spikes, price will spike to). So the whole power demand is also grade A BS.
If bitcoin goes away tomorrow and we miraculously get all the power that was used back we're still f'ed as far as global warming and financial markets go.
It's caused a scarcity of video cards, sure, but the vast contributor for inflation has been government money printers running on full blast.
Crypto, in my opinion, is a waste of electricity, but you're not seeing the forest from the trees.
did you know the money market (the "dollars" in your brokerage account) broke the dollar and the government bailed it out?
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/09/money-mar...
Then there's a surreal amount of noise. The hundreds of altcoins, the blockchain buzzword, insane speculation, insane energy use and carbon emissions, drama about losing funds.
So yes, I'd like to cut down the noise so we can focus on the innovations.
People have just lost a sense of proportion that investing timelines are 5-40 years. Investing for "moon gains" in time periods less than that is for suckers, save for maybe people who are building a new business.
People dont know why “Magic Internet Money” - a stablecoin - is a meta-meme on re-appropriated skepticism of all crypto while being designed decently well, much better than TerraLuna (overcollateralized, compared to "partially collateralized as a last ditch effort that predictably failed"), MIM is holding its benchmark price through this stress test so far.
Same for DAI, which has a similar but older and more convoluted design than MIM, and less native collateral choices.
All while neither of these are perfect. None of these are a model decentralized stablecoin (for those that dont want a central company being able to freeze some funds, but I understand thats a feature for some market participants).
I like that the shakeouts and implosions will cause great discount prices. “Discounts” because many implosions force selling that pushes a price down beyond the rest of the market’s feelings, and when that selling stops (which can be transparently seen), the prices reach back to the level people were willing to pay. A chance I am sometimes willing to take.
In the end, it's a bunch of crypto bros who want to show how much they don't depend on the government suddenly realizing that FDIC-insured accounts were actually developed for a reason. It's people calling dibs on numbers. And yeah - the blockchain has led to all sorts of interesting ideas, but the money you pump into the currency du jour isn't really worth anything once people move on to a new trend, or once your exchange is hacked, or whatever.
I've been getting told for months that I'm missing the train and making a bad decision by a guy who bought BTC at 60k and told me "everyone" was saying it was going to go past 100k. And apparently I was a fool for investing in property and a diversified stock and bond portfolio. So yeah - I feel somewhat vindicated right now.
Also, it does not matter what decision you would make 3 months ago with the information you have today. What matters is what decision you made 3 months ago with the information you had 3 months ago. Same for the decision you are making now.
BTW: I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you. I'm mostly disagreeing with the "methodology" :)
I've been wondering when it would crash, didn't expect it to happen this quickly. NFTs i mean.
Monetary policy for the past decade has made it "reasonable" to take a much more risky portfolio stance, that situation has changed, and everyone is realizing it at about the same time.
And so we're seeing the paper tiger of crypto valuations - once the market situation changes such that crypto is too risky, everyone leaves and dumps what they have. It just took 10 years for people to learn that the hard way.
Sure when there is risk appetite again cryptocurrencies will rebound along with other risky instruments.
But I just can't shake the feeling that cryptocurrencies in general is just a huge pyramid scheme.
We have created a culture where quick money gets celebrated and regular work doesn’t pay off anymore. It’s no surprise that people get sucked into get rich quick schemes.
"Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked". Well, cryptobros don't even have a fig leaf...
Well, that and perhaps a lot less wasted energy and environmental damage.
That'll be permissioned/private blockchains (if at all), though, without that PoW nonsense.
I also fail to think any of the tech built on/with crypto (and blockchains in general) is even vaguely cool or exciting. I don’t think expensive apes are an abberation in an otherwise promising field, I’m convinced it’s just apes and scams all the way down. Artificial scarcity, pyramid schemes, pump and dump. Whether it’s coins or apes it’s the same thing.
The promise (or threat, if you see it from my POV) of actual widespread use in society to challenge traditional systems and industries like credit card companies is perpetually just over the horizon. And as soon as it really does have an impact it’s obviously going to be outlawed.
Then there are the MMT people, who seem to believe that money can be printed by the state in any amount, without consequence.
I hadn't had a question from my mother about the legitimacy of the spam she's getting in months.
Also, from all this drama, a whole culture emerged:
I briefly did some side-work for a web3 company and honestly at this point product people / people who don't know any better are the most obnoxious in the space.
By far, the most obnoxious are the people who happened to have a ton of BTC and then decided they were smart enough to start VC funds with the capital. RIP to anyone who agreed to a comp package that included a $COIN.
I'm still holding BTC, ETH and LPT though. I really like that LivePeer is solving a real problem - however it's also absolutely tanked in value.
I'm also glad that the stock market crashed too. I hope it all goes to 0 and new, better projects and companies can grow out of the ashes. It's scams all around.
The only thing that could be celebrated is if crypto mining capacity were to lower. But this aspect isn't even mentioned. And although the most valued coins currently rely on PoW, PoW isn't something intrinsic to cryptocurrencies. It's something we should move away, the same way ETH is planning to do.
I find Bitcoin itself to be interesting, so I intend to hold as I suspect a crash will come with regulations. Regulations may be the thing to save it in a way, but who knows.
Of course I have a decent amount invested in these things, but it's not a huge deal, I got in long enough ago I'm still way up, just wish I stepped on the sidelines a few months ago instead of stubbornly staying in like I did the last two market cycles. But I never put in anything more than ~2% of my paycheck into it. I waste way more money on two or three takeout meals every week.
Even with these crashes, my piddly crypto purchases are still outperforming my 401k, and I'm putting about 7x times more into that every paycheck.
But seeing people lose their life savings is just sad. I completely understand people's rationale for taking the crypto bait. Many people bought into something that they didn't understand, motivated by the "standard" financial system failing them completely.
Read some of the replies to this status: https://twitter.com/stablekwon/status/1524164780189126657
"I put my life savings in because I trusted you. Putting good yield on binance for locked period, now that billions of dolar have been locked this happens and thats the day before my locked period is over. now i put two stakes of max 30.000$ =60.000$ an thats my life savings ... I feel terible now. I really hope you can understand, I trusted you. No one is telling me now what is going on. I took a loss,my life is ruined"
Another
"please hear me Do kwon tell me everything will be okay if I just keep DCA Luna is not going anywhere it was my choice. I spent two years putting everything I had into it and my family and I suffered because of it and I have a few hundred left I'm not selling. Just give me hope"
Another
"Too late, everything built up, from 15k invested to 75k, to 45k end of last week to final 0 today and a fkin credit card debt for the final roll of the dice, no bear market DCA for me now fk"
Another
"I lost everything my apartment my house my money everything is gone someone help me"
This isn't joyful to watch, it's sad. As it turns out, the return on cryptocurrency isn't good, when you factor in the risk. The biggest bummer about this is that it was entirely preventable: we have an existing framework of securities regulation, created when all of this (suicides included!) happened with traditional financial instruments 100 years ago in 1929.
I can’t even begin to imagine how many nontechnical older people that downloaded TikTok to follow their grandkids have fallen for these bullshit pump and dump scams. I wonder how much of the real money that’s in crypto actually comes from utterly clueless people that are being actively exploited by a small handful of crypto “influencers.”
He uses them only when he has no choice.
Peace and quiet are dear to his heart.
And victory no cause for rejoicing.
If you rejoice in victory, then you delight in killing;
If you delight in killing, you cannot fulfill yourself.
but i don't particularly want to see cryptocurrencies fail in general.
I think atm I see this a a "reset" or cleansing. There was too many obvious scams and well dressed and marketed pyramid schemes. This will collapse a lot of them.
>I'm hoping this crash and those in the future rid the space of the toxic backrooms these $30,000 jpegs provide access to and get us to collectively work on building really exciting cool new things.
Which part about current valuations changes your ability to create?
Dislike "crypto-bros"? Fine. I'm not sure who that is, but they are neither here nor there. Do you give them control over your creative endeavors? If so, why?
Perhaps a less charitable interpretation might be: You're not interested in building at all. In lieu of creation, you blame "crypto-bros" for what you dislike in the space.
There are plenty of alt-coin communities if you are looking for alternatives. There are thousands of cryptocurrencies with different energy consumption patterns and market valuations. Choose one that fits your technical and ideological needs.
Meanwhile, NFTs -- I have to wonder what's different.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20020928142349/http://www.thetul...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Viruses-Scientific-American-Library-B...
5. Crypto bros deserve a punch in the face. If you don't feel that way, it's probably because you're a crypto bro. The world is secretly (or not) cheering for this to all burn to the ground because it's easy to perceive people who promote crypto as obnoxious swindlers. Really, they are. Sorry, if this isn't a good reason, but I'll just spill those feelings out right there before making some more reasoned arguments...
4. Crypto not useful in a real way. Speculative investing, money laundering, hiding wealth, pyramid schemes. I'm a tech guy and I have no idea how I would go about acquiring crypto currency then using it to pay for something tangible of real value without eating an exorbitant amount of fees and taking my chances moving stable fiat currency in to a highly volatile asset. I know here are exceptions, but let's be real, crypto in 2022 is about creating shady financial tooling.
3. Crypto's externalized costs make it expensive to society while providing little benefit. Graphics card shortages, energy usage and global warming, brain drain from other real tech problems, aiding and abetting criminal activities like money laundering. What are the benefits that make up for any of that?
2. People losing savings sucks, but the longer crypto insanity goes on the worse that's going to be. Taking a statistical view, unsophisticated investors almost certainly will be taken advantage of in unregulated markets. The longer this insanity goes on the worse that's going to get. End it now and fewer real people with real savings are going to get hurt.
... and the real reason we should all be excited about...
1. I used to be excited about blockchain technologies. I think there are some really great uses for them. But then speculative investing in crypto became a craze and that kind of swamped out everything else interesting. If speculative investing becomes no longer feasible, hopefully we can start to get some focus on some of the more interesting and beneficial applications.
They buy bitcoin to destroy the central banks, the states. The corrupted ones. They are on a crusade and at the top of this very new world : them. One day they will dominate the society. We poor ant-sheeps will continue to struggle while they golden eagles will have almost unlimited satoshis in their wallet that they will have earned so hard by pressing some buttons on a web app.
So yeah I somehow like to see their dreams taste a dose of reality. Bitcoin is a shitcoin too despite them chanting otherwise. And don't get me started on NFTs or other cryptos...
Dogecoin's "market cap" is still over $11B.
Yeah a lot of dumb hype settled in crypto, crypto is naturally suited to that and that's never going to change. But there's plenty of dumb hype in markets that should know better.
Anyway crypto doesn't seem to be that different than the world around it and it has performed drastically better than traditional markets since the bottom of march 2020
I think DCA-ing into ~1% of net worth held in crypto over the next few weeks would be a pretty solid trade.
Another theory I had about two years ago, was inflation was getting sucked by inflating crypto. Now real life inflation is happening and so crypto falls. This was predictable too. The question Wa a matter of when exactly will the pandemic end and people will start enjoying life.
Thats what happened. So don't look at it as omg crypto falling. It's just an economic shift.
New question: what will Future savings look like? Need to brush up on economic theories after world wars for insight
Honestly, I don't feel too bad for people who put their whole life savings into crypto. Never put all of your eggs in one basket as the old saying says.
The scams and low quality projects will die and true web3 projects that aren't only for quick cash but for actually building something will stay.
Just like the dotcom boom.
This is all happening at a time of high inflation and so the measurement of that crash isn't even net of inflation. Gold is actually down 16%. Stock exchanges are actually down >20%.
Crypto crashing isn't a factor at all, this is global economics collapsing.
Oil is way up. Food is way up. Fertilizers are way up. Looks like major military mobilizations are happening to me.
I am, however, looking forward to replacing my 970 with a more modern graphics card! Haven't seen the pallets of 3080TIs showing up on eBay yet, though...
Until I’m living off of my investments, it’s generally in my interest for the prices to be low.
This is true for company stock programs. Yeah - it can be painful to watch 3 years of options go to zero, but if I’m being given $N in options every vesting period, that just means my next vest is going to be great!
Crypto is no different. If I’m dollar cost averaging into Bitcoin, crashes are in my interest and rallies are less than worthless unless I’m planning on selling.
I'm mad as hell that people got taken in by it. Increased suicide rates, broken families, lost homes, etc. It is infuriating that the people behind this are going to walk away without a single scar or regret. It's been a giant con from the get-go and it sucks seeing so many lives ruined over it.
However I will dance on its grave and laugh as it all burns down. If it wasn't going to be put down it would destroy itself eventually. I'm here for it.
If we get higher transaction throughput or less energy consumption with similar guarantees, the value should go up again to reflect that ability.
The big one is going to be Tether. When that inevitably fails I think it will kill 80% or more of the cryptocurrency market.
On one hand the schadenfreude is high, not going to lie.
On the other hand I liked that they were all in the same spot. Every time crypto dips down, or there's a rugpull or whatever, I am afraid they'll jump ship to some other area that they'll ruin for everyone. Or worse, they will move to many different areas, spreading the greedulousness all over the world.
But tbh. crashing earlier (e.g. pre-covid) would probably have been even better.
In parallel, there are communities of builders working on the post-jpeg future. Check out https://partialcommonownership.com, for example.
If they had won (in the greater fool game), most of them would have celebrated all the way and deluded themselves that they were savvy investors.
Play stupid games, don’t be surprised when you get stupid prizes (e.g, losing your life savings).
And if you think that a crash is going to clear the way for anything you want, there's a principle from PT Barnum about sucker production. The get rick quick schemers will "pivot" to something else.
Some higher-end video card prices will go down. That'll be nice.
As with previous crypto crashes, the chaff is gonna die, and the grain will remain (Bitcoin, ethereum, maybe a few others). Then a new spike to a new all time high will occur after the next bitcoin halving.
What is even worse is that those life savings will be collected by criminals and personalities alike. I'll be glad only if those people will be put in jail for running all those frauds and scams.
Yes, I'm glad this ponzi is crashing. You can feel somewhat sorry for the greater fools, but they're learning an expensive lesson and hopefully will not repeat their mistake anytime soon.
However, it's not like crypto is the only bubble crashing right now. Stocks, bonds, and (soon to be, but to a lesser extent) real estate - they're all going down in a pretty big way because the Fed is taking away the punch bowl. Yes, it seems unlikely that crypto would have inflated to the point it did without the Fed's easy money policy for the last dozen+ years, but neither would stocks or real estate. It gave us a culture where people thought they didn't need to work to obtain wealth, a few well-placed bets and you were gonna be set. But that mentality is corrosive in the longrun.
Tech stocks are crashing just as much as crypto right now. And Bitcoin is trading 30 THOUSAND DOLLARS.
Would barely call this a "crash that's finally happening"
However, I’m happy if this means money will be invested in innovation towards saving the planet, rather than finding new ways to burn resources with proof-of-work-based crypto.
None of this prevents people from working on cool things, cryptocurrency is just a dead-end technology without much potential to create cool things. I don't think it can be denied that the concept of bitcoin is pretty interesting from a technology perspective, but in terms of practical utility there's really not much blood to squeeze from this stone.
Time and again we've seen dips - and this nonsense always bounces back.
This looks like an overall market correction, which we're overdue for, rather than a fundamental collapse. Maybe some of the more blatant fraudsters will lose their shirts, but at this point I wouldn't dream of betting against this stuff. It's simply become too big to fail.
When you look at the Bitcoin chart over the last 10 years on a log scale, you see that a halving over a timespan of 6 months is completely normal given the volatility.
The volatility has been always like this. The only thing that changed is that the price is at an all time high (in terms of orders of magnitude) at the moment.
We are putting the planet in peril already without the existence of this pointless technology, which represents the first net-negative invention of Computer Science. As a discipline we must evolve to apply an ethical lens to what we do, just as other sciences have had to do with time.
I write about this position at webtwoboomer.com, flagged thread here about it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31330281
What do you all think?
If it's not your bag, don't put your time into it.
/2cents
However there's still money to be made. My automated trading web app detected two opportunities earlier today: BTC/USDT and BNB/USDT through EMA cross-overs. Both are still going strong, although the app is still demo-only trading. https://tradecast.one
Crypto IMHO mostly is a scam. Neither is it backed by real commodities, nor is it backed by violence (think military might). It alone (without converting to other currencies) can make few legitimate purchases. Because it still can make some legitimate purchases, I used the word "mostly".
The computational power could be used for other purposes.
Builders gonna build.
The most impactful technology since the internet.
Changes trust, governance, economy, incentives.
Changes everything.
Like... the idea of using blockchain to ensure a decentralized * network.
We've HAD them before on the internet. They worked fine as long as the average person knew nothing about them. They don't work when 12 year olds and 4chan trolls and Trump groupies get access.
Wanna fix social networks?
Step 1: Recreate twitter.
Step 2: Make it compatible with user-created subscribable blocklists (and exception lists) that can be shared and modified.
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit
You never have to see anything but the content you like, and it's still "free speech" even under the most ridiculous faulty application of the term because the company isn't blocking anyone directly. List owner block someone you like? Add them as an exception.
Boom, social media solved, at least until people who are REALLY for personal responsibility decide it's too much trouble.
Even if it takes a huge recession to wipe these cryptobros and casino tokens out, I would be glad.
Obviously would not like the collateral damage that this inflicts on all these so called small 'crypto investors' but as long as this triggers tight regulations to make these tokens, illegal, unusable and banned completely as to make the common person not touch these tokens, then that is a good thing for all humanity and we can start to concentrate on more worthwhile issues.
I really hope this space gets destroyed sooner than later.
Blockchains have many use-cases. The community's insistent push toward tokenization and assetiziation of this technology near-totally obscures the fundamental technology and what its capable of.
Arguably, it isn't even the tokenization. Tokens make sense. Tokens which have value makes sense. But then enters: greed. It's not just about having a token which has value and can do things via interfacing with the blockchain. The asset has to be an investment. We don't think about ETH in terms of what it can do on the blockchain (utility); we think about it in terms of an ETH:USD price. Its utility is impossible to detangle from Growth; Deflation; my Investment portfolio.
ENS is my favorite example. Arguably; this is how domain names should work. A distributed, trustless ledger. Power to the people! And then you realize, it costs $100USD/year to register a domain name. Today is pretty cheap; thursdays are cheaper than fridays, but you should really buy one on a wednesday because that's when gas is at its lowest.
Why is it so expensive? Because the token is an asset. Thousands of stakeholders, really every ETH user, has an interest in seeing the token go up. Token goes up; utility of the token goes down, as it becomes prohibitively expensive to actually do interesting, real, utilitarian things with it.
Real world: Assets which have both Utility & Investment Potential are somewhat rare. Cash has little investment potential, but high utility. Gold, Silver, etc; low utility (not zero, but low), classic investment options. Corporate shares? Low/moderate utility; maybe you can use them to vote on corporate direction, but at the end of the day that vote is in service to investment potential.
It turns out that assets which overload Utility and Investment Potential inevitably screw over someone who needs that utility. They aren't egalitarian, even by the perverted definition of capitalistic egalitarianism. They inordinately favor early adopters and capital holders. The biggest real world asset class which suffers from this: real estate; and our world is observing, in real time, the decades-long consequences of treating housing like an investment.
That leads me to three conclusions about crypto:
1. Crypto & Blockchains are too intertwined with money. It will never not be about money. Most will recover from this crash, and still be about money.
2. Some people say: "How can bitcoin have value? it's nothing. just bits in a computer." That's literally its best feature! Not only is it irrelevant that it can't do anything; it's a good thing. It's among the purest investment vehicles ever created. A store of wealth with near-zero utility. I say let it grow! Every dollar tied up in BTC is a dollar not being spent to make housing more expensive, or grow the tendrils of gigacorporations into every nook and cranny of our lives.
3. Some people say: "This crypto project will be successful; it's doing something really cool, blockchain for wifi networks, or dogs, NFTs for games, whatever". I disagree. Crypto projects which try to be utilitarian Will Always Fail; unless they can detangle themselves from the deflationary investmentization of their tokens. None do that; all are started to make money; their founders being the biggest holders of the tokens, look for a return on investment of their time and effort. You can't engineer greed away.
And here's a prediction for the immediate future: The stock markets are red this month, abstractly, simplistically, because of Fed rate hikes. Recent analysis has suggested that the markets have already priced in more rate hikes than the Fed has gestured it wants to do, for the foreseeable future. That would tend to signal that a broad market crash isn't forthcoming; I'm not timing the bottom, or saying we're heading up, I'm just saying that there's reasons to be positive right now.
Crypto is still dumping; hard. The first reason is the Luna situation, which is REALLY bad, I don't think its possible to understate how bad that is. The second reason is really that last paragraph; value, or money, is a fixed entity. If institutions are seeing positive signs concerning the stock market right now, they're seeing whats happening to Luna, they may be positioning to move capital out of the crypto markets and back into the stock markets.
Crypto diehards will be unhappy to discover that most coins are correlated with one-another. That's sad; there's an alternate reality where people could lose faith in Luna, but still maintain faith in BTC or ETH, and different coins become inversely correlated.
But there's another test running in parallel to that: is the crypto market as a whole inversely correlated with the stock market? Over the past eight years, the answer to that has been No; but its also not been tested in the fires of a major sell-off in one or the other. Today is that test. And if the result ends up, actually, being Yes: that's REALLY good. I can't understate how good that is, for both crypto and our economy; it will give our economy another $1T+ alternative store-of-value to bonds, it'll desync boom-bust cycles which lessens the economic impact of recessions, it just gives capital holders optionality.
What we don't want is: everything crashing at the same time. Crashes are necessary; but its healthier to have smaller, isolated crashes in specific asset classes.
But hey, let's just blanket claim that it's all a ponzi scheme (despite the definition of ponzi schemes being very clear and very different from the essentials of Bitcoin or Ethereum or many other cryptocurrencies). Or lets go on and on ad nauseum about the carbon burn of BTC and PoW mining (despite many of you working in tech fields where insane amounts of electrical energy and carbon are burned just maintaining billions of people's generally utterly pointless social media posts or cat videos).
Or how about endlessly sniping about fraud and money laundering on these systems, never mind that the wider financial world is filled with fraud on a far larger scale and that even social networks along with many other digital technologies are enormously used for exactly the same thing. Worth noting here again that there are actually many, many people in the world, people who aren't so nicely blessed by sound government landscapes, trustworthy or functional financial institutions and easy access to bank accounts who already do use crypto in many non-criminal ways (at least morally non-criminal). Anecdote, yes, but I personally know many who do this, and especially among people who I know in developing countries. I've read more than enough to know that the use is much wider than commonly reported. Even Chainalysis has estimated that only a small fraction of all crypto transactions are due to crime and fraud, and their very business is tracking the fraudulent use of crypto.
And finally, that it's useless because blockchains can be replaced by so many other things, or because DeFi sucks, or because transaction fees, or because "12 years later and there's barely a use case" and etc and etc... Since when does a technology have to be immediately useful and incredible to be interesting? Some of the sniping against blockchain's usefulness reminds me of the mentality behind those who criticized the Dropbox founder's original 2011 post on HN. Furthermore, have so many of you who make the argument about crypto going nowhere been completely blind to the amount of business exploration and experimentation that the wider ecosystem creates literally by the day? Sure, much of these experiments will fail, collapse or include plenty of fraud. So too have many other interesting and now robust technologies over the decades. Frankly, it's a shame to the very most basic idea of the word "hacker" that these negative arguments should be used to totally condemn something like considering how interestingly it's being explored in the wider world.
I could go on but what's the point? So much of the sniping here deviates so completely from legitimate, reasoned criticisms into irrationally, repetitively emotional hate that it's often like arguing at a brick wall.
Remember it’s Bitcoin. What goes down must come up, again.
Now imagine it also enabled a huge range of financial adventures which got some people rich and some people poor and caused most normal people to hate jQuery. That would be silly. jQuery is still a useful tool. It's not just for pumping and dumping tokens... It's great for manipulating DOM elements too!
I hope maybe this crash will help people realize that public permissionless distributed databases and the cryptographic primitives that make them secure can, like jQuery, be used to generate new amazing software products that previously could not exist and are not just about get rich quick schemes.
--edited for formatting/clarity