I’m blown away by how anti-crypto this discussion is. I hadn’t realized how negative the prevailing sentiment is on Hacker News. One argument seems to be that cryptocurrency is purely speculative, which is apparently a dirty word. What about the stock market? What about any kind of investment? If you truly believe that cryptocurrency is the basis for a superior economic system, isn’t it rational and wise to put some…
So the thing about investments is that they are a transaction that gives you a share of property in exchange for a share of the future income stream, albeit this mechanism is often imperfect and valuation may not so directly correspond to the current value of the underlying property or income stream. Even if many people are buying investments solely with the intention of selling them to somebody else for the higher price, the reason to gamble and expect the price to go higher is because of the valuation of the property. Even the miserly interest you get from parking cash in a bank account is tied to the income the bank makes from using the money you so parked.
But with Bitcoin, when you buy a bitcoin, you get a share of... well, nothing. And the way you make money with that share of nothing is to sell it to somebody else for a higher value. That's the only way to make money: you can't make money except by enticing new entrants, which is literally the definition of Ponzi scheme. And other investments aren't Ponzi schemes because there are other ways to make money from the investment, even if they aren't necessarily the most common way of making money.
This doesn't necessarily hold true for all cryptocurrencies; I'll concede that I'm not a connoisseur of the cryptocurrency community. But it feels to me like it's the standard tech-bro "X, but unregulated", except "X" here is finance, an industry which is famous for its unregulated elements not only resulting in lots of people losing all of their money but also bringing the economy down with it. So forgive me if I'm not exactly enthusiastic here.