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Ask HN: Is anyone else glad the crypto market is crashing?

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Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else glad the crypto market is crashing?

#151

Post by [deleted] »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #111
paxys wrote: post #27

Bitcoin is at $30K. I'd hardly call it "crashing". It has erased its gains from the last year, sure, but so has the broader stock market. And "growth stocks" are performing a lot worse in the same period.

for me my company stock has erased the gains since ~late 2018. BTC is up 10x in that period. 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.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else glad the crypto market is crashing?

#152

Post by pmcp »

TameAntelope wrote: post #139
joecot wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As soon as it was clear that Bitcoin was going to be a commodity instead of a currency (why use it as a currency to buy a pizza this week when it could buy you a car next week?), it was clear it was now a pyramid scheme. That's why I didn't invest in it. What I hadn't counted on was how gullible people were for pyramid schemes.

I wish we had a better phrase than "pyramid scheme", because IMO anything that's a "scheme" has people who know better at one end, and I really don't think there's anyone involved in crypto that is deliberately "winning". What's a phrase for when everyone is getting scammed, and not by any one person, but by an idea? Where there are no winners, only lucky and unlucky. Pyramid trap? Pyramid quagmire? IDK, but "scheme"…

Betting?

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else glad the crypto market is crashing?

#153

Post by noxer »

marcosdumay wrote: post #109
nwiswell wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not clear on the logic here to be perfectly honest, even if I broadly agree that the real innovation with Bitcoin died when it was clear it would never be a currency. But gold is also a commodity, and I don't think I've ever heard it called a pyramid scheme.

People buy gold on the expectation that it won't lose to inflation. That's why it isn't a pyramid, an exponential curve is well contained if the exponent is exactly 1.

Gold is a worse inflation hedge than stocks. Gold is actually bought to have quick liquidity when there is a market opportunity. It functions as cash but with less inflation but its not to evade inflation its just better than directly holding cash.

And yes it is a pyramid, almost all of the value come from the fact that central banks hold most of it and almost never sell to the open market and most of the rest is in jewelry with 2-3 generation turnaround time so essentially removed from the gold market.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else glad the crypto market is crashing?

#154

Post by zeven7 »

TameAntelope wrote: post #139
joecot wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As soon as it was clear that Bitcoin was going to be a commodity instead of a currency (why use it as a currency to buy a pizza this week when it could buy you a car next week?), it was clear it was now a pyramid scheme. That's why I didn't invest in it. What I hadn't counted on was how gullible people were for pyramid schemes.

I wish we had a better phrase than "pyramid scheme", because IMO anything that's a "scheme" has people who know better at one end, and I really don't think there's anyone involved in crypto that is deliberately "winning". What's a phrase for when everyone is getting scammed, and not by any one person, but by an idea? Where there are no winners, only lucky and unlucky. Pyramid trap? Pyramid quagmire? IDK, but "scheme"…

> What's a phrase for when everyone is getting scammed, and not by any one person, but by an idea? Where there are no winners, only lucky and unlucky.

The phrase is "financial market"

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else glad the crypto market is crashing?

#155

Post by [deleted] »

mattwilsonn888 wrote: post #112
joecot wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As soon as it was clear that Bitcoin was going to be a commodity instead of a currency (why use it as a currency to buy a pizza this week when it could buy you a car next week?), it was clear it was now a pyramid scheme. That's why I didn't invest in it. What I hadn't counted on was how gullible people were for pyramid schemes.

You don't understand what a commodity is - or you don't understand what Bitcoin is.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else glad the crypto market is crashing?

#156

Post by JackFr »

haunter wrote: post #37

Look at the Terra sub or the replies on Twitter to the official account. Normal people losing all their life savings and a lot of them are contemplating suicide. It's actually really really sad. https://www.reddit.com/r/terraluna/

> Normal people losing all their life savings and a lot of them are contemplating suicide.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else glad the crypto market is crashing?

#158

Post by cryptica »

IAmWorried wrote: post #9

It's less that I'm glad the market is crashing, and more that I'm glad that the insufferable crypto bros are finally getting a punch to the mouth. Seriously, these people are the worst. Your average "crypto investor" has no skills, no mathematical foundations, nothing. Except for pure stupid luck, and the ability to spew inane crypto babble 24/7. And yes, they think they are much smarter than you, because they achiev…

This is true, but it also applies to the tech sector as a whole. The engineers of big tech companies tend to look down on all other engineers on the basis that they happen to work for financially successful companies which have market monopolies (and are propped up by easy money from government money printers via huge contracts and exposure to public markets).

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.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else glad the crypto market is crashing?

#159

Post by 11101010001100 »

jonathan-adly wrote: post #63

It's a Macro crash. SP500 is down -%5 YTD. Meta -37%, Netflix -65%. Lots of pain spreading. You shouldn't gloat or be happy. Give it a couple of more months like this, and lots of the HN audience would be worried about layoffs. 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…

Sure it's macro. But if crypto is dragging down the rest of the market what does that say about the market?
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