211–220 of 670 posts
I'm glad that it's crashing in spite of a large chunk of my portfolio being in crypto. The degree of complacency in the space had gotten absurd and completely detached from any economic or even technological reality. Current top projects seemed to intentionally squander all the money which was invested. It was so bad, it looked as though the biggest investors wanted them to waste the money. I'm also glad that the sto…
I'm genuinely confused. This current crash is not nearly as bad as several recent crashes. The fall in price in the big coins (Eth, BTC) seems downright modest. A bunch of new meme coins got obliterated, which is also normal and completely predictable. Why are people treating this as if it's going to be the fall of crypto? Because a peg broke? Have people not heard of Mt. Gox?
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/
They were on the wrong side of a massive bet and lost. 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?
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.
I feel bad for people losing money, but crypto has not lived up to its potential at all, remains a solution looking for a problem, and is an environmental disaster. 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…
Do you know of any other way to send electronic cash with no intermediaries (EDIT: financial institutions)? It's the first sentence of the whitepaper and ignored by 99% of people, including highly paid software developers. 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 t…
Well, you rely on a bunch of intermediaries, but the profit incentive outweighs the power of any large (but still minority) intermediary blocking specific transactions at will.
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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"…
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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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"…
>...I really don't think there's anyone involved in crypto that is deliberately "winning". I believe that bitcoin began as a straightforward "pump and dump" scheme, dressed up in a techno-libertarian narrative to appeal to its intended marks, young tech males with disposable income. As the size of the market has grown, I suspect the original cartel holds a smaller percentage of the outstanding supply, but I'll bet it…
I'm glad that a long overdue reality check is coming. But I'm incredibly sad that many, many small fish will lose their entire life's savings in the hours and days and weeks ahead. I've already seen random social media postings of attempted suicides, or talk of it. We will lose actual human beings in this. And, what's worse, is that the real grifters and crooks will walk away clean once again. There isn't enough time…
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I'm not gloating just yet. If you bought Bitcoin at literally any other time than the two peaks that have occurred over the last year, then you're still way, way, way up. Bitcoin was last at its current price between those two peaks, a little less than one year ago. Of course, NFTs and all that were just so obviously nonsense that I don't even think it's worth commenting on.
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.
It’s a use case I didn’t consider a decade ago.