381–390 of 670 posts
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> thought crypto was supposed to be a hedge against the markets This made no theoretical sense from the start and has been quantitatively untrue for years.
The crypto believers told me US dollar would enter hyperinflation very soon and Bitcoin will be the only viable currency because it has a finite supply.
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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 could have made relatively decent chunk of money if I had just kept the little I had... But I'm really just too risk averse and believe in sanity that the things wouldn't actually go anywhere. Specially not to the 100x from point where I was. Then again, I also think most tech stocks are just stupid. Especially Tesla, but thankfully I'm not either betting against them. Let's see if I'm proven correct in long run.
I don't think it's about risk, it's that if you hold stocks or crypto or many other kinds of investment, and your holding is worth $x right now, if you're a believer in the efficient markets hypothesis, you have no real idea whether it's going to go up or indeed down in the future.
I bought a house because it's a place for our family to live, not because I belive it's going to appreciate in value. If you buy ten houses, you need to have information - or sheer belief - that your investment is going to pay off.
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There are also those of us who played with Bitcoin when it emerged, found it promising and mined it or bought some. Who took some profits along the way and never promoted it. Who still think it's a useful concept, _despite_ the hype that gets too much at times. 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 ha…
Transfers of wealth from productive to unproductive industries arent risks worth rewarding, neither economically or with praise. It's slothful both as a personal vice, and as an economic activity.
Down that path lies authoritarianism: who decides what is productive?
Is art productive? Is your comment on HN productive? Is beer productive? Is Haskell productive? Are you productive? It isn’t hard to argue most everything is non-productive. Remove all non-productive uses of money or time, and what is left?
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.
I'm not really invested or care for crypto, I'd rather it not be around. But I don't see how this is any different than when bitcoin hit $17k and also "crashed" and everyone talked about how this was the end and crypto had a good run. Then it got even bigger. Now that you have institutional investors in this pie and not just those dudes you knew in college, its not going anywhere. People are automatically putting ret…
"Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked". Well, cryptobros don't even have a fig leaf...
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> What real math is involved in predicting the stock market? Given the apparently inability of active funds to routinely outperform passive funds[0], "not much" would be my response. One could be really cynical and reduce it to: some people get lucky, some of the time. That's all. [0] https://www.ft.com/content/06317e0e-b6bf-4fdc-9255-cf664cb92... ( https://archive.ph/NumMp )
>Given the apparently inability of active funds to routinely outperform passive funds[0], "not much" would be my response. Renaissance Technologies and Two Sigmas are just two examples of firms that constantly beat the market using math, algorithms and machine learning. It's doable, but not easy.
This kind of thing is inherently un-provable. You can have a method that works stupidly well for decades, and then it stops working. Building a model that provenly (in the mathematical sense) works with X% efficiency would be akin to building a free energy device.
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…
The people who hate the intermediaries are the sellers, because they don't like losing a small % of their sale to a payment processor. But sellers do not have the power to change this. They have to accept payment in whatever form customers are willing to provide it in. Customers aren't going to move away from PayPal and credit cards without a good reason, and so far crypto has failed to provide that reason.
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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…
> Do you know of any other way to send electronic cash with no intermediaries (EDIT: financial institutions) In practice you need a bank account to use bitcoin, there's essentially nobody who uses bitcoin that doesn't have a bank account, so the "no intermediaries" thing isn't really meaningful, nobody cares about this.
[0]: https://www.bitcoin.com/get-started/how-to-locate-and-use-a-...
[1]: https://coingeek.com/localbitcoins-restricted-to-only-10-sta...
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Regulation can’t come soon enough. These are risky assets at best. People are getting hurt. Just think how much real tech talent has been wasted on this pointless experiment. This could have gone into fintech, greentech, healthtech, proptech etc anything else really that creates real value.
crypto is a branch of fintech though
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I could have made relatively decent chunk of money if I had just kept the little I had... But I'm really just too risk averse and believe in sanity that the things wouldn't actually go anywhere. Specially not to the 100x from point where I was. Then again, I also think most tech stocks are just stupid. Especially Tesla, but thankfully I'm not either betting against them. Let's see if I'm proven correct in long run.
People with this kind of "risk tolerance" usually dont take a risk even tho it would probably be totally "sane". If you think about it, many people make several million dollars over their life time but see it as to high of a risk to put 10k into something that could go to zero but it also could go to 100k or even more. That does not make much sense. The question should not be "should I risk the 10k? The question shou…
You could walk into a betting shop and put 10k on all kinds of things that will most likely go to zero but have a finite probability of going to 100k or even more.
Q: How do you suggest determining the odds of success? Most of us can't invest in every 10k opportunity (and even if we did, we might not win out in the long run)