Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

In 2022, Web3 went just great

newsletter.mollywhite.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 205 posts

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#101

Post by qbasic_forever »

UncleMeat wrote: post #92
recursive wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: why not? I don't really understand the nuance of taxes. I just use a tax app and answer the questions.

In the US, capital losses can offset capital gains to arbitrarily large numbers, but only $3,000 of capital losses can offset ordinary income. So if you lose $3M in one year and happen to have $3M in other capital gains then hooray - they offset and you pay no taxes on them. But if you lose $3M in one year and made $300k in income, you are still paying income tax on everything minus $3,000. You get to keep carrying i…

But if all of your losses are in crypto coins and not USD it's moot and you can't claim a loss on anything. Not until you convert to cash, and even then I'm not entirely sure it's clear cut.

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#103

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

AndrewStephens wrote: post #14

I would love to know how much of that is real money, as in actually dollars. So much of the cryptocurrency world is based on terribly inflated prices and it has always been unclear to me how much money was actually put in by real people who aren't just self-dealing and wash trading. I am sure the answer is in the billions but I'll bet that it is much lower than some people would have you believe. Luckily crypto is st…

Where do you draw the line? For the clown that paid $2.9 million for the first tweet, do you care if it was 300,000 that he invested into bitcoin and cashed for the 2.9 million? If it bubble money too, does it "count"?

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#104

Post by JeremyNT »

riffraff wrote: post #67
macNchz wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s obviously a super complex web of things involved, but I personally think that the nature of the post-2008 economic recovery (in the US) has had an impact on this at a societal level. I think people perceive that the opportunity to have a comfortable life doing a “regular job” is slipping away in favor of an upper middle class of professionals who enjoy stability, and an enlarged sub-middle class who are findi…

But people were gambling and making bad financial decisions before the 2008 crisis too. The crypto schemes are very often rehashing of old scams and mistakes, they are not qualitatively different from penny stocks pump and dumps, pyramids and MLM schemes, ponzi schemes, tulip/cabbage patch/whatever mania, etc.

The crypto thing has always been about front running regulation and overall awareness of the grift. Whereas most people understood that traditional ponzis and gambling often end with criminal charges and/or financial losses, in 2021 crypto could still tout "line go up" since the other shoe hadn't dropped yet. The layers of obfuscation involved in crypto schemes meant that normal users had essentially no way to comprehend the real risks, other than to rely on a more general truism (like "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch").

GP post is suggesting that demand for this kind of speculation was up, and if that's the case, many of these people in the "market" for scams and gambling might have been more attracted to crypto because it still had some veneer of safety/legitimacy about it.

Nobody could plausibly claim that now that the failures are finally coming to light, of course.

Edit: I would suggest this is largely a failure of the media, which had long treated crypto as legitimate by default despite having the resources to pay real experts to actually cover it critically. Of course, even had traditional media outlets been sounding the alarm, who knows if it would have mattered much - faith in media is very low right now (exactly because they so often get this sort of thing wrong).

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#105

Post by remram »

HN_is_for_gemes wrote: post #98
Eisenstein wrote: post #13

I would feel bad for people who lost money in crypto if every time I tried to warn them during the bubble they wouldn't have said 'have fun staying poor' and called me ignorant. It is tough to remain motivated to try and convince people that they are making bad decision when they actively berate you. It feels like telling someone about to jump into the shallow end of a swimming pool from a balcony that they are going…

[flagged]

Not GP, but are we supposed to feel good for you? You're holding what those people lost. Some people got lucky, some people stole, a lot of people lost big time.

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#106

Post by BaseballPhysics »

simplify wrote: post #21

I'd be curious to see the source on those numbers and how they're broken down. For example, Terra/Luna was a spectacular crypto failure. FTX, on the other hand, was just plain old fraud, not really related to crypto itself.

> FTX, on the other hand, was just plain old fraud, not really related to crypto itself

A huge part of the FTX/Alameda fraud involved minting their own utility token (FTT), artificially inflating the price, and then using it as collateral for further loans.

How is that not a crypto failure? Unless you only define "crypto failure" as "smart contract got hacked", in which case we'll have to agree to disagree.

Frankly, I think folks in the crypto community trying to spin FTX as "not crypto" are simply engaged in goalpost shifting.

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#107

Post by JeremyNT »

dayvid wrote: post #74

I'm kinda happy with the way things turned out. For a moment, my understanding of reality was upside down with how many mediocre and clearly pointless projects were generating so much money. With every crypto hype cycle, I actually go through the motions and create a smart contract project and become completely disillusioned with the hype. I thought ERC20 tokens were bullshit when I realized it's just updating keys i…

> I think web3/crypto will have mass adoption, but when it does, it will be much more boring and seamless with what we have today, with large companies managing blockchains and governments issuing their own coins.

What point is there in the blockchain here? Why would a company or government need or want the indirection and overhead of blockchain/cryptocurrency instead of a normal database and traditional currency?

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#108

Post by duskwuff »

ethanbond wrote: post #26
Lendal wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we need to look at this from the perspective of a society and ask ourselves what else we could have done. Obviously there are a whole lot of people in society completely lacking in common sense and critical thinking skills, while at the same time mass rudeness seems normalized too. Is this a failure of education, or parenting? Or has it always been this way, and the only difference is the way we communicate w…

Well, let's also not ignore the immense greed involved and its power to overcome run-of-the-mill common sense. Doesn't take much to spot the bullshit in: "Risk-free 7% APY in a time when every single noteworthy financial institution is offering less than 0.5%!"

Only 7%? At the height of the bubble, there were a number of major crypto schemes offering interest rates of 20% or more. Sometimes even much more; some of the shadier "investments" offered >100% APY.

Unsurprisingly, most of those schemes have since collapsed.

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#109

Post by subradios »

Lendal wrote: post #22
Eisenstein wrote: post #13

I would feel bad for people who lost money in crypto if every time I tried to warn them during the bubble they wouldn't have said 'have fun staying poor' and called me ignorant. It is tough to remain motivated to try and convince people that they are making bad decision when they actively berate you. It feels like telling someone about to jump into the shallow end of a swimming pool from a balcony that they are going…

I think we need to look at this from the perspective of a society and ask ourselves what else we could have done. Obviously there are a whole lot of people in society completely lacking in common sense and critical thinking skills, while at the same time mass rudeness seems normalized too. Is this a failure of education, or parenting? Or has it always been this way, and the only difference is the way we communicate w…

What happened is that crypto is very cool. There's a not unwarranted perception amongst people in the United States at least that banking regulators are conspiring (or prospiring) to create the financial meltdowns we see, and give people with the right connections privileged seats at the table when it comes to markers.

This is, to some degree, true - Quant traders in finance work with data that is literally unavailable to regular traders or amateurs but when it comes to crypto sophisticated quants and Joe Bogsly are operating on a level playing field when it comes to access.

Additionally, countries that are not the United States have chronic bank instability problems that make the current crypto collapse look like a joke. Large percentages of bitcoin transactions are conducted in Vietnam.

When a new cool thing is happening, the next step to maturity and adoption is gift.

How many rent a bike startups have you seen in your city?

Same deal, not a terrible idea, pretty cool, people flock in but there will very likely only be one to three of those companies left standing.

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#110

Post by coldpie »

dayvid wrote: post #74

I'm kinda happy with the way things turned out. For a moment, my understanding of reality was upside down with how many mediocre and clearly pointless projects were generating so much money. With every crypto hype cycle, I actually go through the motions and create a smart contract project and become completely disillusioned with the hype. I thought ERC20 tokens were bullshit when I realized it's just updating keys i…

> I think web3/crypto will have mass adoption, but when it does, it will be much more boring and seamless with what we have today, with large companies managing blockchains and governments issuing their own coins.

But, that's no different from a really power-inefficient database. Whatever could be done with centralized crypto can equally be done with a Postgres server for 1/100,000 the cost. Why do you think this will have mass adoption?

Post reply on HN