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

Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 774 posts

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#441

Post by pclmulqdq »

r3trohack3r wrote: post #403
pclmulqdq wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, the energy use for crypto as a whole is on par with the energy use of the fiat currency system, if not higher. I don't know how gold mining ranks, but it may be well below crypto mining in energy use or well above. Mining energy use depends a lot on asset price, and gold prices are comparatively low (compared to other asset classes). Silicon and other electronic parts also get dumped into this market, when the…

A good reference to compare bitcoin to gold mining (and other human endeavors like brewing tea): https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index Gold mining and bitcoin are currently roughly on-par. But gold's energy usage isn't just mining. It's the entire supply chain from Cash 4 Gold stores, long term storage, smelting/recycling, etc. I don't have a good reference for the total cost of gold.

Oh, that is only for bitcoin mining. Is there a source for the entire crypto ecosystem since you want to compare bitcoin mining to the entire gold supply chain? I would suspect that if you include shipment and storage, you are still under bitcoin mining for the entire gold supply chain.

However, the point still stands. Datacenters in the US use total energy less than 2 bitcoins. How many of those datacenters are moving fiat around? Way less than half?

Things like brewing tea and heating houses take a ton of energy. Moving money around doesn't!

Crypto is a huge waste, and that site does not suggest otherwise.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#442

Post by JaimeThompson »

gonzo41 wrote: post #92
lumost wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Across every investment class there has been a trend of buyers needing to become more financially irresponsible in order to participate in the market. Need to buy a house? bid 20% more than asking, if you don't - someone else will.. in cash. Need to build a ride-hailing app? prepare to pay people to ride indefinitely. Need to own a growth stock? prepare to pay upwards of 100x multiple on revenue. All around, there ha…

This is also a central banking fail in so far that there's that much liquidity in the market that can't find a productive outlet. There's a lot of money, but also not enough concentrated in one spot to do really useful ventures like large infrastructure projects. So instead the money is distorting everything. Imagine if lending was less cheap for home owners but it was still cheap for governments or really large comp…

>really large companies to be able to build train lines or advanced manufacturing

They would use the money to buy back their own stock.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#443

Post by shrimpx »

maigret wrote: post #380
shrimpx wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Don’t time the market” is stupid advice. The problem with that advice is that virtually every action you may or may not take is a form of timing the market. People going all in “now as opposed to later” are timing the market. Dollar cost averaging is timing the market. Staying in the market instead of selling is timing the market. People encouraging you to stay in the market because if you sell, that’s “timing the m…

> Dollar cost averaging is timing the market. No this is the exact opposite. It’s like passive vs active https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/markettiming.asp

That definition is incomplete. It makes it sound like you have to be constantly moving funds around to time the market, vs "buy and hold".

But you can certainly time the market using "buy and hold", by waiting for the right moment to buy. And even if you buy "asap", you're still employing a market-timing strategy, that "buying asap is better than buying later".

Dollar-cost averaging is a form of timing the market, because you're effectively reasoning that fixed-interval purchase will fare better than lump sump or other strategies. You're still predicting market behavior.

Good resource:

https://youtu.be/w_aOERmUWdA

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#444

Post by thow-58d4e8b »

Closi wrote: post #255
legitster wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure where you are getting those numbers from. Ford had $37b in revenue Q4. Tesla had $16b. Tesla is an impressive company that's managed to finally be profitable. But currently their market cap is higher than all other auto manufacturers combined. > Everyone else is losing money on their EVs and can't make them in volume production, can't find the batteries for them, you do the math. That's the thing, this s…

> I'm not sure where you are getting those numbers from. Ford had $37b in revenue Q4. Tesla had $16b. Tesla makes a 27.4% gross margin on that revenue though, while Ford has a gross margin of 4.8%. > Tesla is an impressive company that's managed to finally be profitable. Although technically true, this is a little misleading as it implies that Tesla is barely profitable - in reality they have moved from 'finally beco…

Tesla pulls all sorts of accounting tricks to make gross margin appear higher than it actually is. Warranty repairs are apparently done by pixies for free, so is R&D, factory amortization, or service centers

A like-to-like comparison would have Tesla's gross margin at ~18%, which is decent, bu not all that unusual for a premium car brand. Ford and GM tend to have much lower gross margins than VW or Toyota. The latter two are usually in the mid-to-high-teens, while competing in a cutthroat mass-market

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#445

Post by [deleted] »

eecc wrote: post #353
gonzo41 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also a central banking fail in so far that there's that much liquidity in the market that can't find a productive outlet. There's a lot of money, but also not enough concentrated in one spot to do really useful ventures like large infrastructure projects. So instead the money is distorting everything. Imagine if lending was less cheap for home owners but it was still cheap for governments or really large comp…

Wasn’t that the Soviet double ruble system? Whenever the Politburo wanted to find a mega project the money was wished into existence and things happened (just as it’s done today) yet it was illiquid and only usable in a sealed silo, separate from the normal exchange ruble. Wonder how a similar mechanism would work today

[deleted]

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#446

Post by winter_blue »

lumost wrote: post #7
avgDev wrote: post #2

I work for non-tech generating 100million+ in revenue. Cushy job, fully remote, good pay and full autonomy with flexible hours working as an IC. I recently talked to a startup, similar pay, culture would be a better fit since it was mostly techies and I'm a nerd by nature.....but things just got awkward as soon as I asked about their revenue....they were bleeding money and I was told they were being acquired by a big…

Across every investment class there has been a trend of buyers needing to become more financially irresponsible in order to participate in the market. Need to buy a house? bid 20% more than asking, if you don't - someone else will.. in cash. Need to build a ride-hailing app? prepare to pay people to ride indefinitely. Need to own a growth stock? prepare to pay upwards of 100x multiple on revenue. All around, there ha…

> where employees demanded equivalent pay increases to housing cost increases

How can employees realistically speaking even do this?

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#447

Post by jp42 »

legitster wrote: post #75

This has been a long time coming. Back in the day, there was an inherent understanding that a stock price is supposed to reflect "the fundamentals" - present value of the company + future earnings. And of course there was some amount of speculation around future earnings, but for the most part companies at least tried to be profitable. But if you look at the share price of like, Tesla - it's completely insane. There…

just want to add point that Tesla is not just the car company, they are into energy (battery, panels etc), AI, robotaxi etc areas as well, that could be one of the factor in higher valuation.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#448

Post by kenchan »

gitfan86 wrote: post #359
randcraw wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla's net income in 2021 was $5.5B, GM $8.8B, Ford $11.5B, Toyota $28B. Tesla's PE ratio is 99.6, GM 5.6, Ford 10.4, Toyota 8.25. Tesla's market cap is $1,061B, GM $85B, Ford's $83B, Toyota $254B. The state of Tesla's stock is simply unreal, not based on fundamentals but on inertia and hype.

Take this logic and compare AAPL and RIMM in 2009. This is why people are buying TSLA. If you think that GM is going to successfully pivot to EVs and that Tesla will not continue to grow 50% a year, that is a fine opinion to have, but if you look at CNBC clips from 2009 you will see very similar comparisons being made around AAPL and RIMM, to what you are saying today.

"Experts" have been telling us to sell $TSLA for over a decade..

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#449

Post by NateEag »

acuozzo wrote: post #392
me_me_mu_mu wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish people would just build solutions to actual problems they have that other people also confirm to have. Not everyone is a visionary like Steve Jobs or whatever, and that’s okay. Just build something that solves your problem and helps others who also deal with it.

The issue is that many people have my problem (click below), but no scruples. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31217221 The desire is there, but the idea(s) aren't and it's not for lack of trying. I've been reading that "ideas are cheap" for over a decade now, but I can honestly say that I haven't once come up with an idea that would make any money.

> I've been reading that "ideas are cheap" for over a decade now, but I can honestly say that I haven't once come up with an idea that would make any money.

Ideas are cheap.

Good ideas are darned hard to find and even harder to recognize.

Re: Tech bubbles are bursting all over the place

#450

Post by wbsss4412 »

Closi wrote: post #431
s1artibartfast wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They still need to 10x their profit to make their current PE of 130 to make sense.

I'm not saying they are worth their valuation, I'm just saying you can't exactly claim/imply that they aren't very profitable compared to others in the market they are operating in. Also remember that they almost tripled profit in the last year, so that PE ratio will be 1/3 if they manage to do that again. Again, I'm not claiming that it is possible, or that that would be a sensible P/E ratio, or that they aren't ove…

I would be shocked if they were able to maintain those margins.

They’ve faced relatively little competition in the EV space until this point and benefited from a shortage juicing prices. As demand eases and more entrants come into the EV space, they will have to lose margin, market share, or both.

Post reply on HN