I think HN plays a vital role and these opinions by very intelligent people are very helpful to me.
Your comment also made me wonder about a sentiment analysis of HN comments. Something like:
"What does HN Think about It?" App
I actually see lots of parallels to companies like StackMob, Parse, and Firebase, which launched incredibly insecure "serverless" database products that didn't even support any notion of security and even as they added security would almost encourage "anyone can read and even write all of your data" in the documentation as even mentioning security in a tutorial made the product look hard to use.
But the result, of course, was that there were even companies offering dating apps that even claimed in their marketing "we are actually secure, unlike others", which were listed as featured users on the StackMob website, where you could just dump their entire database--including both offline Facebook access tokens for all the supposedly-anonymous users as well as the entire database of what they were saying to each other in their supposedly-private messages--as it was all public.
The market is fundamentally incapable of optimizing for secure products in the same way it is incapable of optimizing for open products. Both of these properties of a product are too complex for users to analyze and the benefits often come in some difficult to measure effect that happens on some difficult to predict timescale. We need to work on this problem before the "Internet of things" becomes too popular and we hit truly dystopian levels of insecure centrally-controlled products.
I first heard about bitcoin right here, when it hit $3 per coin for the first time. That was a huge event.
I had my own reservations about investing in bitcoin, but reading the comments here prejudiced my view.
VC's say it's not the losses that get to you, it's the companies you miss out on that scar you.
Not investing in Bitcoin at $3-5 was the single worst strategic decision of my life.
It was something that could have saved me years of toil, it was an easy ticket into the Big Game. A massive influx of economic energy, a fantastic counterstrike to entropy was right there, and it was easy. So easy to buy, granted it would have been not easy to hold through the dark times, the dips, the panic.
Oh, but if one did!
None of the hard work of starting a company, finding product-market fit, hiring a team, raising funds, fighting off the inevitable bandits that will come for their extortion money in the form of frivolous patent lawsuits...
None of that. Just easy, huge, beautiful, juicy investment capital right at my fingertips.
Oh the land that could have been bought! The development deals that would have flowed and the opportunities that could have been pursued. Instant entrance to Ruling Class, a ticket to the best club on earth.
'The most important men in town would come to fawn on me! They would ask me to advise them, Like a Solomon the Wise. "If you please, Reb Tevye..." "Pardon me, Reb Tevye..." Posing problems that would cross a rabbi's eyes! And it won't make one bit of difference if i answer right or wrong. When you're rich, they think you really know!"'
- If I Were A Rich Man, Fiddler on the Roof
And it's that emotion thats fueling crypto asset valuations right now, along with actual riches created by people who didn't give in to the negativity, the doubt, the fear.
The thing has value. People like this thing. They like it all over the world. There are infinite uses for something like money + code + global computer networks.
And a thing doesn't have to be perfect or solve every problem to have value.
The standard that commenters here hold crypto to is not the same standard they hold startup companies to.
With companies if they do something some people like enough to use, they say wow what a success, look they are a real company with profits!
I mean even if the only use for crypto currency is regulatory/legal arbitrage, that's insanely valuable and would have merited an investment.