Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

The problem is the whole idea of cryptocurrency as a growth investment. The symptom is a bunch of copycat scams trying to freeload on the broader market. Without the bull market of the early '90's, Belfort would have had no one to sell to. Same deal here. The root cause is the insanity happening in bitcoin (and now Ethereal, I guess).

Mark my words: this will all come crashing down. I can't tell you when or why, but it's not sustainable. Probably it will happen in a way that makes the bitcoin nerds "right" in some sense of personal justice: the PRC will close the great firewall to bitcoin traffic, or backdoor the protocol in some unsupportable way. Or the SEC will shut it down somehow.

So sure: when the crash happens cryptocurrency "would have worked" if not for the meddling government. But it will fail nonetheless, and all those people (again, most of whom are not investors in scams like bitqyck) are going to lose all their "money".

View on HN

I take a different view of this. I remember the dot com bust. This is a lot like the old IPO mania. Out of those ashes the real companies with real products survived and the culling of the vaporware was healthy for the market.

There are a lot of people in the blockchain space that believe deeply in the technology and are working to see it to fruition. There's plenty that see a quick buck and will leave their "investors" holding the bag. This cycle is not new and I don't think it means everything regarding blockchain is a scam. It's just very reminiscent of mid-to-late 90's Internet mania

The worst of is that early adopters will cash out boat loads of money and use that fact to claim they were right all along, as if somehow the top of the pyramid making money proves it's not a pyramid.

  Mark my words: this will all come crashing down. I can't tell you when or why, but it's not sustainable.

The irony: lots of people feel the same way about the "real" debt-based modern economy. A ridiculous Ponzi scheme, clearly unsustainable in the long run.

As always, the time horizon matters when talking about investments and sustainability. Given the right time window, everything works, and everything fails.

Let me know when BTC is backed by tanks and fighter jets.

Only a matter of time until a group like shadowbrokers in some sense has ICO for managing rooted military/civilian infrastructure and occasionally "deploying"/commandeering (and supply chain, because jets and tanks wont work very long without such) around the world…

Isn't that the problem here?

"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

A pyramid scheme works such that if the growth stops, the whole pyramid collapses. It is dependent on newcomers.

With crypto, if anyone leaves or growth stops the price simply goes down. It doesn't collapse. It's more like stock.

I haven't heard this perspective before. Can you elaborate? What if the exchange rate were 1 BTC to 0.0000001 USD, wouldn't that effectively be a collapse?

You sound like the other thousands of posts I've read over the past 8 years. You're either correct or missing out on something massive.

That is what the investors of Bernie Madoff said... it takes time to vaporize 65 B$.

When you say "this" will all come crashing down and "this" is not sustainable, what exactly are you referring to?

Probably ICO's as a stable 'investment' vehicle in it's current form, as the market will eventually correct itself to match the real underlying value.

That doesn't mean there isn't a ton of real value being generated here or that it doesn't have the potential to be at the scale it is now. It just might be too much, far too soon.

Building companies and innovating is hard, flooding capital to it will boost the value generated but you can't simply manufacture it artificially by throwing money at it unless there is real talent and business models underneath.

Just look at that Circle startup that raised a record seed round based on a nice sounding team and a half-baked idea. Too much money can actually hurt some companies chances.

> Too much money can actually hurt some companies chances.

And you can't really emphasise this too much when the company is a couple of developers, a handful of lines of code and an idea expressed on a WordPress marketing site, and complete strangers are chucking coins that can be converted to tens of millions of dollars of hard currency in return for a token conferring no rights whatsoever, because blockchain > legal systems that actually enforce fiduciary duties. Investors are usually keen to ensure founders can't just convert investments greater than "fuck you money" level into into yachts. But some ICO founders have already got a lot more, and even if they start with nothing but good intentions, they must wonder why they'd bother spending it building a company that in all probability won't be worth more to them.

I'd buy the yacht too.

Not OP, but here's a thought that has bugged me for a while: The bitcoin block reward is currently 12.5 BTC which equals to about 42500$. Put differently, this means that the market currently values 1MB of (transaction) data on the bitcoin blockchain at over 40'000 USD and miners will (collectively) spend about as much for mining each block. This is clearly not economically reasonable, unless of course you believe bitcoin will for some odd reason become the only safe haven for storing wealth. In reality though the price of a crypto currency and its blockchain should depend on the utility it provides to society.

If the system works then it must be worth $40000 to the users of the block chain. There is a valid point to be made about energy efficiency but this possibly is right for the price of securing a global "bank".

Mining protects all transactions that have occured not only those in the current block. But yes, long term the block size will need to increase or transactions will need to pay much higher fees (probably as a result of transaction aggregation, e.g. Lightning channels).

Only about three have an intrinsic economic basis as a currency. And much of that is for illegal goods and ransoms.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com