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Comment by wott | Hacker News Reader

I am unconvinced that hard earned money is 'invested' in those companies. The target demographic is not hard working class.

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The target demographic is gullible, greedy software engineers who have a lot of disposable income but lack experience in conducting due diligence on speculative investments. Basically, Hacker News readers. Why do you think there are so many ICO related posts on this site? It's not accidental.

I'm glad to hear skepticism--I always considered these e-coins to be the perfect scam to attract Millenial technocrats and then fleece them.

I don't have any evidence but I suspect it's technical people who got into Bitcoin early. Have a few million but no partner / no kids so maybe think they are "rich" and "set for life" so don't mind a gamble. Maybe the adrenelin of making all that easy cash is what they want to repeat. This would make sense because to hold Bitcoin for that long and not sell is kind of irrational gambling, even though the results have been good.

You would be surprised. People know nothing about Bitcoin but have a friend, uncle or acquaintance who has dropped a few thousands in BTC and raves about the price going from 580 usd to 4000 usd in just a year. People lose their minds and they won't even have shitty tulips to show for it.

See, that's the thing with the old tulip story. At the heart of the bubble there were a number of people who just wanted a damn tulip.

and those people got tulips, at normal low prices.

futures traders didn't want a tulip, nobody accepted delivery of a tulip.

no tulips in the spot market were being traded anywhere near the futures month prices.

with that in mind, doesn't this make it one of the worst poster childs of irrational exuberance to cite?

You're relying on one person's summary of the tulip bubble 'facts'.

Other sources give great detail of the tulip purchasing craze. For example, read the tulip chapter in 'Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds', by Charles Mackay. It cites many sources that detail the crazy high prices people did actually pay for tulips.

Thanks, I've looked into it over the years but I'm always interested in different perspectives.

Between the contract categorization changes, actual shortages, and the bubonic plague, I think there are a lot of things that are unclear. Without the plague abruptly killing all the speculators would we have called it a bubble, or just an uptrend?

CNBC has been talking about Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ethereum Lite and a slew of recent ICOs in the last month or so. Whether those viewers count as "hard working class" is up for debate

We're still in the "attract as many rubes as possible phase" which is always followed by the "slam the trap shut phase"

and Fortune is starting a dedicated column to crypto related news called Ledger http://fortune.com/2017/08/22/ledger-blockchain-fintech/

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