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Comment by electic | Hacker News Reader

Some of the smartest people I know work on Wall St. and when the topic comes up of cryptocurrencies the conversation turns to outright borderline anger and instant dismissal. They simply don't believe it can have any useful value as a store of value or be used for exchanging goods or services.

I have seen this reaction twice before. First, I see it when we talk about politics. People on the other side just can't believe it when facts are presented that refute their belief.

The second, is when the internet came about. Talking to people in different industries about how it could be used to revolutionize video, news, and just about everything often resulted in a reaction of dismissal.

Wall St. is a deeply ingrained industry and Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc are already sucking a big chunk of transactions from NYSE and everyone on Wall St looses. So it is a natural reaction to dismiss it.

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Actually, big banks are interested in blockchain technology, because having a distributed ledger of stock ownership would help cut out exchanges and brokers, and facilitate international trade.

The broker divisions of big banks are probably afraid of it, or dismissive, but trade execution and asset management divisions are investing in the concept.

My (probably unpopular) bet: blockchain will revolutionize much of finance, but Bitcoin specifically will crash and eventually be ignored.

Separating bitcoin from blockchain is separating it from its incentive structure, which is the very thing that makes it a disruptive invention. It's almost like they're trying to unmake the invention.

Nothing wrong with using the blockchain without paying billions to the people who bought Bitcoin early.

None of that belief has anything to do with bitcoin and nakamoto consensus.

Indeed. Big banks using blockchain technology as a distributed ledger of stock ownership might have nothing to do with bitcoin.

Blockchain without the distributed consensus structure and independent incentivized miners is just an inefficient redundant database.

"My (probably unpopular) bet: blockchain will revolutionize much of finance, but Bitcoin specifically will crash and eventually be ignored."

I'm with you. Just because it's clear a new technology will change everything (the internet, blockchain), it's not clear which individual players will win the race (Myspace, Altavista, Friendster).

Could blockchain be used to replace/side step aging mainframes written in COBOL? I'm not expert in the legacy systems or in blockchain but my understanding is that the reason transactions in traditional systems take so long to complete is that the COBOL mainframes are still set up to do batch processing. I wonder if using a (regulated) blockchain to record and process transactions could work to replace or enhance the legacy systems to process transactions in more realtime.

> They simply don't believe it can have any useful value as a store of value or be used for exchanging goods or services.

I found it very useful for buying cyproterone acetate online as it's not available in my country.

Also there's stuff that's not even illegal, like kink, but for which credit card companies refuse to allow related transactions because of respectability politics or too much fraud.

I’m not so sure. With no evidence, I buy into the conspiracy theory that Wall St. is deep into crypto. It’s a new breed of fish, and these are people who live and breathe intricate, counterintuitive financial systems. I’d be shocked if they hadn’t identified some alpha in crypto and were exploiting it.

Alpha? so far is buy and hold is pretty good.

For most people yes, but I surmise that it’s easy to manipulate up and down and therefore predict as well for maximum gain.

Those at the forefront were already into cryptocurrencies back in 2013. Read Nuclear Phynance forums.

what I find kind of amusing about this is that the thing that creates the value of other wall st properties is the supply and the demand, not the usefulness or otherwise. in that the usefulness of the properties is just one of the elements that drives demand, but not a necessary one..

I mean, come on.. 400 million for a painting?!

in a sense, bitcoin is a much purer market. you would think wall st types, of anyone, would understand this better.

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