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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

At the barbers today they were all talking about having bought bitcoin recently. When barbers start trading in bitcoin its probably the peak. In 1929 some people started getting out when the shoeshine boys started giving tips.

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the reason for that saying is because by the time the lowest class of service workers is buying then there is nobody else to buy from them

Stocks and commodities spread through society that way, from the most well connected VCs down to the lower class when the price rise makes them feel like they have a chance to get rich after it is shown in their nonfinancial choices of entertainment

Bitcoin hasnt gone through society in this route

Existing hedge funds, VCs, University endowments and pension funds are legally incapable of buying cryptocurrency

They are all forming new LPs with new operating agreements to do so

There is no institutional leverage or credit in the cryptocurrency ecosystem

There are no derivatives to manage risk yet

The lower class will be selling to the institutions soon

What is interesting here is that it almost seems to be acting like a reverse bubble.

Most of the institutional 'slow money' like endowments and pension funds will never touch cryptocurrencies, no matter how they are structured. They can't even take positions on FIAT currencies, or even bonds below AA rating. No way are they ever touching cryptos.

> No way are they ever touching cryptos.

Not what I’m hearing in legal circles

Everyone wants exposure, and if they require a new legal structure or a financial derivative they are doing what needs to be done.

The pensions will just go through the next hedge fund that buys for them.

My mom mentioned that she’d heard of bitcoin yesterday. I’m pretty sure that is also a sign.

My mother raised it last night. Meanwhile, my mother-in-law has been sending me "It's time to cash out of Bitcoin" articles.

I told myself I would sell my crypto stack when my Mom asked me what bitcoin is.

I sold it about a week ago.

In times of Weimar prosperity, more people should curl up with a copy of Ben Graham's '29-crash postmortem "Intelligent Investor", IMHO. I can't help but suspect that these barbershop customers will someday regret not having simply parked half of their savings in AAA-rated government bonds, the other in consumer defensive dividend champion stocks, and rebalanced once a year. More power to them if they strike it rich, though.

I believe this article completely contradicts this belief.

yeah.. my barometer is when the designers at my company started talking about it...

Surely designers at a tech company (I guess) are knowledgeable of macro tech trends, so they've known cryptocurrencies for a while, but weren't interested in discussing it publicly?

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