Ask HN: What similarities might the crypto market have with the dot com bubble? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What similarities might the crypto market have with the dot com bubble?

I was too young to remember the dot com bubble when it happened.

All I know is that a friend's dad almost lost their house when Cisco's price collapsed.

But I have been following the crypto markets very closely over the past few years.

We saw a very strange move about a week ago where almost every single coin across the board increased substantially in it's USD valuation.

And I have no idea what to make of it. Surely every single coin across the board did not increase in value overnight.

Are there any similarities at all between the dot com bubble and the crypto bubble that you can see?

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I’ll give you similarities of the Bitcoin with a Ponzi scheme:

From wikipedia: "A Ponzi scheme (/ˈpɒn.zi/; also a Ponzi game)[1] is a fraudulent investment operation where the operator generates returns for older investors through revenue paid by new investors, rather than from legitimate business activities or profit of financial trading."

Bitcoin's only real value is that of the chance of being adopted as currency. For it to become a currency people have to start buying bitcoins, as it is the only realistic way to get hold of them. So the only way to make value for the current holders(older invenstors) is more people buying into it(revenue paid by new investors).

Similar indeed, although you could sell something for Bitcoin and thus get ahold of it. What you sell in comparison with its value against other currencies influences the value of the Bitcoin. I suspect the creators of Bitcoin expected Bitcoin value to come from people selling for Bitcoin. After all, it would be useless without that.

But where is the fraud?

Anyone can do their own research and come to conclusions about the future valuation of Bitcoin.

"Victims should research before they're taken advantage of" isn't a very moral argument.

I prefer to think of Bitcoin as a pyramid scheme, if we look at the definition of that:

"A pyramid scheme is a business model that recruits members via a promise of payments or services for enrolling others into the scheme, rather than supplying investments or sale of products or services."

That's all Bitcoin has become, you buy in, then spend your time convincing others to do the same to increase your investment. If a technical flaw is found in Bitcoin the whole thing will collapse like a house of cards (or just collapse from the weight of ever increasing transaction fees).

I'm arguing that Bitcoin is not a "Ponzi scheme", which has a specific meaning, not that it's not a bad investment.

It's funny, I frequently come across two views on bitcoin: the parallel you presented, and that it's not a currency but a store of wealth or other generic asset (comparable to gold). I must say I find the Ponzi framing more compelling, although I have some hope yet for Lightning/insert hot scaling idea here to improve the viability as a currency at least incrementally.

As a currency, I have little hope for bitcoin in its current form. This is an area where it remains possible in my mind for an upstart coin to displace it. Some people seem to care about this; I've looked at a few niche coins that seem to care about this concept and focus on transaction speed, but none have made great progress yet.

The gold analogy makes me so nervous. Gold has specific and permanent properties (eg, high density, an entry in the periodic table :P). Many detractors of gold claim those properties are not valuable, but it still has them and is specific and unique.

Bitcoin has mathematical properties that can be 100% cloned. The only thing that makes bitcoin unique from some random bitcoin clone is that it has the backing of a big mining networks.

I firmly believe that whatever value bitcoin has is tied to the size of the mining network, and by extension to the energy burned to transact bitcoins. This simply isn't close to being permanent in the same way gold is. It could potentially work like a social thing, and go the way of, eg, MySpace. I don't see how that can hold its value for a generation; the risk of current prices being a blip is still very high.

Bitcoin can be cloned the same way Facebook can be cloned. You could spend a billion dollars copying Facebook's features and spend a billion marketing it, and you'd still fail.

The mining network behind it, the developer ecosystem working on wallets/libraries/services, etc. is the hard part to copy. It's worth the most, therefore it attracts the most time and attention, which helps to maintain its value. It may not be the best from a technical standpoint, but the size of it ensures a healthy financial incentive to improve upon it, which we're seeing now with layered scaling efforts (lightning network).

You mean a pump-and-dump scheme. A Ponzi scheme is centralized to a money-manager, with the rest of the investors remaining unaware of the scheme’s nature; a pump-and-dump scheme, meanwhile, is a distributed action by anybody and everybody who can see what’s going on and wants to join in on bilking some greater fools.

Ponzi schemes are a charade behind a curtain; pump-and-dump schemes are out in the open, but illegible unless you’re looking with a cynical eye to find them.

Someone always makes a statement like this in every thread about bitcoin, without any evidence or reasoning to back it up. The benefits and unique aspects of cryptocurrencies have been enumerated ad infinitum, and to continue to claim that it's all a scam at this point is analogous to claiming the internet was just a scam in 1999, after it was obvious to many people that it was not. This labeling is only evidence of abject ignorance.

What do you mean without any reasoning? I gave a very precise argument on why and how I think they are similar. Why don’t you try to debunk my argument instead of a generic reply?

Cryptocurrency has many positive values that are not replicated by any other financial instrument when taken together as a whole:

* No middle man

* Nearly instant transfer at low cost

* Non-geographically bound

* Non-governmentally bound

* Potentially untraceable depending on how you use it

* Incorruptible

* Uncensorable

* No central point of failure

* Transparent and open (as in source and freedom)

* Programmable and automatable

* It is the first system to solve the byzantine generals problem.

My point though is that anyone who has been paying at least even slight attention would know that there is a purpose and value to the design of and usage of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and to claim otherwise is an embarrassing display of ignorance.

My argument was specific to Bitcoin, not against cryptocurrency as a technology.

Everything I said applies to Bitcoin, which is arguably the most legitimate instance of cryptocurrency.

Nearly instant transfer at low cost?

Depends on what you compare it to, such as Western Union or gold. But if you can really only find one nit out of the ten or so things I listed, I don't consider my argument debunked.

That is cool, but the reason the existing monetary system doesn't have those properties is because government purposely didn't include them. Things like "Uncensorable" and "Non-governmentally bound" and "Untraceable" might yet be tested and turn out to be illegal - falling afoul of, eg, laws against financing terrorists.

If bitcoin attracts regulations, the technical aspects will lose to the social aspects. Overwhelming majorities of people obey financial law - see also, the tax system; people aren't in that voluntarily. These are not proven positive values. Yet.

That's a particular government's problem, not a problem with bitcoin. Considering that Bitcoin is non-local, there will always be a jurisdiction somewhere that allows transactions that are restricted somewhere else. That was the whole point behind Satoshi's design - to work around corrupt and overly restrictive governmental financial systems. If you find a problem with that, then fine, but it's not what we are discussing here, which is the claim that Bitcoin is a ponzi scheme.

Wasn't the whole "no middle man" thing mostly about avoiding the 3% Credit Card Processing fees found elsewhere? Bitcoin is now more expensive to verify than most credit card processors[0].

"Nearly instant transfer at low cost" it is no longer instant or low cost. Confirmation times[1] have now skyrocketed and as I showed above as have costs. This is why Valve's Steam no longer accepts it.

"No central point of failure" like Mt. Gox[2]? And the recent currency split[3]?

[0] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...

[1] https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_Cash

It is nearly instant when compared to most money transfer services or gold, and low cost is relative, and depends on the coin and time of transfer. Bitcoin cash, which you link to, is both fast and cheap to transfer.

Mt. Gox is not Bitcoin. It was an exchange. It has nothing to do with whether Bitcoin has a central point of failure or not.

Nearly instant?:) Compared to what? I got money transfer between banks, by wire, from the US to the end of the world in less than a day. You can't get 3 confirmations on a BTC transaction in 24 hours!

> No central point of failure

It's looking like the dev team behind bitcoin is the central point of failure given recent political fights.

> No middle man

If the lightning network becomes a thing then bitcoin will have lots of middle men. Coinbase already is one in practice.

> Nearly instant transfer at low cost

People have already pointed out that this is totally false.

> Incorruptible

In what sense? How can any financial instrument by corrupted? There's definitely corruption at bitcoin-related institutions.

> It is the first system to solve the byzantine generals problem.

No?

> Non-governmentally bound

only if you are willing to break the law. which is true for lots of financial instruments.

I would have agreed with you to a certain degree if this post was just about BTC. OP asked about crypto-market, and BTC can’t represent all of it even if it has the lion share. Your response paints everything as Ponzi scheme (or that’s how interpreted it) which is unfair to serious projects.

If I am not mistaken the original title was about Bitcoin.

>I’ll give you similarities of the Bitcoin with a Ponzi scheme:

A ponzi scheme implies the underlying "business" doesn't have value, or at least not worth the value which it claims to generate. Just to pick the low hanging fruit to keep things simple, Bitcoin proved it has value on the dark web. That alone doesn't show it has mainstream value, but it contradicts your definition of it being a ponzi scheme. Just to throw some mainstream value in the mix, what do you think of blockchain smart contracts and their position relative to mainstream financial institutions for escrow services?

The underlying "business" = technology of bitcoin DOES NOT HAVE VALUE. The blockchain is good in theory, not in practice. Smart contracts?? look behind the buzz and please tell me what business uses it? If I have to make a shipment of goods somewhere, what company does do you think will pay in advance ..cause you know.. we have a smart contract that releases the funds when the merchandise arrives at the destination..I don't know what you do for a living, but for sure you are not in business, as 'prepaid' contracts are not how the world works.. As escrow service, it does work, I'll give that to you, but when you consider how many ETH contracts were hacked just this year. .. I would rather pay the fee to an offline escrow than risk losing everything to North Korean hackers....

JPMorgan recently launched Quorom, which is a smart contract payment network built on Ethereum. Blockchain as a functioning technology is still brand new and in its infancy, no kidding it doesn’t have widespread use yet. It’s not just an upgrade to an existing system, like dynamic webpages, it’s an entirely new industry. It’s not going to be a rapid overnight adoption by mainstream businesses.

I don't think it's a ponzi scheme, but some projects built on it, such as BitConnect, most likely are. I think Bitcoin is the 1st generation of cryptocurrency which should've either died a long time ago and replaced with the 2nd generation like Ethereum or evolved to Bitcoin v2. Instead, perhaps due to lack of competition for a period of time, it became a massive speculative bubble and amassed enough money that it's now too big to fail. So it just keeps on growing, mostly on hype and irrational investments from the influx of new people, and it's doing it so fast that its effectiveness and usability have become largely irrelevant for most general use cases.

The clearest similarity, I'd say, is that so many people don't understand what they're buying, so they go by a vague story and a price trend and guessing the mass psychology of other investors. That can't end well.

I think in both cases there was tremendous real potential, but it's hard to pick out in the moment, even with a technical background -- there's more to winning than technology.

I know a few people who signed up for coinbase and bought Litecoin because it was the cheapest per arbitrary unit, without doing any reading on what differentiates it from Bitcoin or Ethereum. I've also seen similar attitudes towards more fringe coins.

I'm not old enough to remember the dotcom bubble but I wonder if things like pets.com benefitted from people conflating its potential to that of ebay or amazon.

IMHO, most of the recent purchases of Bitcoin are mostly because of FOMO. That's the only explanation I can gather for something that increases in value so rapidly without any underlying change in the fundamentals. Quite a similar phenomenon happened during the dot com bubble too. Because of FOMO, people blindly invested in stocks that proved to be worthless later.

So the only similarity I see is irrational investment fueled by FOMO.

This is the worst forum of all to ask a question like this. HN is full of people who think they are smarter than everyone else, and a vocal group here has been saying “bitcoin is a scam” since bitcoin was $1 and missed out on the rise. So now they are actively rooting for it and all cryptos to fail, and ignore the benefits of the blockchain. Additionally a lot of YC-type people benefit by the current VC system and funding via ICO’s or similar mechanisms is anethema to what they have constructed.

I know many wealthy cryptos and they don’t have time for the noise here. Bitcoin could fall to $1000 and they are still rich, they don’t care about bubble talk.

You're gonna get downvoted, but there is truth in your comment. I wouldn't have made money with Bitcoin if I had paid attention to all the negative comments on HN.

I know I know, just because I profited on Bitcoin doesn't rule it out as a Ponzi scheme or whatever HN calls Bitcoin nowadays. I and many others genuinely believe that Bitcoin provides great value through its underlying technology and also has the potential to become something greater.

That's speculative market value, though. You can't actually go to your local coffee shop with 10k in Bitcoin and buyout the stock. They may treat it like $2. I'm not one of the people crying "scam", but I think most people here recognize how risky it is. If someone wants to take that risk, that's their deal.

It might be risky but HN is generally full of nerds that love new technology. When it comes to crypto currency suddenly everyone here is fucking Warren Buffett.

We are literally living in a Neil Stephenson novel and HN as a group is collectively sticking their fingers in their ears. It’s amazing the visceral reaction crypto gets here, the people who don’t like it can’t simply ignore the posts, they write 5000 word screeds and vote with hive mind to stop alternate opinions.

More precisely, everyone here is highly skeptical, so this is nothing unusual. Everyone here should be quite well aware of all the trouble that has cycled around Bitcoin, such as DD4BC, etc. That's common with something new, but it's not unmerited either. It's an easy trap, and it's best to understand the risks before moving in.

That's not to say Bitcoin doesn't have some usefulness on the fringes of the economy. It's like untraceable gambling. We already have that everywhere and society continues to function.

It might be more constructive to answer the criticisms rather than attacking those raising them.

You seem to be placing a lot of your own emotional baggage onto other people's concerns. Most people talking about Bitcoin and similar just aren't that vested into it (either literally or figuratively). For example this:

> since bitcoin was $1 and missed out on the rise. So now they are actively rooting for it and all cryptos to fail, and ignore the benefits of the blockchain.

The fact you perceive anyone critical of Bitcoin and similar blockchain currencies as jealous is very much deflecting your own baggage.

What I see is a phenomenal technology that is excessively ignored and shat on for no obvious reason. For example, the Red programming language decided to focus on blockchain tech, and the most popular comment was “time to ignore Red because they are doing blockchain now”. It’s an opinion that is quite popular here.

I feel the need to write so strongly to counteract the vibe. I guarantee there will be 20 popular comments above mine (which will likely go negative) that all say variations of the same thing, so it’s good to get a different opinion out there.

What exactly is the phenomenal technology?

Most people on HN understand the Blockchain can be described as a p2p distributed database. It has great use cases, like asset registries, but im still waiting for the killer applications.

Personally, I've only used cryptocurrency for buying drugs on darknet matkets. We were the people actually using btc. Until the transaction fees got crazy and people moved toward better coins.

Can I purchase that Neal Stephenson novel with bitcoin?

>You can't actually go to your local coffee shop with 10k in Bitcoin and buyout the stock. They may treat it like $2.

My father taught me a great lesson along those lines growing up.

I used to collect baseball cards, and was thrilled when I realized that one of them was "worth $20" in some baseball card collecting book that I had.

I ran to my father and exclaimed with great joy that "I have a baseball card and it's worth $20!" (which was a lot of money for an 8 year old at the time...)

To which he said, "Not to me it's not. I wouldn't give you anything for it. Because I don't collect baseball cards."

That blew my 8 year old mind.

It said it was worth $20 in the book, but my dad wouldn't pay a penny for it.

(He probably should have! It's worth $100 today!)

But the lesson was sound and has stuck with me ever since.

I still collect the odd thing these days, but I don't pay too much attention to what some book says they're worth.

So you haven't explicitly stated this, but I'm reading into your comment that the early bitcoin investors made a lot of money ergo it is a good investment. That argument isn't sensible, and if you are making it I caution you to stop.

We can all point to examples where:

1) something was valued low,

2) then it was valued high, made the people who bought it low rich

3) crashed and lost the people who bought it high a lot of money

Mine is Isaac Newton's bankruptcy because he has some name recognition.

And further we can all point to examples where people did something stupid, got lucky and benefited from it. Hacker News is a reasonable place to ask, because it is a good crowd to assess bitcoin's technical aspects.

"it's not a bubble because the people at the top are doing very well and some people missed out"

Fantastic argument!

My point is that HN will say it’s a ponzi / bubble / scam no matter what the value. First it was “it will go to zero”. Now the argument is “all the smart people already made money so don’t bother” but HN was saying that at $1k, $5k, $10k, etc.

Maybe crypto is simply a better way to transact for many use cases. If we all agree it has value, then it does, and it’s really as simple as that.

This is an exceptionally facile analysis.

YC-type people don't benefit from the VC system; YC is a subversion of the VC system, an effort to organize promise founders against the interests of VCs. Ceteris paribus, every YC founder would rather raise 5MM in an ICO than to raise them in capped notes or (even worse) directly from a VC.

If ICOs actually mainstream, YC itself gets more valuable, not less, as they control essentially the only noteworthy credentialing system for startups. Not to mention, they'll be the locus of all the selling-picks-to-prospectors activity that will follow.

Meanwhile: "congratulations" if you made money by buying and "hodling" back when 1 BTC was $1. People made money on Pets.com, too. So did the banksters who made money reselling bogus AAA MBS's. Nobody doubts that you can win large sums of money gambling on the actions of the greater fool.

But: it looks to me like most of the concerns raised by Bitcoin critics have played out as expected. Decentralized? No. Bitcoin is controlled by a small, self-interested group of big-time players. Currency? No. Bitcoin is a speculative asset. Seamless way to transfer funds? What are transaction fees for Bitcoin now? Here's approximately the trajectory of Bitcoin: in 2012, you could buy a pizza with it in 1-2 cities. In 2017, you can't.

And, as predicted, tens of other organizations have come up with their own competing cryptocurrencies. Many of them are objectively more sound than Bitcoin. But we're all meant to pretend that somehow, 1 BTC is worth $15,000 because it really is worth that, and not because Bitcoin is a distributed pump-and-dump scam.

I fundamentaly disagree that YC is a subversion of the current system. They are basically the same thing but everyone drank their own koolaid and thinks it’s something new. YC is a system that is really good for putting stamps of approval on selected groups, and Airbnb is great.

Plenty of crypto currencies exist other than bitcoin. This is only the beginning, and scaling is one of many issues that will be figured out. Even if you don’t buy coins, paying attention to the tech coming out can be beneficial and interesting.

>And, as predicted, tens of other organizations have come up with their own competing cryptocurrencies. Many of them are objectively more sound than Bitcoin. But we're all meant to pretend that somehow, 1 BTC is worth $15,000 because it really is worth that, and not because Bitcoin is a distributed pump-and-dump scam.

I am by no means an economics or marketing expert, but I think it's worth considering Bitcoin's "brand" impact and its history. Humans are irrational and do a lot of questionable things even with ample evidence of better alternatives to our choices.

Tuur Demeester makes a comparison in this podcast (https://www.theinvestorspodcast.com/episodes/bitcoin-masterm...) to Bitcoin/altcoins vs Coca-Cola and its competitors, starting around 1:05:20. He says that Coke had countless competitors trying to overthrow it as the #1 cola brand, but it stuck around as a result of familiarity and being of quality (my takeaway, not his exact words). He goes on to say that if Bitcoin survives with the same core developers trying to make it better and better, the brand attacks become less and less of a threat.

I was here when everybody on HN was really shitting on Bitcoin back in 2011 and 2012. Albeit under another username.

I know full well what HN thinks of crypto currencies and technology in general, which is exactly why I asked the question here.

I think that's about what I would expect from HN considering that Bitcoin was largely known for its speculative value rather than its technology. In a way, the success of Bitcoin is its biggest enemy in communities like this one.

> Additionally a lot of YC-type people benefit by the current VC system and funding via ICO’s or similar mechanisms is anethema to what they have constructed.

Aren’t REQ and QSP supported by YC.

The similarity is GREED.

People invest in a bubble, despite knowing it is a bubble, because they want to make money. And they are willing to take the risk to do so. Why not, when you can invest a small amount of your net worth and make 2-10x returns in a matter of months? The only problem is nobody knows when the bubble will burst.

Bitcoin like Boo.com, Pets.com, WebVan, etc. were first movers, had good branding and promised disruptive models. These all have value, but were overvalued because the main motivation was to make money. Just like how the main reason to buy Bitcoin now is to make money.

I have lived through the dotcom and there are massive parallels. Throughout the 90s everybody was talking about why they would need the Internet when they have tv and newspapers. Then from '98 to 2000 hyper and hysteria kicked in. Ridiculous funding happened and businesses really started doing irrational things because they thought they'd have their lunch eaten. Everybody new the dotcom bubble was going to pop and it did over the course of 6-12 months.

Calling bitcoin a scam or ponzi scheme is really not fair, it dismisses the underlying utility of blockchain. Look at the tech of Ripple, their performance characteristics are aiming at the VISA and AMEX of this world. Bitcoin is turning into the reserve currency of crypto-coins, there are lots of alternatives which better serve day to day transactions.

The real point I am trying to make is that right now it feels like we're in HTML 2.0 days and bitcoin is Netscape Navigator. New finance companies are going to spring up over the next few years, in about 5 years they'll start eating into traditional banks. Those banks and institutions will start panic buying. Nobody will know who the next Google/Facebook of the finance industry will be and thats the risk right now.

Regarding the price change, you have to be careful. It's not a fiat coin backed by a government, so it's value is purely based on what the guy next to you will pay for one coin. On that basis bitcoin is very risky because it's value to you is $16,000 but your car mechanic thinks it's worth $0.

Full disclosure I work for a firm that's helping launch the next generation of crypto/fiat brokers that will be popping up through out the world the next couple months. My dad is a chip engineer and has personally worked with kurzweil on some of his early ventures. One of his xmas bonus was a kurzweil keyboard that I was forced to learn how to play when I was a child. I remember hearing first hand from my dad and his friends about what was happening. Later on in my undergrad biz school I still had some text books that was written around the boom. Everything was about the new "information highway" and how the "long-tail" will finally be serviced. People were giddy and it being the end of 2017, it is safe to say they were all right to be giddy. I buy a majority of my stuff through apps, able to maintain friendships across the globe and taught myself everything my dad tried to teach me about linux, when I was a child, now online while at work.

Being able to freely create a currency that has the necessary legitimacy to actually work while still being able to cleaning integrate with a larger organization is a powerful weapon against getting screwed by globalism and these massive multi-national corporations. Where I call home is a former mill town that got fucked. Having a solid local currency that all the local businesses will recognize will make home much stronger. For this to reach it's potential though, there needs to be massive investment and social change - just like tinder needed fb, websites, emails and fast internet connections to reach a point of maturity, these new digital currencies need a full ecosystem.

I don't buy or sell any of these currencies even though it would be ridiculously easy for me to do stuff that would be terribly illegal with stocks. It's because I think there will be a spectacular crash in the short run but in the long run the next FANGS will related to the blockchain and crypto technologies.

So hate at your expense.

In the dot-com bubble, people invested in companies that had websites, but for some reason, they thought they were investing in domain names ending in ".com".

In the crypto bubble, people are investing in Bitcoin, Ether, etc., but they think they're investing in cryptography.

</sarcasm>

I think stories like the one about Long Island Tea adding blockchain to the name and seeing their stocks soaring. More examples here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/21/technology/bitcoin-blockc...

During the dot com bubble everyone was doing something similar.

I know for now that crypto currencies are really only worth something as long as they are used as “currencies”. I don’t believe bitcoin is currently being used as currency to buy/sell stuff, rather it’s used increasingly as an investment, which I don’t believe any currency should be especially when it’s this unstable.

I think there's some belief that the current issues Bitcoin has in transaction rate/cost can be addressed in a software update.

The problem with Bitcoin is that the transaction rate/cost has been a problem for years now and the core dev team isn't budging.

These issues have already been fixed by other crypto currencies like Bitcoin Cash.

The core development team behind Bitcoin doesn't seem to be interested in fixing these problems for the time being.

* The people don't understand it. Check

* Everybody just wants a piece of it no matter what. Check

* Companies that have nothing to do with cryptocurrencies are trying to associate themselves with it. Check

both involve irrational exuberance?

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