Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

You know what's funny? I'd expected that this place would be the early adopters to cryptocurrencies back in 2010. Instead, all posts about them were flagged as scams.

There were many chances given. Alt-coin Faucets, Keybase giveaway (not a scam) literally giving 'free' cryptocurrencies (Not ICOs.)

They are not doing this anymore and now if you held them, well you're up >10,000%

> Your answer should’ve have been cryptocurrency.

True. Mostly everyone here was too focused on the 'tech' 'engineering', 'how to get into FAANG companies' and the 'cryptography' of cryptocurrencies to even care about 10x-ing their investments at the time.

Many cryptocurrencies (and some are still scams) were perceived as ponzi scam-coins, until they rocket off for little to no reason and now the 'mainstream' catches up. The actual winners are the ones who dared to risk >$5k on a 'scamcoin', 5 years ago and now it netted them 20,000x ROI.

> It is now 2021, what’s the next big thing?

No one knows, but the answer always starts somewhere from a tiny select few in the know or a fringe site. It could be from anywhere. Including this site.

That's a bad line of reasoning. I could try to 10X my investment at a poker table. That doesn't mean I should try, even though it would probably be less risky than putting money into cryptocurrencies.

You can pick any risky investment that's currently doing well and say after the fact "look how wrong you were to doubt this". It doesn't mean that investing in that thing at that time was ever the right thing to do. People have been losing money for centuries following similar lines of thinking.

Cryptocurrencies, blockchains, distributed ledger technologies etc have been bashed pretty comprehensively by economics and finance experts as well as tech ones, because they are a bad solution to almost every problem they have been thrown at.

I guess I'm still a sceptic. It's like me saying I can't believe people didn't get onboard with $GME stock or something. The rise of Bitcoin and a lot of cryptos (DOGE for example) has been completely irrational and fuelled mostly by greed.

Arguably Bitcoin is technologically inferior to other cryptos and there was really no reason to think Bitcoin would remain the dominant crypto in 2010-2017. Betting on Bitcoin a decade ago was like betting on Yahoo or Myspace stock because you thought search engines or social networks would change the world -- even if you were right, you would be wrong. It's rare that the first of anything remains on top for long because better iterations always shortly follow. I strongly thought ETH was going to surpass Bitcoin's dominance early days of ETHs rise, but I was wrong. IMO anyone who was investing in a technologically inferior crypto currency that had clear scaling issues and almost non-existent usage as a currency got lucky.

As for whether I've changed my mind now, I still have no idea what the point of Bitcoin is. It will never be a useful currency so that leaves it's main use case as a store of value and there are plenty of assets which hold their value with less risk, so why would I ever use it?

That said, I'm still more bullish on ETH and I'm glad it's been getting more attention recently. But even then I'm not convinced that the blockchain will be used outside of very niche applications and I'm not sure if it's as revolutionary as some people suggest.

I keep hearing this myspace argument. You are forgetting people want to store value on the most protected chain out there. It has one job, to survive. ETH is looking to solve all these problems while BTC has more focus.

I don’t think so. Altcoiners in 2013 and 2017 mostly got wrecked. Bitcoin was not a foregone conclusion. And Bitcoin wasn’t the first either. Ask E-gold buyers how well they did.

Getting lucky gambeling doesn't make it a wise investment.

I think the key thing about the next big thing is it's something you discount or over look

If I had a pound or dollar for every idea or business I've thought wouldn't work then I'd be a rich man

There are many crypto advocates here, but also many afraid of the disruption it will cause, which is common when the old gives spaces to the new.

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