Comment by bogota | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bogota | Hacker News Reader

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I think you will find in many places of life people are just trying to make a quick buck but in crypto this truth seems to cause a visceral reaction for people.

One of the problems crypto has is that it would be really hard to make a currency that was inflationary and still have any adoption. Bitcoin and others have tried various economic incentives to bring early adopters in and reward them. Is this the best way? Im not sure other coins like NANO have tried to distribute coins early by captcha and this was actually very helpful to people in poorer countries. Ultimately though most of them sold it as soon as they got it and the distribution looks to be about the same as bitcoin and others. Other solutions exist I’m sure but bitcoins decreasing inflation seems to be the best so far if you are making a crypto you want to succeed.

The same logic though could be applied to startups or any business. The first people in do a large amount of the work in helping it grow and are rewarded for that. Maybe too much but that’s hard to quantify.

Also reddit has never been the place to talk about tech. Most of the people buying hardly understand it. If you want to have better conversation they normally have developer channels. And again you could say the same thing about people talking about stocks on reddit.

Edit: a reminder not to downvote just because you disagree. This always happens in crypto threads and really just enforces that you always have the same discourse on them. Sad to see on HN i expect it on sites like reddid.

> The same logic though could be applied to startups or any business. The first people in do a large amount of the work in helping it grow and are rewarded for that. Maybe too much but that’s hard to quantify.

With a business where you hold shares, the business generates cash flow. That cash flow is invested in the business, in share re-purchases and in dividends. This cashflow increases the intrinsic value of each share of the business. The expectation is that holders of equity will be rewarded through the future performance of the business.

Those early folks are rewarded by people who derive value from the system - the customers of the business, whoever they are. They're rewarded for building a business not shilling their equity. The equity value is a consequence of the business being built.

On the other hand the sole source of gains from crypto come from future buyers. Worse, miners, especially on PoW chains, have to be paid and so constantly extract huge quantities of welfare from the system. With Bitcoin, it's something like 20-30 million dollars per day. That gets turned almost directly into CO2 and e-waste. 67MT of CO2 and 6.5kT on e-waste per year.

Early holders are simply rewarded for shilling, hoping someone else will grab their coins for a higher price. It's just an MLM scheme which yields zero intrinsic value.

Ergo, bitcoin is strongly negative sum while equities are positive sum vehicles.

The thing is, most people don't understand the economics or the fundamentals. Those who do get it (especially bankers, ex-wallstreet folks) intentionally downplay it rather than educating folks because they know their paycheck depends on people not understanding. The community pretends or fails to understand and looks the other way. They're all convinced they're "getting in early, on the ground floor of the future of money" - classic MLM stuff.

They're really only superficially similar, in the sense they're traded on brokerage-like services.

Not necessarily.

I work for a bank. Applying your analysis, one could argue that banks offer zero intrinsic value. After all, all they allow you to do is to move money around back and forth between different people.

But, as it turns out, moving money back and forth between different people is a very valuable service. Let me be clear: there are many activities practiced by banks that add very little value to the world. For example, one could argue that high frequency trading (beyond the point needed to provide market liquidity) adds very little value.

But banks allow people to exchange goods and services without having to barter. Banks allow people to store wealth and transport wealth and exchange both with other people without having to move around carts laden with gold and higher huge numbers of guards to keep it safe. Banks help to match together people who have capital ("investors", "savers") with people who could accomplish things if only they had capital ("borrowers","entrepreneurs") and facilitates them working together through interest payments.

Just as banks are far from useless (although some of the things they do add little value to humanity), so cryptocurrencies *MAY* be far from useless (although I agree the majority of people involved at this point are doing little more than engaging in a broad Ponzi scheme).

Banks offer loans which help finance businesses. You have a pretty direct connection to people that actually work in the real economy. They are the ones that are paying the loans back after all. Nobody would be crazy enough to take a loan denominated in Bitcoin. The Bitcoin community is basically dedicated to making it impossible to repay debts. Just think about it, every HODLer that joins the community makes it harder to repay your debt because they will never spend their Bitcoin on things your company produces.

It's funny how low inflation or even deflation (if you consider 2% to be price stability) caused a rush of money into mortgage bonds and subsequently destabilized fiat currencies and cryptocurrencies try to beat fiat currencies on their way to becoming useless as a medium of exchange and subsequently make it useless for financing via debt.

People take loans denominated in both WBTC and ETH everyday.

> Nobody would be crazy enough to take a loan denominated in Bitcoin.

You have too much faith in financial literacy of the participants in this market. [1] It doesn't really matter as much as you may think because they (1) are using these casino tokens to borrow more tokens to buy yet more tokens and (2) they see liquidations as a natural part of such lending.

[1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/are-we-dumb-financial-illiter...

> I work for a bank. Applying your analysis, one could argue that banks offer zero intrinsic value. After all, all they allow you to do is to move money around back and forth between different people.

What I meant was that it's the bank shares that capture the value you describe, not dollars. And because the bank does create the value you describe, the shareholders of that bank are rewarded by and increase in shareholder equity value.

There's no reason for the intrinsic value of dollars to go up because banks exist beyond their value increase attributable to a growth in GDP as a result.

The role you describe here maps to miners, which are in fact the third party that in aggregate facilitates bitcoin transactions. They are rewarded via block rewards for this service which similarly increases their shareholder equity. Bitcoin doesn't enable people to move bitcoins between wallets, miners do. Bitcoin basically unbundles the services banks provide, but it doesn't internalize them or capture the value they create.

At the very least it makes me want to check my watch is still on when someone tries to convince me it's an "anti-elite" invention, despite appearances, as this article seeks to do.

I’ll read the article again with this in mind but on first read it didn’t come across as trying to convince of anything other than using the gini coefficient isn’t insightful and he pointed out the flaws as he sees it.

It's like every attempt at a great replacement: the incentive is for a group of people to replace another and get the same benefits. Be it a communist revolution, the crypto alt finance or whatever, the hardest is always to build an all encompassing compromise to let people have moderate increase in comfort while not totally shifting the balance in the opposite direction.

I don't see how it is an anti elite invention. Deflation scales with your networth. The bigger your networth the bigger the income from deflation. The only difference is that the system is new and the elites haven't established themselves yet but it is starting to get old. Give it another 10 years and it will be just as bad as everything else.

Inflation scales with your networth too but it doesn't reward you. You'll have to find an income source to cover the loss. Most inflation protected income streams rely on employing humans.

If you were to pay out a fixed UBI to all people and finance it with inflation then basically people with above average deposits would see the value of their bank account decrease and approach average wealth and people with below average deposits would see the value of their bank account increase and approach average wealth as well.

Assuming inflation = low unemployment holds then incomes would rise vs wealth which would be a reasonable approximation of the theoretical UBI I proposed above.

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