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Comment by sub7 | Hacker News Reader

From a Coinbase exec: "Tether is a ticking time bomb. Whenever it goes off, it'll be a 70-80% market correction for 2-3 years"

Crypto continues to help nobody and achieve nothing in the real world. This administration has been criminally slow in shutting it down, lobby is strong.

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No there won’t be a big long term correction from Tether because there are dozens of other stable coins now for people to temporarily sell into. There’s also the ability to short crypto and buy puts on crypto. All of that provides ways for speculators, investors, middle class savers, and early technology adopters to stay in the game.

You’re like a doomsday predictor that will never see a doomsday happen.

No real value? The AAVE crypto platform alone already holds more value ($23B) than the entire market cap of Ecuador’s stock market ($11B). The AAVE platform is literally more valuable than a country.

AAVE is just one of many applications built on the Ethereum network. It speaks nothing of Uniswap, Maker, Yearn, Balancer, USDC, Compound, and many others.

Bitcoin alone secures over 1 Trillion dollars.

The Quito stock exchange consists of over 300 companies in farming, forestry, power generation, medical care etc. They have physical and human capital and earn profits from their paying customers, whether or not people want to buy stocks which offer them a share of this profit

The AAVE platform consists of individuals lending recently printed tokens to each other to buy other recently printed tokens in what is essentially a zero sum game with no connection to the real world unless they can convince outsiders to pay even more money for some of the tokens.

The fact the latter is notionally valued at higher than the former pretty much underlines the OP's point about the lack of "real value" underpinning the whole thing...

The difference is momentum and trust. Crypto is underlined by trust. Permissionless trust and cross-border trust. Either people don’t trust the Quito stock exchange to return all of the money back to shareholders or they don’t see their money going up in value there. So people don’t give them their money.

You could make the same argument about any number of over valued VC funded startups.

Market psychology is hard to predict. Going from one coin to another in a state of crisis is like people dumping their X stocks to buy Y stocks, because X is crashing. Or selling their housing real-estate portfolio to buy some other class of real-estate.

Casual "investors" sell their portfolios for hard cash when markets start crashing, which in turn induces others to sell. And if you're sufficiently leveraged, you're forced to sell - no mater how much belief you have in your investments.

> Crypto continues to help nobody and achieve nothing in the real world

Crypto posts on HN seem to be a hotbed for these sorts of hyperbolic, wholly unsubstantiated and objectively false comments. I wish i understood what the motivation was for these sorts of replies.

Please show me a real world use case that's better than the status quo and is not speculation or gambling. It's been over 12 years and I'm still looking.

Cryptoclowns can't use the it's too early excuse anymore.

But they choose to listen to a handful of man children running around promising world peace via a distributed database.

There are several options to 'stake' (deposit) coins/tokens and earn interest. You can earn more interest in crypto than you can at a bank. Assuming you trust the underlying tech long enough for your investment horizon.

Easy: bypassing financial censorship. Hint: try buying a 4chan pass without cryptocurrency.

Is that a joke? Your one example of real world value of crypto is that you can buy something on 4chan?

I could give you more examples if I needed to, but considering the argument always made here is that cryptocurrencies have precisely zero use cases, one example should suffice. If you want a better response, don't leave yourself open with sweeping generalizations.

Money transfers across borders. I have friends who live internationally and crypto has become our defacto way to transfer money.

But frankly, your presentation of the question leaves me doubtful you are looking for a meaningful answer here. The reality, as others have pointed out, is that there are lots of platforms in the space offering plenty of compelling services. You personally may not desire those services, but that doesn't change their viability.

If I was presenting the question more completely, I would have included financial fraud alongside speculation/gambling, which is exactly what you're doing by sending $ across borders without AML/Forex regulatory checks on the txn.

Some fun things off the top of my head.

KlimaDAO => https://twitter.com/Churchee_/status/1455321571078418433?s=2...

Proof of humanity providing Sybil resistance and ubi => proof of humanity.id

Holly+ trialling collective ownership and finding ways to pay musicians. (Spotify ceo worth $5billion yet the musicians get fractions of pennies). https://mobile.twitter.com/hollyplus_

Radicle, building bridges between git and contracts => https://mobile.twitter.com/abbey_titcomb

Citydao collective ownership of land https://twitter.com/CityDao/status/1455203913985138700?s=20

Supporting scihub! https://twitter.com/TBSocialist/status/1454853772807745539?s...

A documentary about Stuart brand and the whole earth catalog funded &distributed via nfts => https://twitter.com/StewartBrandDoc/status/14374476280281047...

“Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive, that tension doesn’t go away” - s.b. HN often uses the first half of that quote and forgets the rest.

> Crypto continues to help nobody and achieve nothing in the real world

It's kind of surprising how little progress has been made.

It is absolutely possible to use privacy-respecting low-fee tokens to purchase ebooks, purchase "no advertisement" article reads, or subscribe to periodicals.

Even something like Taler is better than Visa and Mastercard. I would love to know why lwn.net, ars, or the register don't try. I would absolutely pay $0.25-$2.00 per read for the ~50 articles I read per month on these websites.

Micropayments for tech readers seems like a good place to start. Tech readers use ad blockers, but are also willing to try new tools with janky UX.

I believe the case for micropayments was shot down back in 2002 when Scott McCloud first proposed it as an option for webcomic authors in his comic post "I Can't Stop Thinking" (the original no longer exists at his site, but various rebuttals [1] are still around)

Basically, people hate microtransactions. They hate the very idea of paying per article. They don't want to do it.

Ars, among many other sites, offers yearly subscriptions with various benefits (such as no ads) and that business model has worked well for them for many years.

[1] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2001/06/22/magic-its-what...

I run a globally, distributed company funded solely operated based on smart contracts and cryptocurrency/equity. We got 50 investors from around the world. Most of hackernews is exclusively focused on the United States, which is a very limited point of view. Try travel and see other parts of the world and you might understand it better.

And what does your company do, if I may ask?

Crypto as a fundraising mechanism is an existential risk to YC and its peers.

Explains the constant bullshit you see on this forum whenever crypto is mentioned.

"70-80% market correction for 2-3 years" is a contradiction. A correction brings asset prices back in line with their true values. That a coinbase exec thinks the cryptocurrency is 3-5x overvalued is wild, but if that is true I don't see any particular reason to expect the prices to go back within a few years.

Spoken like somebody who knows nothing about crypto

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