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Comment by Hydraulix989 | Hacker News Reader

What kinds of returns and from what initial investment?

If you got into crypto in the time leading up to 2013, 2017, and 2020, you could have 10x'd your bag easily.

I suspect having a technical understanding helped appreciate the value of Ethereum, Filecoin, Avalanche, etc. before everyone else, while simultaneously knowing to avoid Tron, Litecoin, Cardano, etc. which lack technical merit. (Although even properly timing the latter would have generated lucrative returns...)

And then having enough sophistication as an investor to liquidate your holdings at peak hysteria when the layperson was asking about crypto.

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"Initial investment"

It's not an 'investment', it's just playing 'trading cards' with invented numbers, based on nothing.

"having a technical understanding "

No, having a 'technical understanding' just enables the obfuscation of the Giant Scam even more.

"having enough sophistication as an investor "

If you think it's 'sophistication' then you're in the 'fish' category being fed to sharks. Markets crash when the leads/powerful decide to make their moves (which includes the central bank actions, regulatory apparatus).

The magic numbers may continue to trade for a long time but it's still a scam.

I saw someone here or on Reddit discussing how BTC is guaranteed to 3x at least each year for the next 1-2 decades.

I mean... Putting $100 into crypto today and being set for life really sounds nice but I highly doubt any market could support that kind of growth....

It could if the dollar is falling by 3x every year...

You wouldn't be set for life in that case, though, because everything else would cost 3x as much each year.

This. Currency speculation has been called currency speculation for decades, and yet in case for crypto (much riskier, less protected) it is somehow called investment.

It's not even currency speculation, because Crypto is not currency.

It's baseball card speculation, without the baseball card.

Can I replace "technical understanding" /"sophistication" with "luck" here?

I'd ask why you think the "good" coins are good and the bad ones are bad, but I feel like that would just lead to cherry-picked data...

Ethereum was the first cryptocurrency that does decentralized general purpose computation aka smart contracts.

Filecoin decentralizes storage.

Avalanche has the first Byzantine consensus mechanism (within a reasonable bound, read the paper) that does not rely on proof of work aka energy wasting.

If these neither excite you nor stand out from forks of other coins (Litecoin is Bitcoin with a different hashing function, Tron is just marketing, Cardano is centralized), then yes, you are right, you are at a casino.

But the best technology doesn’t always win.

Agreed. The crypto market will win eventually, the tech is better. Today though, there’re more bubbles in the crypto market than a roll of bubble wrap. I’m just hoping the government doesn’t bail out the losers.

aka Tether bailout

I remember when it was invented, debating with friends the virtues of turing complete ethereum vs non turing complete bitcoin script - its still not clear to me why you’d want to do general purpose computation on the world’s slowest most expensive computer.

edit while i still can: no wifi, less space than a nomad.

The main problem computation on the world's slowest most expensive computer solves is lack of trust in doing it on any other computer. The increased cost and decreased speed is worth it in some use cases for the increased insurance against the pre-determined computation not being run correctly or at all (making a payout based on certain data, usually outcomes of events, like for insurance or gambling).

> The main problem computation on the world's slowest most expensive computer solves is lack of trust in doing it on any other computer

This is an invented problem. "lack of trust" is an meaningless abstract; there is no specific concrete benefit to "solving" it.

Most of the cool business uses/potentials of Blockchain do not require decentralization and are definitely made more complex by it.

The advantage of the world-computer is that everybody agrees with your results.

There are some problem domains, like advertising, where giving every person their own reality increases net wealth. There are other problem domains, like money, where giving every person their own reality makes them utterly useless. Ethereum expands computation to problem domains where it's critical that everybody gets the same answer.

Monero has always been my go-to example of this. It truly does achieve something that other coins do not, but it doesn't see meteoric rise like things like Shib or whatever.

In a way the absence of a meteoric rise of Monero is good, its supposed to be fungible money. The lack of traceability and origin of the coins bring concern though.

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