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Comment by csdvrx | Hacker News Reader

And Dropbox was just a ftp, and the iPhone was just a lame mp3 player. And e-commerce just a fad, etc.

We're blinded by what was, and wrongfully infer what will be.

Also, we mix in our biases, Douglas Adams said it best:

"I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."

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This argument might have made some sense in 2010 or 2011, when crypto was a new thing. But it's been over 12 years. Dropbox, iPhone, e-commerce were all successful products/business models in far fewer than 12 years after introduction.

It's fine to express skepticism when a new technology gets immediately dismissed by people who may lack foresight. It's harder to sustain that when over a decade goes by and the "new thing" is still struggling to deliver on its promises.

"But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." - Carl Sagan

You want us to believe that crypto-currency is like the first three examples, but it's been long enough now to be certain that it's far more like the latter.

Did you read the article per chance? There are very valid criticisms in it and none of your "arguments" here seem like they pertain to the claims the article makes.

Yes I did, and no they're not. It's basically a regurgitation of the traditional arguments against crypto, with some extra words around them, akin to "less space than a nomad. lame" to describe the ipod.

You may not believe me, never mind then, but sometimes I see good criticism with interesting new ideas and little to no appeal to emotions, but this has none of that.

What about Laserdisk?

You seem to be only choosing technologies that were exceptionally successful. An odd bias.

Most of them aren’t.

An odd bias? Ok, let reality be the ultimate judge, and ask yourself:

- What's the total valuation today of companies dealing with Laserdisk?

- What's the total valuation today of companies dealing with crypto?

You'll have your answer about who may have a bias there.

You're putting value in the companies dealing with crypto simply because people have put money into the operation. Anytime I see "this is going to be successful because of all this money that backers have put into it", I roll my eyes. Investors are human too. There are plenty of failed investments.

I live in the Houston area. Some heart surgeon decided to chase his childhood dream, bought a plot of land in Texas City (I-45 south of Houston) and got a couple other backers to build a mini amusement park. He bought the land for who-knows how much. He _immediately_ bought some whirly rides. ...and that was it.

It sat like that for more or less 2 years then a metal building went up alongside the rides that have been sitting idle. About a year later a metal fence went up around the property. The waist-high weeds got mowed about every 6 months and it's all sitting idle today. This guy and his marks have surely dumped no small amount of money on it. Dude is a heart surgeon so he's not a complete moron --- he's just not good at project management _at all_. So don't use investment value as a bulletproof metric - and so far almost all of it has been speculative investment. (I'm not aware of any successful cryptocurrency businesses that have turned a profit yet. [and I could be totally wrong here, so plz tell me])

I think the real money to be made in crypto is "selling the shovels". A gold miner could've struck it rich in the California gold rush, but more often than not his costs exceeded his return on investment. The shopkeepers back in town that sold the gear made all the money. I think that's where there's money to be made. Selling hardware and consulting services to miner operations, taking sizable fees for lobbying and marketing efforts, and selling posh real estate to crypto startups.

Yes, one guy. I'm talking at a lot of companies and a lot of people.

Maybe they are all wrong and you and the few people decrying crypto are right, but I would tend to go with the majority vote (investors vote their beliefs with their money!) and even then, unless you are shorting the market (which will have lost you some large amount of money most of the time), I fail to see what you stand to gain from the contrarian position.

Given your comment from yesterday ("I'm still skeptical of blockchain as a whole and hoping someone can help explain this to me.") I think you should consider the hypothesis that these people voting with their money might be different from the heart surgeon you mentioned to check if now may not be the time to revise your priors.

Ahh so you equate investment with success. Got it.

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