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Comment by fullshark | Hacker News Reader

The evidence to support the claim is pretty weak, basically there's some more anti-crypto blogposts and documentaries out. I could easily make an article with the reverse claim and point out the pro-crypto blogposts and documentaries.

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I find it remarkable that a 2hr18m YouTube documentary that is mostly a guy talking directly to the camera has racked up 1.2m views in 2 days.

https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g

(It's an extremely well presented video, but still!)

Kind of depends what counts as a view (but still, true)

Yeah I'd love to know how many people watched the whole thing!

Personally, I watched all of it twice. Not only was I an existing fan of the creator but this video does a very good, holistic job of criticizing crypto from multiple angles: technology, economics, and ideology. There's a lot to digest.

I did. My wife is hooked too.

That and half the value of Ethereum and Bitcoin evaporated in a matter of days.

No one wants "currency" that just up and loses half it's value.

If no one wanted it it would've been down 99%. People were saying the same thing you're saying when bitcoin was 1000$

As the famous quote says, markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent.

And there isn’t an upper limit to who can buy into bad ideas or how badly they can go wrong.

https://youtu.be/lMUtU0tOmNE

People can want something without wanting it as "currency". GP is indeed correct that nobody wants a currency whose value fluctuates by 50% over a few days; what the people who want bitcoin want is a high-risk speculative investment that has so far dodged the gatekeeping and restrictions that the developed world tends to place on other high-risk speculative investments.

You might draw comparisons to the stock market. The Dow Jones lost 90% of its value in the Great Depression, but we didn't do away with the stock market altogether. We fixed the structural problems because there is clear utility to the trading of corporate securities.

Currencies that lose 90% of their purchasing power tend to get replaced. Equities/securities? Not so much. I think the point is that Bitcoin is either a terrible currency, or not a currency at all but an equity.

Do they? I more often see a mere slashing of a few zeroes and maybe a slightly different name, but with the old one being convertible and keeping the same monetary policy.

Microsoft has declined 20% since the new year. Should we abandon that company entirely as well?

Or what about the VTI (total u.s. stock market index) which has also declined 15%?

The truth is crypto currencies such as BTC and ETH are maturing with institutional investment. Their value relative to USD tends to correlate more with the markets and especially tech now.

> Microsoft has declined 20% since the new year. Should we abandon that company entirely as well?

No one is claiming that MSFT stock should be used as a currency for transactions. If the US dollar lost 20% of its spending power in a few months, many people would be baying for blood. It's bad enough when gas prices rise 20% in a short time.

Well, inflation is reporting in at 7-9% across the country and getting worse. So that is exactly what is happening and is kind of why the market is in decline right now (and all the things that come with it)...

As I understand, the market is in decline because "The Fed" is trying to tamp down inflation by increasing the price of borrowing money. The fact that this kind of market correction is deemed an acceptable byproduct of countering inflation tells you how seriously the "fiat" economic system treats loss of purchasing power.

AFAIK, Bitcoin does not have a mechanism for doing something like this to stabilize the currency.

Yeah, that kind of glosses over all of the action taking over the past 2 years which heavily contributed to the current situation. But even if we ignore that they have a problem on their hands - the two main goals of the fed are currently at fundamental odds with each other. They have been injecting money to achieve maximum employment which is at fundamental odds with price stability. If they raise rates to stabilize prices (which they are definitely doing, potentially more than anticipated), that is going to affect employment. So it's going to be a tough balancing act. There is also no guarantee that raising rates will have the effect they desire. It could stagnate the entire economy.

There is a ton of uncertainty and that is really what is driving the craziness in the markets. Over 97% of my portfolio is in fiat and trust me this makes me very uneasy.

The fact that Bitcoin does not have levers is the appeal to a lot of people.

> Microsoft has declined 20% since the new year.

>> No one wants "currency" that ...

Who uses Microsoft stock as currency?

The best argument against cryptocurrencies is their impact on the environment, which is becoming huge and is based on solid numbers. Thousands of thousands of hardware miners in pretty much every country, and growing every damn day, each one drawing no less than 3 Kilowatts 24/7 and pumping heat into the atmosphere don't come without a cost. Which for those who don't care about the environment is also represented by the unprecedented raise of energy prices. Energy has become the raw material used to build money; its costs follow the demand and will continue to soar as long as prices continue to be dictated by the demand for continuously growing crypto farms. There's no going back until some form of strong regulation, or a global catastrophe, will end this for good.

My personal (admittedly Don Quixotesque) stance on the matter is that I will never ever accept to be paid in crypto currency for products, services or whatever: their value over here is less than zero.

Sentiment in online chatter correlates with price movement. It becomes a feedback loop. Maybe the criticism is finally overwhelming people's risk functions.

Or the reverse... price drops make people more open to "crypto is bullshit" arguments.

Why not both?

This is probably right. Bitcoin is down over 50% from ATH and continues to fall. People are probably confused and in panic.

My mistake for the lack of clarity. That's what I mean to imply.

My point is there's not even evidence to support online chatter turning negative. Any topic that is polarizing and growing in terms of chatter will produce more positive/negative blogposts and youtube videos. I could write this blogpost substituting in anti-vax sentiment for example pretty easily.

I didn't assert whether sentiment was changing or not, just sharing the pattern in case someone reading hadn't thought of it. Sentiment is easy enough to check. I'm not doing crypto homework though.

It's also correlated with fed talks of rising interest rates which tends to coincide with capital moving from risk-on assets to risk-off assets. Growth tech stocks are taking quite a hit too.

I think there is a seed of a good idea in Web3. We should know in about a year what, if anything, grows out of that seed.

Crypto’s been around for a decade. What’s so special about the upcoming year?

Because it's not a crypto thing. It's a blockchain thing.

Blockchain’s been around for a decade. What’s so special about the upcoming year?

Web3 may turn out to be a good application. What's special is only that we may see if in fact something interesting comes of it over the next year. Or another way I'll say it is that if nothing of value emerges over next year then it likely never will.

Though there's been an uptick in its usage recently, people have been talking about "web3" for several years as well, and so far as I can tell, it basically just means "blockchain and cryptocurrency, but we try to build them into a new kind of WWW".

What's so special about the upcoming year?

"if nothing of value emerges over next year then it likely never will"

A list of appeals to authority. I guess it is the centralized mindset.

copy jpeg meme is rise of anti nft dumbness

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