Hacker News Reader

Time.

Crypto is a speculative digital commodity bubble. We haven't seen a real bear market yet. Gold took 7 years from 1973 when you could own gold again to the 1980 peak. All the increase in gold mining lead to a 20 year bear market.

The crypto narrative is fundamentally unsustainable. It doesn't just have to beat the S&P 500 returns, people need to believe they are going to get rich. That November 2021 peak is going to be tough to take out. That is looking like the peak of the everything bubble from COVID. The get rich narrative can only hold for so long until the reality that crypto is a set of volatile currency no one really uses and has been massively over mined for years now sets in.

How do you define bear market for crypto? -90% is just another year (or even month) in crypto space.

I mean, I'd define it, much like any other bear market, as a sustained downward trend in the market.

2017 wasn't a real bear market? It dropped like 95% and stayed at 50% to 80% below peak for a couple of years..

Ban crypto mining. Outlaw exchanging cryptocurrencies (directly) to USD (and other fiat currencies, but USD is the big one for now).

It seems like it’s happening indirectly. I keep hearing stories about places like Coinbase not converting dirty Bitcoin that’s been associated with illegal activity.

Eventually, it seems like this will apply to all of it.

How much would it cost to purposefully contaminate a significant portion of Bitcoin? Just, you know, for reasons.

I don't think banning fiat conversion would stop this.

There are bonds and stable currency issued peg to the defi or crypto world.

It would reduce the value but it's unstoppable.

See fei: https://fei.money/

Proof of work or hardware intensive proofs are only used in a few crypto currency so this is a very blunt response in regards to banning exchange.

Have you seen what happened in the finance world with respect to Russia recently? Feels to me like it is perfectly possible with the right Zeitgeist. Pretty much all the on/off ramps for Russian money are gone at the moment.

Which I acknowledge above. You can ban exchange to fiat but it will only reduce value, not completely eliminate it as there are protocols which derive value from defi ecosystem itself.

I.e people will start directly using these currency for payments (which they already do) without exchanging to fiat. The stability is maintained by the defi collateral and shared acceptance.

So you would have to ban everyone to accept crypto currency and so on as payment but that is very catastrophic decision with large implications.

It also doesn't help crypto completely eliminates centralized authorities when moving across borders.

So let's assume crypto is banned? Why is FIAT much better? What about another 2008? What about Quantitative Easing?

It's not solving much.

Because it's not speculative garbage like literally all crypto is.

> people will start directly using these currency for payments (which they already do) without exchanging to fiat

Without fiat exchange, People can only accept crypto in an economically feasible manner as payments up to the rate that they have expenses/outflows that can be paid in crypto. The price will only be able to stabilize at a price that is orders of magnitude lower than today. How much lower exactly depends on the health of the black market for exchanging with fiat.

Russia is a bit more complicated..half their economy is oil. The chance of import bans and Russia nationalizing oil companies is partly priced in.

Time.

Crypto is a speculative digital commodity bubble. We haven't seen a real bear market yet. Gold took 7 years from 1973 when you could own gold again to the 1980 peak. All the increase in gold mining lead to a 20 year bear market.

The crypto narrative is fundamentally unsustainable. It doesn't just have to beat the S&P 500 returns, people need to believe they are going to get rich. That November 2021 peak is going to be tough to take out. That is looking like the peak of the everything bubble from COVID. The get rich narrative can only hold for so long until the reality that crypto is a set of volatile currency no one really uses and has been massively over mined for years now sets in.

Time will make crypto boring like every other currency/commodity. No one gets all excited about corn futures.

I think the most straightforward thing would be to regulate mining operations as money transmitters and smart contracts as derivatives. Several jurisdictions have made noises about doing this; it seems to be more a matter of political will than any fundamental difficulty.

Although I agree that post crypto incentives have changed. It's a bit much to say that it's "completely changed the digital universe" this group is targeting the primary developer of GPU mining.

In terms of the ask, I think they are being much cleverer than dumb money as unlocking the GPU mining further could create new areas of economic power, i.e ebay old gpus or push NVIDIA to design a specific crypto gpu?

Either way capitalism is what's driving the team.

artificial limits, on bandwidth and energy could be one way to both foster innovation and decrease resource usage

We just saw that those artificial limits (Lite Hash Rate) fostered the "innovation" of hackers attacking Nvidia, eh?