Hacker News Reader

Comment by benreesman | Hacker News Reader

How many times are we going to have this conversation? Yes crypto is an asset bubble, alongside equities, real estate, precious metals, you name it. Money printer go brrrr, more dollars are chasing the same amount of Apple sells iPhones.

Crypto has no intrinsic value, it pays no dividend and doesn’t give you proxy rights, just like all the tech equities.

Proof of work burns a lot of electricity, though this is complicated because it drives up demand for renewables.

I also wish I had bought BTC when it was like a basis point, and if I had I’d be a booster instead of a skeptic, like everyone else.

Can we go back to arguing about Rust vs C? This horse has been flogged into quarks at this point.

View on HN

> This horse has been flogged into quarks at this point.

HackerNews Crypto Thread Discovers Unconfined Equine Quarks (theregister.com)

Forum Boffins Observe Physics Beyond Large Hadron Collider: New Use For Blockchain in Repeatedly Smashing Dumb Ideas Together

Scientists baffled?

Stop equating crypto with stocks please.

Stocks represent ownership so just by that virtue, it has intrinsic value.

Stocks are equity over a corporation. Sats are equity over the wealth of the planet.

Stocks "represent ownership", is such fiction I don't even know where to start. If you really believe this, I'd like to sell you 49% ownership in my next venture! I of course have 10x voting rights and can issue more shares whenever I'd like ('oh but why would you do that? Won't that depress the value of your stock too?' 1. Not really because of crazy structures of the banks that underwrite these issuances, and 2. Because fuck you, that's why! I want more money and I can use any number of excuses to dilute you, like: "the capital constraints of our business necessitated these extreme measures" ), I can flex on my employees by giving them all kinds of triggers and contractual ways to screw them. Sigh. No. Stocks today (as in those that are traded on NYSE, etc ) don't "represent ownership" to the average person. They represent an idea, a way of saying, "This company will be worth more in the future than today".

Stocks have value because of dividends (or for stocks that don’t yet pay dividends, the likelihood that one day they will pay dividends).

But ultimately, it is a bet on actual cash transfers from the profits of the business to your own pockets. All share price appreciation comes from bets (maybe far removed in time) on future dividend payments.

Most crypto has no basis for value like this. Tokens based on proof of stake or utility tokens do, but Bitcoin is pure speculation on future speculation.

Importantly, stocks represent cash flows.

Even stocks that don’t pay dividends can benefit from cash flows in the form of stock buybacks. Many big tech companies like Meta don’t pay dividends but do spend tens of billions on buybacks.

When a company buys its own stock, the value of the remaining shares appreciates. This is in some ways better than a dividend because you (as a shareholder) don’t need to pay tax on the cash distribution.

Many crypto proponents just don’t seem to understand how shares work and tokens don’t.

If I have 100% control over the issuance of said stock, you don’t really “own” anything. Whether you benefit in the profits is subject to contracts and my whims.

> Stocks represent ownership

Stock represents specific rights (which may differ across classes) typically including a claim on assets at dissolution.

They're both assets.

>Crypto has no intrinsic value, it pays no dividend and doesn’t give you proxy rights, just like all the tech equities.

Tech companies return money to their investors via buybacks. Most investors prefer this as they get to choose when they get taxed.

Unless they go under, then the money is just gone.

Some do, Apple is notable for this. If Uber’s done one I missed it.

FTX burns FTT when they have a good quarter, with roughly the same zero accountability to do so as a FAANG with a God Emperor CEO running a dual-class share structure.

Neither of these things are backed by guys with guns who come to your house if you fail to pay taxes in them.

A failing business is still a business. 60% of new restaurants fail within a year, but nobody would argue that these restaurants have no intrinsic value. Likewise, Uber has facilitated billions of rides.

A better comparison would have been national currency.

A piece of paper has no intrinsic value, pays no dividend, and gets diluted over time.

Very difficult to opt out of using it.

Still not the same. Every fiat currency that isn't effectively useless facilitates far more trade than its face value.

Current USD M2 monetary velocity is barely above 1, which is far from "far more".

Buybacks? If you're running a company profitably you're supposed to invest your cash to expand the business, not inflate the share price. The share price is supposed to be a reflection of your future profitability, not your future buyback schemes.

If the company does not share its profits in any way with the shareholders, then I agree that it's not different from crypto. The thing is that usually there's an expectation that you will start paying out to your shareholders eventually. There are also companies that already pay out dividends - you can always invest only in those to dodge the "greater fool" problem, at least partially.

So you're opposed to dividends as well?

You're giving the earnings back to investors because you don't have anything to invest them in yourself. Just like you're supposed to.

It's just that you're just doing it through a buyback rather than a dividend because dividends in the US are taxed like plain-old income and buybacks turn into capital gains and are taxed less.

Buybacks are optimal when your share price is undervalued or when the Business has plateaued, which is commonly done for value stocks. In which case Buybacks becomes the best way to return value to share holders by purchasing under valued shares of themselves, trading their excess capital to reduce the supply of company shares that also improves dividend yield given its paid out to fewer outstanding shares.

It's the optimal way to return value to share holders when your share price is undervalued and you have excess capital. If the company ever needs to raise funds for a strategic M&A investment in the future they're always able to resell their shares again.

Some companies are content with maintaining a healthy business and not go after growth at all costs, which is a totally fine operating strategy.

Rust is an incredibly difficult language to be productive in and I don't think it will stand the test of time. C has been around for half a century and is a perfectly fine language to use today. Rust is popular because people these days are too risk averse, "unsafe" code is really not that bad.

Not all heroes wear capes. :)

I like how I had 6 upvotes, then the lemmings started regurgitating pro-Rust propaganda in the replies, and now I'm at 0.

Your comment is fucking perfect, clearly exaggerated for effect, and while I sometimes fail, I personally try to rein in my friggin Aspergers enough to not get precious about shit like that.

You sir, are the apex predator of subtle HN trolling. (The guy with the collider thing above is hot on your heels).

> people these days are too risk averse

And they should be. Software has become much bigger than it was "half a century" ago. We need to scale up on C.

> "unsafe" code is really not that bad.

Wow,... I only hope I never need to maintain your code.

I read that as “code written in a non memory safe language”, since that’s the nomenclature that memory safe languages use when they need to execute code that can’t have the guarantees the language typically enforces (often when interfacing with things outside their ecosystem).

In a comparison with C? How the hell can you be productive with C without serious years of experience under your belt? A 3-month Rust learner can confidently contribute and deliver working code to a production system.

Tech equities have buybacks.

Crypto is the evolution of money. It's early days now. The one thing I know is that people are greedy and it's that greed that will make crypto function as part of society.

It reminds me of the early days of the personal computer. Early PC's were useless to most people. But they were the greatest tool/toy to some. They couldn't get enough of it. Now it's crypto. It's mainly useless to most but some people can' t get enough of it. Add greed to that and there's no way people won't find a way to reduce its drawbacks and create useful tools.

Crypto's blockchain brought about the technology that lets complete strangers collaborate on a problem and be sure with high certainty that it's trustworthy. People just don't get how mind blowingly important that is.

It's slow in its development but it will have a great impact in our future. Give it time.

I remember hearing this when I would ask what the point of Bitcoin was over a decade ago. Now major cryptocurrency networks have expenditures approaching the GDPs of mid-sized countries. It's well past time to retire the "early days" argument.

Growing organically through collaboration for the sake of it is very different then how computers proliferated. People were exposed to computers in school and work beforehand to them being introduced into every mainstream activity like internet banking and Amazon. Crypto is still stuck in a separate bubble universe where innovation only occurs within.

PCs also seemed to have a ton of uses. More with everyday.

Crypto? Or E-Cash?

Electronic money, sure. But from a blockchain?

Greed is definitely driving it and not actual utility, and that’s much different than the rise of personal computers.

Crypto is not the evolution of money, it's the evolution of the pyramid scheme.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com