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Comment by mordymoop | Hacker News Reader

I'm genuinely confused. This current crash is not nearly as bad as several recent crashes. The fall in price in the big coins (Eth, BTC) seems downright modest. A bunch of new meme coins got obliterated, which is also normal and completely predictable. Why are people treating this as if it's going to be the fall of crypto? Because a peg broke? Have people not heard of Mt. Gox?

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Yeah, this thread reads as very weird to me, it's liking I'm watching the SV tech bubble manufacture consent in real time. In reality, crypto has been tracking the market almost 1:1 for like 6 months now.

Bitcoin is a bubble, but their 500k salary with bonuses is not. Go figure.

I just don't get why people think this is unique to crypto. Crypto is maybe 4% of my total net worth, but literally every asset aside from my home has been deep in the red for weeks now. Hell, my high volatility ETFs are way worse off than my crypto.

People either aren't paying attention to the markets writ large, or have an axe to grind.

The millions of people that joined crypto joined many years after Mt Gox, no they haven't heard of it.

A peg broke = a stable coin people thought was anchored to USD (ie= a safe place to park your money) suddenly lost 70% of its value overnight.

While I'm sure many people were laboring under the belief that a stablecoin couldn't fall, I've seen lots of commentary about various stablecoins not being properly backed by USD and thus being probable targets for an attack like this one, going back almost a year. I'm not arguing this isn't, in some sense, a 'big deal', but we've seen crypto as an asset class shrug off objectively worse disasters.

It was almost impossible to be alive in 2017 and not learn about crypto (and also watch it tank).

I think it's based on the assumption that USDT was entering a death spiral, which looks to have been premature.

You’re focusing on the price of bitcoin. Bitcoins market cap during Mt Gox was a few billion. Today it’s over a trillion.

Luna going from a market cap of close to 100 billion to basically worthless in a few days is like 50 Mt Gox incidents in terms of wealth destruction.

Bitcoin has market cap swings larger than the loss during Mt Gox in minutes these days.

Underscores the fallaciousness of thinking paper gains are wealth.

Profits aren't real until you have to pay taxes on them.

Which technically should happen as soon as you transfer your floating cryptocurrency into a stablecoin, but I get the feeling that most people don't pay taxes when making that mind off transaction.

> in terms of wealth destruction

It's a net zero game. Someone sells at 10, someone pays 10. But we still have the 10 in the game, they just moved.

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