Meanwhile I have a house and was able to lift out of poverty by ignoring people like you and saving in BTC instead of USD for the last decade.
YMMV.
YMMV.
The entire reason we were banging our drums was exactly because people made money, but the music will stop, and when it does, all that value disappears. There is nothing wrong with crypo as a commodity. If you need it to build something with, fine, but it's not a wealth creating asset. It's a commodity, which is effectively never an investment vehicle.
Nonetheless, the winners think they’re winners because they made the right choices and will try to convince others to follow suit.
I bought an item for thousands of dollars in bitcoin just this week just to dodge paypal fees. Some of my clients pay me in bitcoin too. I am considering offering a discount for it as it saves me conversion fees.
The traders are speculating and most of them do not care about privacy or censorship resistance or using it as a currency so they are just here for the hype and greed. They are fickle and will lose a lot of money.
I just buy, hold, and spend, because bitcoin is a currency that, if used without kyc exchanges, offers much better privacy and censorship resistance than visa, paypal, or mastercard.
Privacy and censorship resistance are utility.
Those betting against the internet succeeding long term as the defacto way of exchanging data were wrong, and those betting against decentralized value storage will be wrong too. It will get worse before it gets stable but I am in it for digital sovereignty above all else.
I can only imagine it's easier to pay for life's essentials with a debit-card issued by a UK or Dubai bank in Nigeria (or cash withdrawn from an ATM using the same card) than it is to pay for those same things with Bitcoin there.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6372440-this-time-is-dif...
(interesting aside, the best heuristic i ever learned on how to get good vodka, look up the manufactures headquarters/operations location on google maps, and if you don't see grain silos, don't buy the vodka)
Who needs bitcoin? Honestly not many people right now. The speculative boom is that, in the future, it becomes internet-cash. Then people will need it, they'll want it a lot to buy things in the internet, and that's fine. If they do, then the value will go up.
However, aside from the fact that bitcoin is absolutely not able to handle cash-like transactions at all, there is still no reason for normal people to speculate on it now. If it becomes the de facto internet cash of the future, then, cool, you just exchange for it in the future.
The idea that anyone could ever anticipate the future demand of a trivially replaceable ledger of exchange is... honestly insane. I'm not saying it's not worth speculating on, but please, god, don't put any serious portion of your investment portfolio in those types of arbitrary bets!
Some years ago I updated the Wikipedia article on Skyy vodka, which read like a press release, by putting in actual facts. Such as that the ethanol came from a industrial ethanol plant in Pekin, Illinois which also made ethanol for fuel use. Then it was shipped by rail, in tank cars, to a company in California which mostly makes low-end booze, but also will make a custom brand for you if you pay them. The water used is tap water run through a reverse-osmosis plant. A little bit of re-distillation for polishing, some mixing, some flavoring, and it's piped into the bottling line. The outsourcing company makes about a thousand different brands, but, as they admit in interviews, there are only about hundred different recipes. Skyy itself was purely a marketing company - everything was outsourced. Eventually they were acquired by a real manufacturer, so they found an exit.
So it was a meme brand. But a real product. Now we have meme brands with nothing behind them.
Looking at you, Bored Ape Yacht Club / Otherside / Yuga.
Worldwide, lots of people.
There's folks in Venezuela and Zimbabwe who need Bitcoin because their national currencies are hyperinflating.
There's folks in El Salvador who need Bitcoin because it is their national currency.
There's folks fleeing Ukraine who need Bitcoin because their nation is at risk of being swallowed by a large empire.
There's folks in Russia who need Bitcoin because their nation is doing the swallowing and getting cut off from the world financial system as a result.
There's folks in China (and other countries) who need Bitcoin because their nation can't be trusted not to interfere with private property and it's good to have a little insurance policy on a thumb drive, piece of paper, or memorized.
I think that cryptocurrency is one of those areas where people in the developed world look at their own life experience and think "Who could ever need that?", not realizing that they represent a tiny fraction of humanity and that the experience of most of the rest of the world is dramatically different. I work on a product (Android) with about 3B users. I work on a tiny segment of it (tablets & TVs), with about 12% market share combined, and we're always struggling to get the larger org to invest in developing us. But when you run the numbers, you realize that the 12% of Android users with a tablet or TV is about 340M, more than the entire population of the United States. Similarly, the number of mobile phone users with accessibility needs (largely vision difficulties) is also larger than the population of the United States, yet it's awfully hard to get people to consider screen readers and assistive technologies when developing.
Americans in general are wildly unaware of what a tiny percentage of humanity they are (for reference: about 4%), and this comes up over and over again in HN threads.
It's true that people here need either an alternative currency for purchasing foreign goods (access to USD or other currencies is restricted, and customs fees are insane), or an alternative asset for keeping the value of their savings.
But it's not true that people need Bitcoin. As a currency for purchasing things, Bitcoin is useless. People here are better off evading customs taxes (smuggling), and purchasing via USDs bought on the black market. And for keeping the value of their savings, again, people usually turn to USDs. Some people have speculated with BTC and other cryptocurrencies, yeah, but this is not so much for savings, but more for greedy speculation.
And it's not like the USD is important on itself, it's just an intermediate goal for something else. If the USD becomes too unstable or loses much of its value, people here will turn to other stronger foreign currencies.
So, imagine what this means in the context of what your parent comment said: that Bitcoin's ledger being trivially replaceable.
No, Bitcoin is not needed here. Not at the moment at least. And if it is in the future, so be it, but so can be any other crypto or alternative currency. Who can predict which it will be (if any)? I don't see how betting on future Bitcoin's value for countries like mine makes any sense when there nothing inherent about Bitcoin that would make more valuable than any other alternative currency.
I'm not saying bitcoin is going to zero. In these threads, i've always said bitcoin has perfectly reasonable use cases, but if we're being honest not many people really need to use bitcoin, and yes, i'm saying, in the the grand scheme of things, the population of El Salvador is not many people. It will probably not become the de facto unit of exchange in our lifetime, or ever.
I'm not talking about bitcoin is a vehicle for temporarily transferring wealth from one asset to another, i actually think it's pretty useful for that, i'm talking about bitcoin as a vehicle for investment... which is why the lion's share of people have been buying it in the last decade.
Maybe China?
Certainly Venezuela, Zimbabwe, El Salvador, and other countries around the globe already use USD as a de facto currency. Heck, in Zimbabwe and El Salvador it's de jure as well!
To be fair, China is a big chunk of the global population already. But crypto enthusiasts are wildly unaware of what little use it actually has. It comes up over and over again in HN threads and on Twitter.
The Ukrainian Hryvni is only down about 10% since the war started. The Ruble is actually up 10% (these are all quotes on open markets, not ones controlled by governments)
Bitcoin is down more than 30% in that time. It has a short history with incredible volatility and is very illiquid in a bad situation.
Government currencies aren’t the best when controlled by tyrants, bur crypto isn’t ready for global adoption yet. Would you park your GTFO money in a commodity that can be destroyed by an Elon Musk tweet?
This is fine. But you acknowledge you gambled. If you'd lost, it would have been inappropriate to ask for others' sympathy or, worse, public support.
Said house is destroyed in a fire, insurance can't pay everyone out (see Paradise fire) and then those same people end up begging others for support (Including GoFundMe) pages.
Didn't they gamble on having a house in a high risk area and lost? Why do we only bail out certain people and not feel bad about it?
But generally I agree with you, there are definitely tragic events that happen to people that get more sympathy than other types of tragic events, even if they're pretty similar ultimately.
But I'm also someone who "gambles" on nothing but "ponzi schemes", (i.e. I buy Bitcoin and Ethereum) according to HN. I don't have insurance though, if some black swan thing happened and I lost it all, then I don't have much recourse.
Crypto is far from the only thing where that's a possibility, though. I'd say three of the startups I worked for have been even more of a gamble than my crypto purchases (all three shut down a little more than a year after I joined and I never made a dime more than my kind of low salary, and they didn't offer a 401k so I missed out on a lot of financial accumulation and security there).
Everybody needs a home, and one way to have a home is to buy one. Investing one's savings in buying a home comes with the expected option that one can live in it indefinitely if one wants to. Fulfilling this expectation does not depend on others becoming homeless, nor on their home becoming worse, nor on others being unable to buy a home in the future.
On the other hand, nobody needs to invest in cryptocurrencies. Investing one's savings in cryptocurrencies is done on the expectation that they will increase in value at least until one can sell them at profit. Being able to do this depends on others losing out by comparison, inasmuch as one expects others to buy the same amount of currency at a greater price.
I don't think any of this is true. You buying a home deprives someone of said home and drives the expected price up. We have a homeless crisis in California because we are not building enough and everyone is treating housing like an investment ("It can only go up!", "This is an investment!").
Living in it indefinitely is also a pipe dream. You're paying taxes and fees that can increase or change at any moments notice if enough people agree. This requires the same consensus as fundamental algorithmic changes in cryptocurrencies. You can't bank of living somewhere "indefinitely" without agreeing that it's a gamble...nothing is guaranteed.
Regarding the "need" to invest in cryptocurrencies, I can kind of agree. Shelter is a need because it helps us survive more efficiently but one could argue investing/growing wealth should also make life easier to live if it works out.
It’s a good point.
When the traders walk away I will still be using Bitcoin as a way to store and transfer value p2p unless something with similar properties replaces it.
How many USD savings accounts are outrunning inflation these days?
At least the crypto investors aren’t expecting a wholesale bailout at any point, unlike “sophisticated” institutional investors as we saw in 08…
Because stocks have inherent value in the form of dividends or the potential of future dividends (or the current/potential stock buybacks, which are mathematically similar).
I think this misconception must be the root of the whole issue.
In reality dividends don't distinguish between productive innovation and wealth extraction.
Innovative dividends are derived from the use value of new goods and services which increase freedom of action for the majority of the population. Wealth extraction is derived from zero-sum movements of capital, typically benefiting rentiers at the expense of productive employees, decreasing majority freedom of action.
But even the first can create externalities - which are real physical cost which are not accounted for.
A house that burns down because of climate catastrophe is a real physical loss. A increase in the value of a house created by aggressive speculation is an imaginary gain that only exists because the people in the game believe in it.
Trad economics exists to hide these differences, and make a hallucinatory financial reality which seems more real than the physical world.
Crypto is an obvious symptom of this hallucinatory mindset. Not only are the tokens imaginary, but the environmental costs are catastrophic.
But the rest of the economy really isn't built on firmer ground.
>A house that burns down because of climate catastrophe is a real physical loss. A increase in the value of a house created by aggressive speculation is an imaginary gain that only exists because the people in the game believe in it.
And a house that is built creates real value by taking land, adding materials and labour, and creating something worth more than the sum of its parts.
I don't need to forgive all of the economic system's sins to explain why stocks have value.
Stocks have value because companies have value. You can buy the whole company and have something with positive value. Buying every outstanding derivative nets out to zero. Buying every cryptocurrency leaves you with something worthless.
Positive- versus zero- or even negative-sum games.
Crypto does have value. Not all of it, but again we could make the same comparison with ridiculously overinflated stocks like PTON or CVNA.
This is irrelevant to the game dynamic. (Trading stock in the short term is usually gambling, by the way, because trading per se is a zero-sum game.)
> we could make the same comparison with ridiculously overinflated stocks like PTON or CVNA
One, I can buy a Peloton. People pay for Pelotons. Positive sum. Two, if you go all in on Peloton stock, yes, you're gambling.
> One, I can buy a Peloton. People pay for Pelotons. Positive sum.
Yes and once Peloton runs out of people to sell overpriced bikes and treadmills to, the valuation will (hopefully) return to reality. Uber continues to lose money on every ride.
If you’re going down the “people pay for it” route, we could say that people also pay for NFTs of monkey pictures.
I think NFTs are silly, but they are positive value systems. Like art.
This is a false analogy between taking measured risks and gambling. Putting 100% of your assets into anything, particularly a cryptocurrency, is gambling.
Semantics means arguing over definitions, not misunderstanding them.
The difference between positive- and zero-sum systems is unambiguous. We can call participating in the latter, whether by trading cryptocurrencies or derivatives or playing slots, with an intent to profit gambling or wijiwogging or blurlippening, it doesn't matter, the expected outcome is the same.
Ah the semantics of semantics. If two people disagree on a definition, then there will be some belief that the counterparty "misunderstands" the definition. That goes hand in hand.
>The difference between positive- and zero-sum systems is unambiguous.
And uncontested.
>We can call participating in the latter, whether by trading cryptocurrencies or derivatives or playing slots, with an intent to profit gambling
Yes we can.
We can also call a well diversified portfolio of 'positive-sum' investments gambling. You are risking your money on the chance you'll have a favorable outcome. There is no riskless portfolio. You are forced to gamble if you keep your wealth, because there is always an element of chance regarding maintaining your wealth. The default, uninvested state, for most is to gamble inflation won't eat it away.
We can call it whatever we like. It's still positive sum. (That's the point of the part of the quote you omitted.)
Crypto and slot machines are not positive sum. That is a fundamental difference that separates them from investing.
> is no riskless portfolio
Straw man [1]. Nobody claimed this.
>Crypto and slot machines are not positive sum.
I think this the part where I link to a wikipedia page of a fallacy I don't understand/doesn't apply? /s
A ponzi scheme doesn't stop being a ponzi scheme because your personally profited from it. It doesn't stop being a ponzi scheme because it uses complex technology that 99% of people don't understand.
I won’t be getting a house unless it does, so here’s hoping.
I also won’t be in trouble if it doesn’t, so here’s also to a sensible investment strategy.
I will have no regrets for funding digital sovereignty. It is a war for critical freedoms that if lost at least wont be as bloody as those with weapons.
The world I want to live in requires decentralized money and governance and I continually vote with my wallet.