Does anyone here realize that only possible way to get big ROI is/was crypto? | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone here realize that only possible way to get big ROI is/was crypto?

9 pointsOnuRC24 comments

I mean for retail and talking about 10x or more. Since any other startup deal is not available for retail by law in USA and many countries. So if anyone really wanted to take big financial risk with their own money, only way is/was crypto.

Example how bad it's in stock market is recent tech IPOs and their funny returns since IPO day. Many crypto actually offered public returns, where you could buy in big exchanges follow for months of volatile price, take profit in between until recent crash, so before that it was possible to make it. If one can spend time to understand returns in last years.

For example, Uniswap has a working product, it's so popular and shared their tokens with users and after token release, it publicly returned more than 10x. See yourself https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/uniswap

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Do you realise that that kind of ROI has never been normal?

In the old days (pre 2000), around 6-8 pct per anno was considered good and anything over 10% stellar.

By making 10-baggers feel normal, more people are feeling FOMO and taking "investements" they don't understand and does not have the money for. As soon as they get a margin call they are dead in the water...

Wealthy people historically have either worked up the money (the key word "work", though not as an employee) or inherited it.

Today people are asking, "having 10 dollars, how can I be a billionaire next week"? There IS no way of getting a 10x return even in a decade, unless

a) You are fine with "robbing" other people (i.e. being early and exiting early) in a fraud (and I count all the cryptos as fraud).

b) you are doing something of tremendous societal value ON YOUR OWN RISK. I.e. building a company that produces stuff that customers want to pay for...

c) taking a hugely leveraged calculated risk based on your view on long term market conditions (and that is also EXTREMELY risky)

That was the reason Silicon Valley produced so much wealth, they made PRODUCTS that others wanted. Today I am not so sure Silicon Valley's value proposition anymore..

I for one am fine with a solid financial plan, where I day-to-day feel wealthy enough and have a nice saving for my retirement.. (And I expect only 5% per anno to make it work)

Yes but we it can be more normal and possible time to time, depending on how FED feels. Because there is literally more money and debt in the entire financial system compared to any time in human history so it can make thing less efficent. Unlike made up things like efficient market hypothesis.

Nice list but since crypto is fraud etc, historically countries had colonies, slaves and many rich made also this way. Wars were funded by rich, elite or defence industry, recent example is how much arms they left and spend in Afganistan?

Why not mention any of those also? am I just wrong?

Sorry, forgot to add "actually robbing" people (of possession or freedom) to the list due to thinking over the last two decades.

Look, I don't say that the current financial system isn't in trouble - especially in the US. Most of the EU countries (where I live) are quite a bit more financially stringent - not that it helps us much when the US economy blows up....

But that has happened a lot of times before, and even though I expect the twenties to be a very unpleasant decade (covid made sure of it start out suitable unpleasantly), life will for most people go on as our real production is okay (as long as we are not getting WW3 triggered).

Famines due to the Ukrainian war is going to be a much, much bigger problem the next 18-24 months, especially in the poor areas. And in contrast to "money" the thing we call "food" is a hard asset, that is we cannot simply multiply it...

Some people (me included) have invested as much as they reasonably can in hard assets - for me since slightly before covid (the trouble already started pre 2020, how much before depends on what you think is the threshold for trouble).

But IMHO the cryptos are a totally unworkable system and it is going to cost people who try to secure their money there their last money...

But there are certain hard realities in economics also (like gravity, thermodynamics etc in physics). One of them is, that we can by definition not all be wealthy (when compared to each other), even a very large percentage of people are richer today than kings where two centuries ago (if you measure health, food quality etc).

Most people would have a much, much better life if they dampened their FOMO and consumed less instead of more...

Those returns were funded by other people's losses. It's a net negative on society because now we have a few people who are richer and many who are poorer because of crypto. Overall we are better off without it.

Ok but how did recent stocks that crashed funded by then? Your retirement fund and money printer along with retail?

People work at companies to actually do something useful. The money that investors take out is mostly earned from customers who paid for a product or service they thought was worth more than the price they paid. Returns on stock market investments are not mostly taken from other investors' invested money. And NASDAQ is still above its 2019 peak.

> The money that investors take out is mostly earned from customers who paid for a product or service they thought was worth more than the price they paid. Returns on stock market investments are not mostly taken from other investors' invested money.

I don’t agree with these points, having seen loss making companies have sky high valuations and stock prices (see Amazon in its first decade and a half, Netflix, and some more companies that had or have a large negative P/E ratio). Companies being profitable is not a requirement for stock prices to go up. It’s been all about how much a company can grow revenues (taken as a proxy of increased market share) even if it’s losing money.

> Those returns were funded by other people's losses.

This may be true depending on what (which cryptocurrency and what time frame) you’re talking about. But it can also be true for other cases that the returns were funded by easy money created by central banks that were deployed to chase higher returns (hence the stock market bubble and the cryptocurrency bubbles).

Gambling, various forms of crime, and some other confidence scams might offer the risk and returns you're looking for.

Gambling appears to be MUCH riskier then crypto and why would you suggest doing crimes?

Depending on the day and which regulatory body you ask, many unicorns , faangs and cryptos, ( and also real estate developers, extractive industry, pharma, etc ) are committing crimes, or facilitating crimes —- and getting away with it.

Edit: let us not forget our good friends “the Banks”

Many feel that much of the "crypto" world is criminal activity that has not yet been held to account.

Many others find various laws immoral and see no reason not to profit from the opportunities offered by violating them. For example, smuggling European baby formula into the USA right at the moment sounds like a decent business to be in in many respects.

No, almost all gambling products and companies limit accounts that turn profit, so 10x is out of way for big money there, even one correctly win the games they offer.

I think you misunderstand. Be the one who runs the game.

So, Crypto then.

Calling bullsh*t

You can make 10x or even 100x in millions of different ways. You mentioned the stock/bond/commodities markets, so here is how you obtain similar results there:

1) You study the world in all its complexity and find a trend or a price movement you have a very high confidence about

2) You use leverage, even if the % price movement is tiny you'll make bank using leverage.

There is no shortage of high risk/high reward things you can do in this world, ranging from betting on Jacksonville to win the Superbowl to use leverage on the stock market to literally hop on a plane and grab unclaimed territory in Africa/South America.

Abandon the idea that crypto was the only way to do it. It was the only way to do it within the context of a techno-utopian religion...but even then you still have Tesla, no?

Plenty of public equities have a peak that's 10x its trough, even without leverage or using options. Just as an example, many smaller-cap oil/gas companies look something like https://www.google.com/finance/quote/RRC:NYSE?window=MAX .

Of course, these aren't investments for retail shareholders, they're lottery tickets. But if someone wants a lottery ticket rather than an investment, there's plenty of ways to get that, uh, exposure.

Crypto is a Ponzi scheme made from FUD. Nothing more. If you profit from it then you are extremely lucky as somebody lost a heck of a lot of $$$ to make than happen.

Financial genius over here. But I really think you’re just scratching the surface until you start doing leveraged options.

Very true... I wonder if the rich could help the poor skirt the law by creating a crypto for each startup... I could see crypto becoming an open stock market among other things (it's already acting like it).

Inv. banks financially engineer really good or great IPO opening price so retail gets little returns, it's also part of class war we have.

Crypto has scams etc. but it's not engineered to steal any profit from retail.

Options are about the same risk level and you can 100x with them

Greedy. That's it. If you want to be right, Work hard, Start a a business. Don't chase ROI because that won't make you rich.

Or to get big LOI

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