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Comment by orbz | Hacker News Reader

Part of me feels like this is actually somewhat a feature. It's like a research implementation of an economy that iterates more rapidly than the current economy. What if the real value in all of this is finding out mechanisms to bake consumer protections, transparency, anti-money laundering and fraud detection into the main economy in an automated fashion?

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It's a very costly experiment, both in terms of the energy required to power the experiment, and financial losses of the participants (many of whom are almost definitely not treating their investments as an experiment)

The real economy actually produces value. It feeds people, clothes people, entertains people, etc. even if it does so imperfectly. The economy's value dropping 20% a day would represent a real problem that needs to be addressed.

We saw this when COVID began. The stock markets were plummeting as people increasingly realized that COVID was not gonna be gone by Easter, and that this would affect us for some time and how impactful it would be.

With crypto, the only thing that the falling prices is tell us that another layer of the onion of scams that crypto is built upon has been peeled, and the only real question is how deep the layers go and whether there even is something of value deep inside.

You could just observe the economy of an MMORPG - no blockchain needed.

Nothing to add here, but this is fascinating to think about. Thank you for this perspective.

Ah, so it's like AlphaZero, it learns from scratch, starting by making random moves.

The real treasure was all the regulators we suborned along the way

On the individual level, a few years of bitcoin helped me get an intuitive-level understanding of why common investing advice works.

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