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Comment by mmastrac | Hacker News Reader

I recall walking through an airport this year and seeing Crypto ads everywhere. That was my shoeshine boy moment (1)

(1) https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-spot-stock-market-bub...

I visited Brazil recently (3-4 months ago), I got into cryptocurrency-talk or some shitcoin peddled by cashiers, Uber drivers, waiters in some restaurants, acquaintances that aren't tech-savvy at all, etc. That's when it downed on me how big this whole thing got outside of internet chatter, it downed how many vulnerable people are exposed to the fallout of a crypto implosion.

It's so ironic how all those libertarian crypto-bros think they've got the inside track and they're so much smarter than everyone else, when actually they're just as gullible and common and deluded as random cashiers, Uber drivers, waiters, bartenders, used car salesmen, chiropractors, cosmeticians, shoeshine boys, and ordinary hoi polloi on the street, all being influenced by the exact same mass market ads and hype all over the world.

Yup, and seems to be getting worse:

“Families in despair over IM Academy: ‘The crypto-sect has kidnapped our children’”[1]

https://english.elpais.com/international/2022-04-18/families...

Well, people that got in early and got out about 6m ago (or now, still) might have made good money. Attributing it to a deep understanding of the technology is almost certainly wrong; attributing it to a certain street-smart understanding of bubbles, marketing, and hype might be correct. Though I'm inclined to just call it luck.

("dawned")

... but yeah. It's depressing. Countries with already bad economic conditions (like "we literally don't have functioning currency" level, not the things US residents complain about) seem particularly susceptible to it.

I really thought I had written "dawned"... I think it's the same issue I have when writing "ratio", I always end up writing "ration".

Thanks for the correction.

The older I get, the more errors my typing contains versus the mental stream of consciousness I intended to type.

The way I type compute always involves deleting the r at the end. :)

Because they're actually using it as a currency. Consequently, they probably won't feel as much of the pain speculators are feeling right now / will continue to feel; as long as the amount of $FOO earned from a day's work pays for the day's expenses, they have little reason not to continue adopting and using $FOO (for whatever value of $FOO we're using).

Put differently: when the options are "failed local currency" v. "hard to obtain foreign currency" v. "easy to obtain electronic currency", you and I would probably be inclined to use the third option.

I had a few different moments, since I was always very skeptical of crypto.

However being pitched crypto by an old bartender in Stuttgart was probably the most obvious one.

Generally, crypto was not promoted to me by people who would understand either computer science or economics.

Not to be flippant, but nobody who I've heard promote crypto has any real, deep training in economics. Computer science yes, totally, but not econ. There are obvious problems with the entire concept of decentralized money if you've studied economic/financial history. We already experienced it back in the 19th Century and it's following pretty much the same pattern. Wildcat banks, frontrunning, wash trading, bank runs, and much more.

Some brilliant computer scientists created crypto and Dunning-Kruger'ed themselves into thinking that they were also experts in finance.

I saw the Crypto.com Arena as a Pets.com Superbowl moment.

This article is off by 3.5 years and I bet that most FAANG stocks are still above their values when it was published.

Tech “growth” companies has been overpriced but it made kind of sense as long as interest rates were negative and their revenue was growing… people believed in positive returns because they assumed the only way is up.

Truth is … in any healthy public market no company has any business being at a higher than 20 p/e ratio. Unless maybe for a transitioning period of time (market making)

Boom and bust seem to be the prevailing pattern for the development of complex systems. Happens in ecosystems, and in economies. I don't even think it's detrimental... That was how we get a lot of otherwise unthinkable infrastructure development. The dotcom bubble left a lot of very cheap fiber connections that fueled later internet adoption, for example.

I love that phrase, 'shoeshine boy moment'.

I've stayed away from crypto, but my shoeshine boy moment was when we went on a road trip around Wales last summer. We happened to wander into a small shop in a small harbour town in Wales, literally about 4-6 streets in total. The guy behind the counter had some 'pay with crypto' machine and was singing the praises of crypto to all of the old ladies, moms and dads that were ahead of us in the queue...

To be fair, he was likely being paid to sing those praises.

I often see the ads in advertising billboard. I usually go to a public park every other day, and the road will pass through a major intersection with large billboard. At one point, a billboard of cryptocurrency broker appeared every time I passed through that intersection. The particular broker also advertises into a convenience store (7-11), so I will be pretty much guarantee to see its ads every day.

Another broker dared to register the domain name "Join the Crypto Revolution" to promote its scheme. I wish we could have an enforceable rules on prohibition to market cryptocurrency to general public like Singapore did (see [1]). We did open for comments regarding this, but it has not been set in stone as cryptocurrency broker tried to game the rules.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/finance/banking/singapore-cautions-aga...

I had a similar moment at the peak in 2017 when my non-financial friends asked me if I owned Bitcoin.

About a year ago I was chilling in my bedroom and overheard some crypto-bro shilling just outside my window. That clinched my conviction that it was just a matter of time for it all to collapse.

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