Crypto Is Crashing. It Deserves To | Hacker News Reader

Crypto Is Crashing. It Deserves To

nymag.com

107 pointspseudolus51 comments

Crypto has crashed and recovered even worse before than this, so what's the huge deal? Is it more "dead" now than the 456 times before?

https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/

When did it crash worse?

After having a look at the logarithmic BTC/USD chart, I'd say it crashed worse in 2014 and in 2018.

It isn't done crashing yet.

It needs to go to 0 and be forgotten along with those ugly monkey images.

What do you mean, "ugly monkey"? /s

But yeah, the whole response to crypto crashing brings to mind a very particular phrase: "an odyssey of rancor".

There's a great number of people watching the antilope being eaten, and rooting for the lion.

An unusual phrase indeed; I've not seen it before seems to have come from this piece of writing? https://coronzon.com/pdf/cioran/Odyssey-of-Rancor-by-Cioran....

The rancor is not surprising given how obnoxious the crypto community have been to people with reasonable objections. It's more like watching a cultist missionary get eaten by a lion.

It's really more like watching lazy lions getting eaten by heedless hyenas.

> There's a great number of people watching the antilope being eaten, and rooting for the lion.

Ignoring the metaphor and taking it literally: watching nature documentaries, I don't think I've ever rooted for the antelope. I've always been on the side of the big cats (particularly leopards, snow leopards and such)[1]. And reading comments under such videos, seeing most people rooting for the antelope was always disheartening to me, knowing that, if this cat doesn't kill this or another antelope soon, it's going to die. And out of the two I always prefer the cat to survive.

[1]: Will also root for the lynx feeding on a deer, no questions asked. Lynxes are awesome. :)

I find anthropomorphism in nature documentaries hugely annoying. Especially when they add music that is sad depending on the outcome.

I once watched a documentary where a polar bear was unable to hunt. In one last ditch effort it tried to hunt a walrus from a large group but failed. He didn't have enough energy left to kill. Felt so bad for him. The narrator said the bear Wouldn't survive long. Nature is brutal.

Crypto BTC is following the stock market which is also crashing, but I guess that would generate fewer clicks.

The stock market isn't down 50% over the last 12 months

QQQ which tracks nasdaq-100 is down 30% the last 6 months

If you're going to cherry pick indexes, we can pick cryptos that also performed much worse.

Just open the default stocks app on your phone, hit nasdaq and set the window to 6m. Who’s really cherry picking?

The constant noise and whitepaper overload needed to stop anyway!

So much this it was nauseating.

Just the other night I was told to enjoy being poor by a couple of new investors, sucks for them, I don't think they invested sufficiently long enough ago to not have lost money by now

"Crypto" is just egold with extra steps.

etulips

I suspect OP meant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-gold

Which, some believe, is where the idea for Bitcoin ultimately originated from.

I suspect parent was making an economics joke

etulips == electronic tulip mania

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

cryptocurrency allows you to send money over the internet seamlessly which is pretty amazing.

I can do that today with no fee. I actually did it today and it was free to pay someone.

I can already do that far more easily using my bank. I sent money from my European bank to a Vietnamese account yesterday. Including opening my banking app, selecting the amount and so on, maybe 60 seconds total for the money to leave my account and arrive in the VN account.

Well how wonderful for you to be part of a certain privileged subset of people whose banking is fully accessible, easily usable, flows smoothly and has no political obstacles binding it. There are many others for who this isn't the case and all shills, NFT hustlers and cryptobros aside, the basic functionality of cryptocurrencies allows an excellent, hard-to-block workaround of these possible problems that many people I personally know have used to save their own assess in countries such as Russia, Mexico, Venezuela and (oddly perhaps) Hong Kong.

I don't understand that logic in your counterargument (and it's common among many people who hate on crypto btw. I don't single you out on this). It amounts to, "I can do this in this way and I love it, so I'm going to shit on alternative means that others might have to use for doing the same thing because they can't use my method" Really?

as long as seamlessly means paying very high fees and waiting a ridiculously long time for the transfer to be confirmed..

and explaining crypto to your non technical grandmother in law who needs some cash to pay some bills in a foreign country

You can rob someone blind more easily than ever too!

You can do that for free and faster (and also transferring actual money, not virtual coins you need to re exchange at the end for real money to be able to anything in the real world)

Where and how exactly? I'm not a huge crypto fan, but what you're saying is generally a huge problem with FIAT, unless you are sending it to someone in the same country as you.

see PayPal, TransferWise, IBAN etc.

Have you used paypal extensively? Have you not read the MANY horror stories about its arbitrary blocks, lockouts, outright thefts of funds or at least months-long freezes and so forth? All of these things happen with many other corporate platforms. Sure, they also work for millions of people but it's good to at least have an alternative that can be called on for when things go bad or you live in a place where banking isn't as smooth as it often is in interconnected western countries. What's wrong with having that? One doesn't need to be an NFT hustler, cryptobro or shitcoin scammer to appreciate these basic benefits of a means of wealth transfer that it's very difficult for governments to control.

I actually haven't heard the horror stories but I have been using PayPal relatively extensively since at least 2007 and never ever had an issue. Aside from many retail purchases in the UK I've used it to send money around the world also. I'm also pretty sure TransferWise (now "Wise") works for sending money across most of the world. Plus the latter is regulated in the UK so I know that up to £85k is guaranteed by the government to be safe. I am one of the bigger critics of government yet I trust them a lot more than anyone in crypto. Sure they've done bad, but at least they've done some good too.

I'm definitely not a crypto hater, I have used several cryptocurrencies somewhat. I wouldn't call it that smooth, and I'd also worry significantly about the lack of regulation (despite that being one of the main selling points of crypto) and the wild volatility.

It’s also completely uninsured against losses.

My bank and fidelity can both go bankrupt and shutdown, but I’m still FDIC and SIPC insured, I’ll get all my money back.

Good luck with getting your money back from Celsius, Binance, and Coinbase.

I can mail someone a check in about a day or two for the price of a greeting card, and for about fifteen bucks a formal wire transfer. The issues around payments in the USA are due to policy, not technical issues.

Everything is crashing.... Good luck

While my portfolio is -15% YTD overall, BTC is -33% in a week.

It's not even remotely comparable. I even have some stuff (Shell) that have done really well actually.

Despite inflation, US dollar is strengthening, defense stocks are doing great. And commodities are also up and rising. I-Bonds are yielding 9%+ and TIPS are doing good.

You just gotta know how to navigate a bear market.

BTC is up 800% over the past 5 years. S&P 500 is up 53%.

Tulips were up once too.

And currency was once backed by commodities.

Currency did and has its uses unlike Crypto which is running on promises. And everyone hates promises in Javascript.

Approximately nobody hates promises in Javascript.

You need to round that value down a bit, like, every minute. Or manipulate the time frame.

'Just zoom out bro' doesn't account for the rise of stablecoins in the past 2 years.

The majority of people who joined the cryptocoin world are underwater.

The majority of people who joined the stock market world, within the past year, are also underwater.

An article did a what if you bought just before each major stock crash.

Turns out you still did really well.

https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2014/02/worlds-worst-market...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9caen6S_dA

I bought my SHEL in January. +20% actually. I'm not even someone who timed it that well, I know somebody talking about how oil was oversold in 2020 when the price of oil hit negative $40 and bought into the exact valley.

Even then: SHEL is kind of a bad bet. I was expecting that Europe would try to be more dependent upon European oil, but it turns out that American Oil (XOM) was the real winner of the Ukraine / Russia conflict.

I've also bought into TIPS / I-Bonds as this inflation thing is getting worse. Hopefully those do well in the coming months (or maybe not, they're more of an "inflation hedge", in that I know they'll do good if inflation goes bad. No, not the "crypto" kind of hedge, I mean something that's _ACTUALLY_ tied to inflation and does better-and-better the worse inflation gets).

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The key in these times is to remember what does good during recessions and war. And keep your wits about you as well. There's plenty of good buys if you know where to look.

All those cryptobros buying in 2020 or 2021 for "inflation hedge" have their moment to prove their theories today. My inflation hedge, TIPS/I-Bonds, are yielding 9% right now. How well are your cryptos doing?

What a junk choice of headline! Ugh.

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