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Comment by workingon | Hacker News Reader

None of it has ever happened before during a recession. Crypto basically didn’t exist the last time the world had one. Being religious and so sure about the way something is going to turn out should be a warning sign to the self.

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> None of it has ever happened before during a recession

We are not currently in a recession.

If we get into a recession in the next quarter or two, there's no harm done to crypto. The market is headed into bear territory regardless of the macro economic climate.

I swear no one remembers 2017. Thousands of projects that raised billions of dollars died. No one cares. The market rebuilds itself every 3-5 years. This is absolutely no different.

Man, I have to respect your true believer attitude about the everlasting cyclical system that has existed within a single lifetime.

I believe it until the pattern stops. No other reason to believe people won't continue to be addicted to gambling.

You are correct that people will continue to engage in stupid gambling. The problem is they're not going to have gobs of cheap money to throw into it and get leveraged 100x on which drives a lot of the speculative value.

Cheap money will come back again also, at least within 3-5 years

What’s the argument for this? Do you think rates would drop again within 3-5 years?

Yes, because after correcting for irrational exuberance and the economy being in a holding pattern for 2 years all the next politician has to say is that they alone can fix the economy by lowering rates. They will then install a dummy head of the Fed that will play along.

Rolling over our current national debt at the current rates will make the debt servicing costs too high relative to tax income. So either rates cannot stay high indefinitely, or inflation will continue until debt is smaller compared to tax income. In both cases money becomes cheap. The average maturity on debt is 5 years which is where I got that time scale, but this is also in line with previous cycle lengths-- you can't find many times where the fed has waited longer to cut rates. Debt has also never been this high as a percent of GDP, so more pressure from that shouldead to faster policy changes.

Great! That means people will invest in cryptocurrency projects with good fundamentals and that deliver value, instead of the pure speculation that we've suffered until now.

It has literally happened once before, that does not mean it is going to revive again. What if we're at crypto saturation and the demand won't cover another crash?

2013, 2017/18 and now 2022. That's three times total, two times before.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say a lot has changed in cryptocurrency since 2013

2013 isn’t even close to the first time crypto recovered from dead.

I have no idea if it's true, but it seems like people are writing about contagion within crypto, as if it is more substantial than last time, and worrying a little bit about it affecting the rest of the economy.

This game of lending crypto assets for ridiculous interest rates wasn't nearly as popular last time, was it?

> This game of lending crypto assets for ridiculous interest rates wasn't nearly as popular last time, was it?

- ICOs - DAOs - NFTs - Yield - Earn - Farming

etc. All of these can be ephemeral concepts within a single crypto bull cycle. Regardless of whether or not you think crypto is valuable, there's no denying people love money. So long as crypto remains unregulated there will always be bull markets imo.

We may currently be in a recession. The second quarter GDP numbers aren't out.

> None of it has ever happened before during a recession.

The 2020 Covid crash was a recession. A very short one, but also one of the most severe since the Great Depression. Bitcoin crashed from about $10,000 to $4,000 in the span of 3 weeks, before recovering and peaking at nearly $70,000.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/08/past-rece...

What might be correct to say is that bitcoin has never gone through stagflation, but that's a terrifying prospect for every person and asset class.

crypto could go away tomorrow and the impact on the economy would be tiny to nonexistent.

In and of itself, yes. But there's a real risk (far from a certainty, but a real risk) that it will cause some kind of crisis of confidence in the markets more broadly that could result in a much more catastrophic crash.

What people are entirely missing here is the massive economic indicators flashing that are preempting this crypto stuff. The US dollar is about to be devalued and take with it, the entire global economy. We're heading into a serious depression, not just a little 2008 recession here. $9-10 gal of gas by October and double of all goods and food prices likely by Sept-October time frame. The outlook is growing very bleak.

What do you base that claim on?

So if it didn't exist how can you be so sure about dismissing it? It literally is a new paradigm.

EDIT: nice to see all the luddites downvoting me. Guess the meme is true -- we still are early.

Investment fraud is not a new paradigm. Selling bags of nothing is not a new paradigm. Goes all the way back to the South Sea Company in 1711 [1].

I recommend reading Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds published originally in 1841 [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_Company

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Extraordinary-Popular-Delusions-Madne...

Extraordinary Popular Conclusions is also available for free from Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24518

I don't see it usually mentioned when people cite the South Sea Company, but their principal actual business was the slave trade.

There is something about a useless or immoral business that often excites greed beyond what anything beneficial to society can.

I'm not. Bitcoin could still MOON. I'm just saying you shouldn't be so sure either way with so much uncertainty.

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