Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

The Stock Market, S&P 500, is down 20% year-to-date (6-months).

BTC is down 33% *in a month*. Its not even remotely comparable. YTD, its below 60%.

--------

I got some buddies in Celsius right now. Has there ever been a circumstance in "the stock market" where you've been unable to access your funds for a week, with _NO_ contact from the CEO or an explanation of what the hell is going on?

EDIT: Whatever happened to "inflation hedge" and "store of value" promises from the community by the way? No one in the stock market promised those things. But as inflation ticked up to 9%, BTC completely collapsed.

View on HN

>The Stock Market, S&P 500, is down 20% year-to-date (6-months).

A more apples to apples comparison would be comparing crypto market to tech stocks. In which case yes there are valid comparisons.

Its not very surprising that Cryptocoins would be correlated to GBTC (literally a pile of bitcoin trading as a stock), Coinbase (literally the exchange that does better when more volume happens), and TSLA (who bought a pile of BTC sometime last year).

Tech companies were playing with blockchain this past year, and are now getting burned. You've got cause-and-effect backwards here.

They're also correlated with other high-growth tech stocks like SNOW, TWLO, NET, DDOG, and other companies that don't have exposure to crypto. It's not necessary to engage in denial in order to trash crypto.

People were making equivalent accusations of vaporware when the dot com bubble burst but 20 years later and many winners have emerged from that era in addition to new ones.

I lost all my paper money at that time trading Ask Jeeves. The Dot-com bubble was my "test run", when I was learning stocks, paper-trading, and getting into finance. I very much was alive during that time.

If you didn't live during that time, then you wouldn't know anything of that era. Yahoo was the #1 search engine. No one cared much about Google. Amazon was a book store.

Ebay was far bigger than Amazon for general purpose goods. Webvan was your hope at making the internet mainstream. Etc. etc.

The biggest "internet" company was either AOL or Netscape IMO. Neither of them really the winner over the next 20 years.

---------

If you lived in that era, you would know just how unlikely it was that you'd have picked Amazon or Google out of the ashes.

Chances are, you would have been caught up with Enron and Worldcom's schemes, just like everyone else was.

It’s extremely comparable. Take a time-series of VTI (all US stock index) against BTC or ETH. It’s very highly correlated since November. Crypto prices have what is called “high beta”. Very similar daily trends just a few orders of magnitude larger.

The beta is infinite since crypto has no book value

I didn't mean literally that it will move by the same amount of %. Stock markets down -> crypto down. Stock market up -> crypto up.

The swings in crypto are just bigger, just like swings are bigger in stock market than in bonds.

Celsius hiring Akin Gump wasn’t explanation enough?

You can rest assured that I appropriately warned him. I personally took the Luna/UST situation to talk to him about fake APYs, risks, and why anyone offering more than the risk-free rate (~3% US Bonds) is making some kind of risk (just as the laws of physics prove that perpetual motion doesn't exist, the laws of finance prove that risk-free rates _above_ the risk free rate are non-existent).

In any case, Celsius has managed to convince a lot of people that their 10% or 20% APY stablecoins and "staking platform" was risk free. Sometimes, these people need to have their own money burned, before they believe in the potential of risk.

----------

I don't know anything about internet celebrity figures. But I do know a thing or two about risk-free rates and reasonable return rates.

Akin Gump is a large law firm.

Oh. The timeline is messed up then.

Celsius locked everyone's accounts on Monday, _BEFORE_ hiring those bankruptcy law firms.

By the time you heard the news of the bankruptcy lawyers, it was already too late. Your funds were locked.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com