Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

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Lots of noise in the crypto space and the HN comments are always bad.

BTC and ETH are the interesting and worth putting a small percentage of your holdings into (BTC [0] as an international store of value that has benefits over gold, ETH as the core programmable token that backs anything that stores stuff on chain to manage decentralized state). Vitalik is earnest and his writing is pretty great. Everything else I'd probably avoid (except to play with). ZCash's privacy protections are pretty cool. Outside of that risk is extremely high. Lots of bad actors, but also a pretty cool new technology with a new capability for self-custody. If someone tells you you can make 20% risk free returns, they're lying to you.

I feel bad for people that lose everything making dumb bets. It's why all the institutional investor rules exist. It's why there are restrictions on trading with leverage. Still, it's annoying that I'm prevented from making bets (or investing in startups) because of people like this. I understand the purpose of the regulations and clearly there's a need, but it's still annoying.

[0]: https://www.matthuang.com/bitcoin_for_the_open_minded_skepti...

[1]: https://vitalik.ca/

Somewhat related this article was pretty interesting: https://www.lynalden.com/what-is-money/

They are both volatile and unpredictable, any investment could easily be wiped out in a day or week, and there is the added challenge of having to maintain and secure one’s own keys and use privacy preserving tools and techniques.

But if you are OK with all that, ETH and BTC are fine investments for those seeking to self-manage a high risk high reward portfolio, and ofc. for only a small percentage of net wealth

but I would argue against BTC on the grounds of PoW energy waste - keeping your portfolio greener - and the fact that ETH is able to achieve the same international digital-gold-like properties but with better cryptographic tech, interoperability and privacy features. It is hard to see the long term 10 years BTC thesis - maybe only scenario where it continues to surpass ETH is if PoS proves to be an untenable consensus mechanism.

BTC is simpler and more static which I think is an advantage for long term store of value. PoW also has advantages on that front too. I think the environmental concerns are generally overblown and don’t matter.

> BTC and ETH are the interesting and worth putting a small percentage of your holdings into

Extremely no. It's FOMO and no real value all the way down.

I used to think Vitalik was earnest as well. I was an ETH believer up until a few years ago. My distrust in him was the crack that in the end spread and became a distrust in ETH.

I'll just provide 2 sources for this, fossuser, and then you can judge for yourself. Cause I just feel bad if someone else trusts someone I know to be intellectually dishonest at times.

[0] https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pos-still-pointless/ (Vitalik being intellectually dishonest in his responses, which is proven by Paul in his follow-up article)

[1] https://twitter.com/adam3us/status/1273353652447608834

> BTC and ETH are the interesting and worth putting a small percentage of your holdings into

At what price?

Probably any price for now, but psychologically easier when it’s down.

If BTC does become a real international settlement layer then it’ll be worth a lot. It’s basically an asymmetric bet on that (which is why small % is good enough).

Similar for ETH being the default for programmable token.

>ETH

Which ETH? As far as I understand the currency keeps forking and rewinding every now and then because whatever safety features it provides to "smart" contracts are widely insufficient and the resulting buggy mess falls over the moment a sufficiently motivated script kiddy so much as sneezes into its general direction.

It only happened once, so hardly "every now and then".

Programmable money is a useful feature and ETH has won that space. It doesn’t mean it’s not high risk or easy.

The one hard fork was fine imo - it’s probably good to have an extreme case community fallback when there’s serious abuse. BTC is the counter to that and why I think it’s good as a store of value long term (rather than just holding ETH).

Monero is far better than ZCash privacy wise since it's privacy by default. It really is the closest to money, which was Bitcoin's original purpose, not the silly store of value only that just translates to a purely speculative asset.

Monero is security through obscurity- it’s not better.

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