Hacker News Reader

Comment by paywallasinbeer | Hacker News Reader

For anyone else enjoying the crypto meltdown, might I suggest the subreddit /r/buttcoin? It's quite enjoyable.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/

It gets old quick. I remember joining when bitcoin was around $100 and it looks exactly the same now as it did back then.

> It's quite enjoyable.

Not really, it's full of people hating and insulting and pretty much comparable to the average crypto bro subreddit.

Even if it is trolling - that's orders of magnitude less harmful to society than a subreddit that offers dangerous financial advice.

Also less harmful than promoting the latest single waste of energy the world has ever seen… yet.

where are they promoting war?

Except we have nothing to sell you.

After looking at it for a moment, it's equally delusional as /r/cryptocurrency.

I'm enjoying the meltdown because it flushed out those who believed in nonsense like 'This isn't even close to what will be the all time high' [0] 'Doge to $1 by September 2021' [1], etc. Where are they now?

I won't be surprised to see Bitcoin go lower than $10K. This is before regulations and the Tether scam collapsing.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26840923

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27046019

> After looking at it for a moment, it's equally delusional as /r/cryptocurrency.

There can be some serious discussion there but it's first and foremost a joke subreddit. Without knowing what you're labeling delusional, there's a good chance it's meant to be taken with a sense of irony.

A joke sub wouldn't have a detailed guide for how to productively disagree with its followers:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/p8uv0h/helpful_gu...

Be careful not to get snared by Poe's Law.

I don’t think tether is going to collapse. The money is there and the demand is high.

Nobody is trading suitcases of fiat bills behind closed doors anymore, it’s all in USDT.

Can you point to a source for "the money is there"?

Nothing surrounding Tether passes the smell test.

theyve been telling us crypto has been melting down and bursting and dying for a many years, its still here. my bet is that itll still be here in ten years and theyll still be posting on buttcoin.

seems much more interesting to explore, hack, risk, and learn by playing with crypto, id much rather to that than post "bitcoin ded" for a decade.

prices go up and down, culture persists.

Celebrating another person's failure is for small minds.

What would you call "have fun staying poor"?

We all do it pretty much all the time.

Whether we're talking about hostile governments we don't like. Companies we don't like. Groups of people we don't like. We make jokes about them all the time.

It's just crypto's turn.

No need to go there when 99% of HN comments provides the same material. And I wouldn't call it enjoyable. The comments are the same as when Bitcoin was $100. Frankly, I'd call it ignorant.

Off topic, but that subreddit logo is patrician.

Why would u enjoy people losing their life savings? Just because they told you to have fun staying poor on the way up?

I think people can be interested in how something plays out without “ enjoy people losing their life savings”.

I don’t mind seeing some of the pyramid schemes and such revealed for what they are.

I like to think everything plays out and for a while more people don’t risk and loses their money and maybe some bad guys go to jail even.

I don't think anyone should act hateful to anyone else. However, seeing that specific bubble deflate though, and a return to, I don't know, sanity, is a welcome change. It's just a shame that so many people have to suffer though as a part of that process.

It’s also, quite frankly, the market reallocating economic decision making power. After a decade of beanstalk economics, it’s reassuring to see the system at least attempting to correct itself.

I have no sympathy for the people losing money. For the young people who invested precious years into what increasingly looks like an economically useless skill set, I feel badly. That said, those who picked up technical or sales chops can likely pivot to a position above the median American’s wages.

People with crypto coins needs other people to be willing to buy them at higher price just slightly later. They keep exploiting fomo for their own gain. I don't think this is moral and a bit of karma is always welcomed.

This isn't necessarily true. A lot of people have held crypto since you could purchase it for single digit American dollars because they believe in the fundamental tenants of crypto - permissionless world financial exchange where the levers and dials of the economic systems are not controlled by world governments.

If they believed in crypto as a unit of financial exchange, wouldn't they be actually using it for transactions instead of going full-HODL?

Cuyrrently (and at a few points in the past) it's a little hard because the value of crypto is fluctuating so wildly but a lot of early adopters have continuously been using and advocating adoption of crypto for a decade now.

The moment Target start accepting Bitcoin/Lightning payments, yes, I'll be buying all my groceries via that thank you.

It is probably true that 99.9% of people with crypto use it as a speculative investment. The remaining 0.1% true crypto idealist may exist, but I have never met one. So it makes the previous statement very much mostly true.

This type of disingenuous argument is why some of us rejoice at the crypto meltdown.

Most people in crypto I know like crypto and the cool tech it is developing, and also want to make money. What is wrong with that?

There's nothing wrong with wanting to make money. The problem is that many (most? the vast majority?) of the ways to make money with crypto are basically pyramid scheme-type scams.

Pleased to meet you jpambrun!

I am one of those 0.1% idealists.

Can you name me a single good or service priced in BTC? If it's not a unit of account it can't be a store of value.

My mate bought some beers for 87k sat the other day. A family member spent 40k sats on groceries a few months ago.

I’m actually tracking it for art

As am I!

Same with most company shares

You are wrong. No value can be added to crypto except through fiat deposit. Publicly traded companies create value by their activity. For example, if I own a share of AT&T, the value of that share goes up if AT&T runs a successful marketing campaign to get new users to sign up.

Crypto has no utility and no underlying value.

Not quite! Shares of AT&T go up because people spend fiat on buying them. The activity makes it a more attractive buy, but unless the company buys back it’s own shares they don’t go up when they make money. It’s not magic, it’s a market like anything else.

Note: AT&T is a dividend share, so it has yield. Cryptocurrencies generally don’t, they are more like tech stocks. Amazon shares don’t go up when Amazon makes money (unless they spend earnings on stock), or the market buys more Amazon stock.

That's not the full story. A company's share price drops when it pays a dividend - because it now has less money. So when a company makes money its share price does go up.

SharePrice = CompanyValue / NumberOfShares

Now it's true that trading activity can affect the share price too, for example a short squeeze. But this is due to market taking advantage of a desperate buyer rather than anything to do with the company's performance as such.

I think it is the full story. Company performance is the driver, but it doesn’t set the price. It not right to say it’s irrelevant, it is, but the most important thing is what the market is willing to pay.

The dividend price drops occurs only because the market believe this and reduces the price of their orders. It’s driven by the market responding to the loss of cash, the fact the cash was spent cannot impact share price unless there is buying and selling. The company doesn’t set the share price except for IPO.

It is compounded by Dividend Reinvestment Programs, where the dividends end up buying more stock.

Additionally, I think your equation is wrong. Company Value = assets - liabilities.

Market cap = n shares * price.

Market cap != company value.

Big tech stock is very similar to cryptocurrency. It’s all about the greater fool who will buy it from you.

> It not right to say it’s irrelevant, it is, but the most important thing is what the market is willing to pay

That's what he's saying, just he's a step ahead of you. Why is the market willing to pay that much? Because that is what they see the company being worth in the future. Repeated studies consistently the correlation between stock price and future returns to investors when adjusted for other factors that might shift value away from the investor (eg, bad governance, risk, etc). There is no predictor that is better (this is important part - its comparisons against other indicators when trying to predict the future - bc predicting the future is kind of difficult).

> Additionally, I think your equation is wrong.

market cap is forward looking. balance sheet value is backwards looking. market cap is also a guess on how much is returned to investors and not taken by other factors - legal, illegal, intended, or unintended.

Viewing the market as irrational is essentially an anti-science stance - its religious. There is no way to prove that belief wrong because people just keep saying its being irrational when it disagrees with their valuation.

And I would feel the same if a massive amount of people were pushing for it, were deceptive and exploitative about it.

There's a subreddit for that too!

https://old.reddit.com/r/gme_meltdown/

Yes! GME stock was exactly the same and just as scummy. Thanks for pointing that out.

Shares have dividends and represent a share of ownership of the underlying book value. The book value of a bitcoin is $0. Shares also come with a vote.

> Just because they told you to have fun staying poor on the way up?

I mean, yes? The level of hubris so many crypto bros exhibited was truly incredible. And if that weren't enough the negative externalities (the truly shockingly wasteful nature of proof-of-work mining, the diversion and scalping of GPUs) should make anyone glad that the bubble burst.

Because you’d have to be a real dumbass to actually put your life savings in crypto.

When I first bought crypto, I put in just enough that if I were to lose it all, it would mean one vacation less and a fewer more meals at home for a few months.

The returns are absurd enough that a $10k investment can be life changing. Anything beyond that is just greed and stupidity.

>Because you’d have to be a real dumbass to actually put your life savings in crypto.

Not all the scams are that obvious. Once a company has a lot of money, it is assumed they have some stability. Celebrity endorsements don't hurt either. There were even stadiums named for the stuff. And Stablegains said in large print that the investments were diversified while the small print said they were putting everything into Luna and would diversify later.

$10k can’t even buy a car. I don’t know where you are in this crazy world but where I but $10k isn’t life changing, it’s more like a month of fancy dinners.

I guess I’m a real dumbass. :-)

he said the *returns* can be life-changing, not the investment.

some people 100xed on crypto

Some even did better than that ;-)

My life is completely unchanged. I still work everyday.

I work everyday too. But not having debt and enough cash cushion to do nothing for years gives you a sense of freedom and confidence that can help you make life changing decisions.

True. I was able to make riskier investments knowing that I would be able to eat if things went badly.

I’m just waiting for the collapse of civilization now myself.

most who were active during 2018-19 before the current run 1000xed. Many lost 80% of that but are still wildly in profit.

Most of the good traders I know managed to cash out 30-90x. All within two years.

For a lot of people, losing $10K is life-changing

$1.50 can also be life changing when someone does something stupid over it.

Ahh, I see you just watched "Web of Make Believe" too.

It's a common human trait to enjoy when bad things happen to bad people, and crypto bros are the worst.

Maybe because crypto is burning enormous amounts of fossil fuels at a time when humans are literally destroying the biosphere and for 90% of people involved their motivation is speculation and greed (get rich) not technology or real world applications.

So you finally got to the root of human nature, you're clearly disappointed, and this is your response?

Being happy at the prospect of reduced energy consumption is a reasonable and appropriate response.

That greedy people took a high risk investment in something purely speculative and lost money is inconsequential..

Always sad to see, but these people actively perpetuated falsehoods about things like regulation. Go look at a celsius thread on reddit when NY said it must cease operations in NY.

>Just because they told you to have fun staying poor on the way up?

Yes. Frankly these people need to have a check to their egos.

Mocking people who just want a return on an investment but don't understand what cryptocurrencies are and falling prey to arseholes (correctly) assuming they are a Greater Fool is definitely in bad taste.

But the people who went "Line goes up, stay poor, I am very smart" despite the warnings they were engaged in a scam... yeah, I have no sympathy for them. They're the get rich quick, fuck you I got mine libertarians who deserve to be taken down a peg or two.

If they banked their future on libertarian magic beans fueled by wasting a mid-sized country worth of power e-waste, and each time you mentioned the obvious flaws in their half-baked schemes they made fun of you, implying that you're 'not going to make it' and telling you to have 'fun staying poor' -- yep, a little. In the abstract of course.

When this crypto thing turned into a ponzi scheme, it was already guaranteed that many people would lose everything. We can only hope it collapses earlier so there are fewer victims.

It was never anything else

Bitcoin's original goals and a ponzi scheme both require collective belief in a fiction, but they are distinct fictions.

Bitcoin requires its users collectively believe it has value and others will accept it for some value - this is necessary in order for mining to be profitable thus hashing power be dedicated to protect the blockchain.

A ponzi scheme requires that more people will be buying in at increasingly higher prices.

Notice the former does not assume anything about constantly rising prices. The original vision of Bitcoin actually works better if the price itself remains stable (not rising).

A fall in price doesn't mean that people are losing their savings. They might be short and thus gaining savings.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com