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Comment by smcl | Hacker News Reader

I admire your optimism, but I can't get on board. It would be naive to deny the growth of cryptocurrencies over the last few years, but it seems like the people who were meant to make money have since cashed out, that everything's peaked and turned a corner and the general public have turned against it (due in no small part to a few many shitcoins, rugpulls, scams, BAYC, and a couple of defunct exchanges). I'm sure crypto will live on in some form, but it won't explode again like it did before. I don't know who is left to fuel the next bubble.

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Unfortunately I don't think the public will stay turned against it.

Pyramid and MLM schemes exist and thrive today despite widespread knowledge of them and how they work.

So I think shitcoins will have their day again, they'll just have new branding.

Finally, my time to jump on the bandwagon of wealth distribution

People talk about crypto cycles like they talk about metal cycles and I'm not sure how to distinguish the two (and that's why I'm not invested in either).

It's almost as if all publicly traded markets are ponzi-schemes on some level, but with better regulation.

On some level yes. If you're day trading.

But you are actually buying a slice of a company and its future earnings. With bitcoin what are you actually buying?

What are you actually buying while Forex trading?

(I'd really like to know. To me, BTC trading and Forex trading sound exactly the same.)

I mean on some level if you're doing this kind of trading then yeah BTC/ETH/etc trading is similar to trading real currencies. I think the difference is that the real currencies have a well-known utility at the moment - they're a means of exchange for goods and services. If you're selling EUR to someone, the chances are they're using that EUR to pay for these in the eurozone. If you're buying USD, you're also likely to need that to buy USD-denominated things.

If you're a forex trader, you're trying to make money from people's need to use these currencies.

If you're doing that for crypto, you're doing that but for people who are just also buying and selling crypto - not actual goods or services.

well if you extend the analogy between crypto coins and FX, a long-only strategy makes as little sense in crypto as FX. Why would I hold dollars or yen long-term, instead of investing in assets which are productive like equites or bonds.

Well I don't do Forex trading but you are buying a currency backed by a government. My understanding is it's closely linked to interest rates.

So you're buying into trust of that government. With BTC you're buying into trust of the technology and other network participants. Is it really so different? I don't trust governments so much - my local currency is currently facing 25% YoY inflation. I bought Bitcoin.

I wouldn't say trust. But an entire nation is required to accept it so there is a market for it. Plus with interest rates nations are paying you to hold it.

I don't do Forex trading so I'm not particularly defending it. The currency I hold is the one that has utility to me. It's the one I'm paid in, the one I pay taxes in. I don't particularly want it jumping up or down 100s of %. I want it to be stable.

If bitcoin is more stable than your local currency go for it, (although if inflation is 'only' 25% it still doesn't seem to meet that bar). But that says more about your currency than the bitcoin and it still doesn't make it an investment. Your case would seem to be better served by holding USD though.

My first post pointed out it wasn't a very good investment. You seem to be buying it as a store of value, but it isn't very good at that either. So all were left with is a distrust of government. But the cure is worse than the disease.

It's much simpler. People want $ for £ for education tourism etc. Successful forex traders are just middlemen for these txns. The make sure that you can always sell $ even if there is no one to buy them at that exact moment.

Well, and isn't it the same for BTC then? In the city where I live, there's tons of Bitcoin ATMs everywhere - and people using them, pretty clearly to go around their everyday business, as if it was a bank ATM.

Differences:

1. No one needs btc for education tourism etc. So there is no underlying demand that the general btc holder can middleman onto

2. You aren't supposed to hodl any kind of forex pair hoping it goes up forever.

Also I forgot to stress that forex is trading and not investment

These people I see around here need to go to a BTC ATM to have cash for the coffee stand right next to it. What's so different? The scale, OK, but anything else? Actually, people are buying land/houses and cars with BTC here, also the largest local web shop (a large EU seller too) - the local Amazon let's say - accepts it, and they claim it's used for a small but not insignificant chunk of the sales.

So most of those places instantly convert the btc into usd. Prices themselves are listed in USD and you have to pay some markup for USD conversion too. It's sell pressure on btc so bad in any case

That's a great point, yeah I guess this is generating sell pressure on BTC.

> it seems like the people who were meant to make money have since cashed out, that everything's peaked and turned a corner and the general public have turned against it

Every 4 years it looks like that. And yet the next greed fueled ascension comes around like a clock. Each next one smaller than the last one.

Next one will come around 2025 but this time it's going to be just few hundred percent.

Eh there might be another bump. But as long as it's a space for scammers, pump-and-dump schemes, shitcoins and bullshitters it's just not for me. A pretty ridiculous amount of money has been sunk into making cryptocurrencies look like a big thing, instead of actually solving the problems that prevented people from actually using them. That makes me think that deep down the cryptocurrency people aren't that serious about their projects becoming actual currencies, and that they simply see them as a way to get rich quick by selling something they know to be ultimately worthless. Quite a few people have gotten rich (hello, Do Kwon!) so there's a chance it could work for those founders. But as a potential end-user, nahh no thanks I've seen enough

The "space" for a cryptocurrency is a Venn Diagram solely occupied by one circle: Bitcoin. We're seeing a culling of these shitcoin also-rans, which took the money from the late-coming naive while enriching the early wave of speculators, like any other common pyramid scheme.

Amazing. When the crypto world get bored of minting apes and such maybe they'll try to actually bother to try making bitcoin into something that can be used day-by-day. I don't think they will though. I think it'll remain only a speculative asset whose price jumps erratically to-and-fro until people get bored and move on to the next shiny thing.

So you are opting out of Bitcoin because other cryptocurrencies exist?

My Coworker said this exact thing to me in 2019, that now was the time to buy because not many were talking about crypto and many had written it off, but that it worked in 4 year spikes. Wish I had listened to him then haha.

Best times to buy bitcoin was in 2011, 2015, 2019, 2022 ... roughly every 4 years. Exactly at the time HN thinks bitcoin is dead and burried.

And best times to sell (if you needed to sell) was in 2013, 2017, 2021 ... so I think the next time will be around 2025.

Every cycle swings less (in term of percentage change) so the next one will be just few hundred percent (troth to peak) and following ones even smaller till bitcoin will become yet another random walk asset like stocks.

Recognize that every two years for the past 10 years someone has posted basically the exact same thing as what you just posted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbZ8zDpX2Mg

If a snarky YouTuber doing the “this one time at bandcamp” voice is the best argument, I dunno what to tell you. To borrow his condescending tone, he is making the argument “you think line go down, but line go up!” the latter half of which is the title of Dan Olsen’s high-profile video of the cryptocurrency boom.

Unless it becomes practical to pay for something with cryptocurrencies (which for me should be the primary use case of any currency) they basically seem used by people who want to time buys and sells according to the current boom/bust or pump/dump cycle.

For millions of people, crypto-currencies are the most convenient way to buy lots of things. I've been buying things regularly with cryptocurrencies since 2011. Domain names, video games, hosting, consumer electronics, clothing, airfare, etc.

2017 marked a pivotal point where Bitcoin specifically abandoned catering to the brick and mortar and e-commerce use cases, and started focusing on large scale financial services. It was a frustrating development for sure, but people all over the world are using various smaller cryptocurrencies to buy groceries every day.

Cryptocurrencies might not be useful for you specifically, and that's fine. Maybe you're not one of the various under-served target demographics. Complaining about that though is a bit like complaining that Yen is useless because you live in the US and none of the businesses you frequent accept Japanese currency. It's undeniably a trillion dollar global economy that provides a massive amount of value to millions.

Well that's kind of a bad comparison, since Yen isn't my local currency and yet it has been useful to me when I was visiting Japan. I could buy it for a reasonable price in my current country, in basically any airport or bureau de change around the world. I could easily withdraw Yen from an ATM when in Japan, could buy things anywhere in the country with Yen and then switch back the couple-thousand I couldn't spend at Duty Free when I returned home.

Hearing that crypto may not be for me is quite surprising. It is advertised to me all over the place and the various stereotypical "cryptobros" seem curiously keen on people like me buying into the ecosystem, and appear to be very generously interested in helping me go "to the moon" etc. I've no idea how you're doing those things with crypto. I guess you have to go pretty far out of your way to buy, for example, airfare with a cryptocurrency or make otherwise really inconvenient trade-offs. I guess you might be semi-forced to use it due to, for example, living in a country with a currency which is more unpredictable than BTC then I think that's more of an black mark against the local currency than it is a feather in BTC's cap...

> I guess you have to go pretty far out of your way to buy, for example, airfare with a cryptocurrency or make otherwise really inconvenient trade-offs.

Eh, not that hard really. Expedia started accepting Bitcoin in 2014.

https://www.expedia.com/Checkout/BitcoinTermsAndConditions

> "cryptobros" seem curiously keen on people like me buying into the ecosystem, and appear to be very generously interested in helping me go "to the moon" etc

Yeah fuck those people. I've been in the space since 2009 and I've never once recommended to any friends or family to invest in cryptocurrencies, and in my experience, the vast majority of people in the space are the same way. The "get rich quick" types who treat all of life like one big MLM have always been reviled, but none of that is unique to cryptocurrencies. Shady hucksters and con men have always existed, and always will.

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