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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

There are no "common people" in this scenario. Just different groups of gamblers with different levels of knowledge and foresight. Hard to feel sympathy for anyone who loses money in crypto at this point.

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But some gamblers have a larger share of the total market(lets call them whales), and are therefor incentivized to coordinate their actions with other whales. They also have more resources to acquire information on the market that may give a competitive advantage. Whereas commoners tend to discuss in common areas, and they don't have enough of a share of the market to move the price through coordinated action.

Polls have shown >20% of people have traded or used cryptocurrencies [1]. Clearly there are common people in the space.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/31/cryptocurrency-news-21percen...

I'd love to see that number broken down. I expect it to be mostly "used cryptocurrencies", not traded them, and those cryptocurrencies to be mostly BTC and ETH, possibly XMR, but not some utility token of an exchange.

Oh interesting, I kind of assumed it was investing just because it's easy to open a Coinbase account and buy $20 of Bitcoin. It's pretty involved to set up a wallet, send crypto, and then do something with it. Web3 is not particularly user friendly.

Darknet markets did make it pretty easy, and often had instructions to use e.g. anycoin direct to send cash straight to your market balance to then order drugs or alien artefacts or whatever with, so you "use" BTC or XMR (and the electrum-style slim wallets made things somewhat easy). Plus there was the whole hype of cryptokitties and NFTs etc which would bring you into contact with ETH.

The number of Americans having any money invested in the stock market in any form (i.e. including 401k, mutual funds etc) peaked at 60%. I'd be surprised to see people trading/investing in crypto to be > 3%, but who knows. Annoying that they just have these broad questions. "Have you, at any time in your life, ever eaten solid food or murdered a president?"

Yeah i know quite a few people who have bought drugs online with crypto but don't trade/invest in it. For the majority of people it's just not on their radar.

Common people gamble all the time.

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