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Comment by rippercushions | Hacker News Reader

It's almost as if crypto tokens are intrinsically worthless!

You can think that crypto is absolutely worthless. But then an exchange is like a casino, earning fees on other people's gambling. There's no reason for the casino to go bankrupt, unless...there's fraud going on.

Though that's not really the issue here. Obviously they were worth something to the people buying and selling them.

Crypto is worth something in that it can be sold at a higher price. USD is worth something in that at the point where it isn't you already have much bigger problems

Not really.

If I buy and sell a coin from myself with monopoly money for ever increasing prices - is it really worth anything?

Obviously there are some inflows into crypto. But it's about 0.00001% of the daily volume.

Yeah but that's not the situation. If you have a bitcoin you can sell it to another person for several thousand real US dollars. Even if you hate crypto it has that value to it. I mean re "about 0.00001%" I've bought and sold bitcoin myself and usually for actual money.

True there isn't much intrinsic value to the 0s and 1s making up a bitcoin but there aren't much to the the 0s and 1s making up the US$ or similar in your bank account.

They’re worth something today because people want them today. If they don’t have any real-world yield, that doesn’t make them worth anything tomorrow. As FTT just demonstrated, like so many have before.

Wait til you hear about how fiat works.

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