I’m not defending this catastrophe (which seems like it was partly an execution by a rival), but this kind of comment is just bizarre on hacker news in the world of tech companies and startups. Age is not a good proxy for competence.
Several Alameda employees worked at JS, which is by far one of the most successful quant firms out there and they only hire the best. He also exploited a very creative arbitrage to start the firm, which is also not a fluke.
Then again, I would expect no less since the people on here constantly complain about leetcode interviews and "not wanting to interview for big tech for XYZ random reasons" when I know damn well they couldn't pass even if you gave them the answer.
The outliers are great and make this site worth it, but on some topics (of which crypto is one) they’re hard to find.
- Blockchain's main innovation is solving the double spend problem in a decentralized way.
- This means that self-custody is a new capability.
- Self-custody without a centralized authority is a big deal and can empower users (especially those in hostile countries or places with bad currencies).
- There's an extension of this with smart contracts and ethereum that allow for programmatic uses which can extend to completely transparent decentralized finance.
- zk-SNARKs allow for privacy to exist within the above systems.
That people don't self-custody because they don't understand how it works (and terrible UX) is a real problem and why most people should not be using cryptocurrency. They can still get screwed by regular collapses of fiat currency (and they do often), but they won't be helped by increasing their risk with something they don't understand.
The centralized exchange failures are independent of this and arguably a symptom of how centralized finance can cause problems because people don't self-custody funds. Your reasons dismiss the new capabilities they provide (self-custody, protection from government debasement of value, global use) and are an example of the type of HN response I'm talking about.
The only enticing quality of blockchain to finance is just elimination of transaction fees on a more open ledger.