Comment by churchill | Hacker News Reader

Comment by churchill | Hacker News Reader

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Crypto is pitched as a decentralized alternative to central bank currencies. Which, I think, is a great idea, especially with CBDCs (which are really going to be the catalyst for fascism on steroids, especially in quasi-democracies) on the horizon.

My biggest problem with crypto is that most people who buy and hold it are not truly libertarians looking to scale up usability in the space. They're really just gamblers who want their investment to go to $1M per bitcoin so they can convert to fiat (the irony) and retire to the Bahamas and life the big life.

Otherwise, why does the entire industry keep banging on about $100K EOY?

And I won't begrudge you that, after all, it's your money, isn't it?

But until crypto makes a hard pivot from being a speculative investment to an ecosystem encouraging day-to-dy usage, I just don't believe it has any long-term usage.

In addition, I think Zuckerberg had an extremely brilliant idea when he wanted to make a stablecoin tied to a basket of currencies - it's be stable enough to use on a day-to-day basis, and it'd still be a crypto, at least theoretically.

That's the thing with decentralization, since anyone can participate you will always get a bunch of gamblers because most people are not in it for ideology but rather to make a buck. That's just human nature. Is it possible to create incentives to keep the gamblers way? I haven't come across any great ideas so far.

It's actually worse than that. The entire selling point of crypto is that it's an ungoverned unregulated financial wild west. That makes this space very attractive for people who want to do things that would be more difficult in a regulated environment where actions have legal consequences; and the more such actors enter the space, the more people who do not want to be around such actors leave. So eventually you end up with a population of half a dozen confused normies and a gazillion scammers and gamblers.

It's exactly the same effect as evaporative cooling of online social groups: if you don't set boundaries, trolls kicked out of places that do gather in your space and people who don't like being in such a space leave, until your space is nearly all trolls and one morning you wake up to find you've made a *chan again.

What makes you believe the 'true libertarians looking to scale up usability' are not also gamblers?

The argument goes both ways - a lot of people investing on the stock market are also gamblers betting that their investments will go to the moon. The only difference is that a lot of non-performing companies get culled before they IPO or shortly after. And after a company lists, the market tends to (although not always) re-value it accordingly.

So, of course they'll be gamblers in crypto and every new field - what matters is for there to be a critical mass of builders making things that can be used on a day-to-day basis vs. those trying to hitch a ride on the bandwagon.

Because when a smart guy like the OP does it, it's not a gamble, it's investing.

I never said that. Theoretically, every investment is a gamble in a sense. After all, we've seen high-flying companies crash and burn overnight. FTX is not the first, nor will it be the last. Even high-fliers like Apple were quite close to collapsing sometime in the past, yet people still poured money into them.

The only difference is that they focused on shipping products people actually wanted to buy.

All I'm saying is that the gambling should be backed up by a significant amount of work aimed at usability, call it a high signal-to-noise ratio, if you will.

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