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Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

I just can't see how crypto can recover tbh. What other technology spent ten years, produced basically nothing of value, is almost universally hated by the whole population and then came back to be something useful?

It's not like quantum computing where we just don't know how to make it work. There are close to no technical problems, the core idea just doesn't work.

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almost universally hated by the whole population

Can you source that? It feels to me like a gross exaggeration. Anecdotally I know more people that are passionate about it or just don't care than anyone who really hates it.

8% of (American) people have a positive view, 43% have a negative view. The rest don't care or are neutral. So although not a majority, it's pretty close.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/07/just-8percent-of-americans-h...

Public majority have no way of understanding anything important. Even it's good for their health or wealth etc. So many historical example out there.

Thanks for sharing that poll.

25% --> 45% since March. I'd be interested in seeing how those numbers fit into the context of longer term sentiment (eg. over the course of several years). I wonder how much it fluctuates year to year and what degree the emotion reflected in those surveys is influenced by prices at any given time (eg. inclination to be more upbeat when prices are going up).

It would be more interesting if anyone would still care about 2022 ( % wise)

I suspect NFTs probably have even worse numbers

At the bottom of the article:

"Negative views on crypto come at the same time as the public has soured on stocks. Just 26% say now is a good time to invest in equities, down two points from last quarter's survey and the most pessimistic level registered in the 15-year history of the survey. 51% say it's a bad time to invest, the third highest in the survey's history, bested only by the downbeat results of the prior two surveys."

It's an example of Base-Rate neglect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy

Often done in media due to a bias they are attempting to confirm. Almost all financial assets are down, and not appealing to retail investors. Negative news gets clicks.

Certainly not the whole population, but when SNL makes a joke about sitting at Holiday dinner and having to listen to so-and-so’s boyfriend talk on and on about Crypto, that’s got to be a sentiment that resonates with a lot of people

I could be lead to believe that if my main source of information were HN comments.

You want to take a quick poll on HN? Nearly everyone who comments here (me included) passionately hate seeing hucksters defraud the general public.

Imagine thinking an industry worth $800B, with 200M users, transferring billions of dollars a day, is "hated by the whole population". You really live in a bubble

200M even if accurate is still a drop in the bucket considering almost every person knows all about crypto at this point and the general sentiment on the street is that its filled with gambling, scammers, and environmental destruction.

Crypto valuations are also complete bullshit considering how much "wealth" is alt coins with no liquidity. I could easily create a multi trillion dollar market cap coin in a weekend. Doesn't mean shit.

> worth $800B, with 200M users, transferring billions of dollars a day

None of these statements are true. All of them (especially when it comes to monetary values) are wishful thinking.

Made up numbers. You can't just sum up fictional "market caps", number of unique wallet addresses and wash trades to conclude it must be doing amazing.

Imagine thinking an industry worth $0.00 is worth $800B. You really live in a bubble

The crypto "industry" is a set of people selling Pet Rocks to each other

For those 200M I'd like to see an independent source before I believe it. Or are you trying to claim 1 wallet = 1 user or something?

When it comes to money moved: the top 1% in the US possess more wealth than the whole middle 60% of income distribution combined.

So if you believe that moving a lot of money inherently implies broad adoption in the population you live in a very small bubble far away from reality.

https://www.coinbase.com/about claims 108M verified users so 200M overall is not that absurd. That doesn't mean that all these users own significant amounts in crypto though.

You can't go out and buy a loaf of bread with bitcoin, how is it supposed to be worth $800B?

> an industry worth $800B

According to https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/ the market cap you're referring to was $2.4T at some point in the last year, now down to the number you're quoting. With such variability, it's hard to trust this number as being anything intrinsic to the actual value of the industry.

From this link, FTX alone seems to be correlated with a fall of almost $200B in market cap, down from $1T to a bit more than $800B. If Tether eventually collapses as many even within the cryptocurrency world expect it will, how low will this number go? What about other shady companies in this space?

It's really hard to put a floor on this market cap, as opposed to regular companies that can always be sold for parts, so as a coarse approximation, they should at least be worth their assets minus their liabilities. Given that we don't even know the liabilities of actors such as Binance and Tether, we can do no such computation here.

It’s easy, the floor is the sum the value of the parts. So approximately $0.

The core idea does not work for many, if not most, of the things people have promised it can work for -- but that's very different from "doesn't work."

I'd say it's still a pretty strong contender not for "cash in hand" but for a better "money in your mattress."

So the only use cases so far are pleasing paranoid schizos, ransomware, and scams?

Cash in your mattress is likely much safer than in your bitcoin wallet.

What if I can’t decide which is better so I further diversify into both?

That's it. What you lose in safety due to price volatility you gain in worrying less about your house broken into and not knowing how flammable your mattress is.

Haha I love that’s great, I might borrow that explanation

Sure, if you're ok with the money in your mattress losing 66% of its value in one year, as happened to BTC.

That's why I didn't say money in the bank? Possibly volatile, but a hedge-slash-gamble against whatever screwiness is going on with other forms of money.

Why on earth would anyone keep “money” in a mattress that their government will not accept for payment of their debts. Wild logic.

It's almost as if there are other parties with whom you have may want to have money transactions other than governments.

MLMs like Amway are still around though. Crypto operates like an MLM in many ways.

It's weird, tokenomics is both feature and bug. Tokens incentivise hosting nodes and the ponzi nature of crypto solves the network-effect cold start problem (eg drivers and riders on Uber)

Imagine if there were some token attached to Mastodon, maybe we'd all have ditched Twitter already.

I liked Moxie's post about how no one wants to build servers. Maybe a next gen crypto that is peer oriented and works on mobile is key.

Not a maxi or mini but definitely find that some interesting phenomena have played out through crypto beyond "just" speculation

> is almost universally hated by the whole population

Haters do not move the market at all, unless they are willing to short the coins. Only the participants, whatever their intentions are, move the market.

Eventually to sustain the value, crypto has move past hype and be actually used for something. If regular people won't use it to buy coffee or store money, eventually the trading bots shuffling billions of imaginary tokens around won't cut it.

Social approbation is missing from your calculation, and is very powerful. When you don’t get invited to social events anymore because of crypto, that is the haters moving the market.

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