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Comment by oneoff786 | Hacker News Reader

The value of crypto to many people was the fact that other people were willing to give them dollars for it.

Seeing as stonks trade for often >40x the company's actual output, sounds pretty similar, doesn't it? Most coins should be worth a fraction of their traded value, and the same with Wall Street. The keyword is speculation that it will eventually catch up to its bullshit traded value. We learned that in 2008, and a lot of people lost their savings and the roofs over their children, then a few years later we completely forgot and now act like crypto invented the idea of trading bullshit.

Sure, it's kind of like really crappy penny stocks that are in danger of being delisted and probably doing fraud. But real companies have cashflows and assets, get audited by real auditors, hire real employees instead of teenage "anons", etc. It's actually pretty different!

Agreed. Shitcoins are like pennny stocks but not even audited or held to much scrutiny at all. It's more like investing in a github repo.

There are, however, plenty of real projects backed by real money with real employees, open books, and have proven resilient over these handful of years. If the economy gets pumped full of fakeass USD causing stonks and crypto to triple up, I'm not going to be one to say "Yeah that value is so real". My fave stonk Square (SQ) (I refuse to call it block), has net me several boatloads of money since day 1, and now it's dropped to only a couple boatloads. Does that mean it's now bullshit? No. It means the economy has a mind of its own and let's not pretend it makes much sense. It's more powered by emotion and guessing than actual worth.

> There are, however, plenty of real projects backed by real money with real employees, open books, and have proven resilient over these handful of years.

Citation needed, especially considering what’s been going on with BNB

Well, right. And real companies don’t just have cheer leaders on YouTube making videos of being on team “X-coin” and having tons of followers like a cult trying artificially prop up the value so they can dump it on sone sucker. It’s really amazing.

> Seeing as stonks trade for often >40x the company's actual output, sounds pretty similar, doesn't it? Most coins should be worth a fraction of their traded value, and the same with Wall Street.

Well for one “40x their output” is meaningless. Ideally stocks are valued at their expected net present value of future dividends; implicitly assuming it’s baked in for growth stocks.

Second, I don’t care at all what you think is overvalued. The question was “why was this thing valued without crypto fundamentals?” And the answer is because the market cares very little for those things.

> I don’t care at all what you think is overvalued

K that's the topic of this conversation.

Read again. The topic of this thread is “why do things have value”.

What is happening in crypto is that libertarian and other anti-“the system” nerds are just rediscovering scams and schemes from the 1800s.

If you don't count Bitcoin that's true.

Bitcoin is used as a tool against French colonial CFA Franc in Africa. A a lifeline to access the outside financial world for citizens of countries under sanction.

https://iharare.com/african-countries-are-no-strangers-to-th...

There's no mention of CFA Francs in that article? Also the bitcoin experiment that this article briefly talks about has since become a failure - though that's probably more on the incompetence of the rollout than bitcoin.

All of that added up to a trivial number of useful transactions which should be obvious when you consider how few transactions per day the protocol could handle globally and how expensive transaction fees often became.

>Bitcoin is used as a tool against French colonial CFA Franc in Africa.

That's a new one. Sure there are some crypto enthusiasts/ scammers (those are not necessarily the same people) trying to push some convoluted argument related to the CFA but this is super niche at best. And furthermore, if anyone would actually use crypto in the CFA area, it would be as a mean to circumvent the exchange control and acquire Euros/Dollars. That's not exactly fighting "colonial money", is it ?

The fact that some people have a valid use case does not refute my claim

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