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Same. I’m one of those lucky few who had futzed with BTC in 2011 when it was almost brand new and then forgot about it till 2019 when it started spiking.

I spent two weeks digging through boxes and imaging hard drives before miraculously finding my wallet.dat from 2011 that I luckily hadn’t encrypted or even passworded lol.

Had 3.25btc in it (I remembered the .25. The extra 3 were a shock.). I ended up paying for my home down payment with it.

You shoulda seen my broker’s face when I showed up with almost entirely crypto to fund the mortgage. It took them several weeks to find a company who would be OK with crypto being fronted. I ended up having to come up with a way to prove it was mine which was fun. Had to back track through the blockchain tracking the history of the transactions, wallet address creation. Show I had the private keys etc. they finally accepted it as after a month of back and forth.

Then I didn’t cash out entirely when it spiked to $60k and now I am regretting that lol.

> shoulda seen my broker’s face...

That rigamarole could have been easily avoid by converting the crypto to cash, which is trivial to prove is yours.

Did they end up accepting the crypto directly, or as cash?

Edit: thanks for the clarification, I didn't realize the issue wasn't with possession so much as provenance.

I did convert it to cash. The problem is in the US you can’t suddenly have thousands of unexplained dollars when getting a mortgage or similar.

I guess I should have clarified: I didn’t directly give them crypto. I was using it to cash out and pay cash with. But I had to prove ownership.

You can use unexplained cash for mortgage in the US if you let it “season” for 60 days on your bank account.

Yes, but then it’s not considered unexplained anymore :)

Also I didn’t have the luxury of waiting.

If it's within 30 days in the US, there will still be an issue with provenance of funds.

Exacty.

> That rigamarole could have been easily avoid by converting the crypto to cash, which is trivial to prove is yours.

In US law this is a taxable event.

Paying for something with crypto is the same taxable event as converting it to cash. You can’t get out of that.

So you actually did get benefits of HODLing BTC, no? When it comes to crypto, I see people conflating 3 distinct buckets - a hard asset like BTC, legitimate projects like ETH and scams. Scams outnumber the first 2 buckets, but the first 2 buckets will provide more growth than stocks or bonds over the next 10 years.

Growth is a little bit of a weasel word here though and you'll be well advised to research the difference between multiple expansion and underlying growth.

In the world of stock, we don't like multiple expansion as it's a sign that prices go up on grounds that are hard to reason about. Things going up without reason tend to come down for the same reasons.

Crypto has _zero_ growth. Crypto companies, however, that's a different story.

But sure, I'm sure you'll be right about what you perceive to be growth. There are still millions of gullible and half smart people waiting to get on board.

To me, price increase is a good proxy for growth and I believe in both BTC and ETH to appreciate more than S&P500 over the next 10 years.

Why is it a good proxy for growth? What do you base that on?

Are you familiar with the term Deflationary Asset?

> Why is it a good proxy for growth? What do you base that on?

Because buyers are valuing them more and more and not just in words but by actually with their money?

> Are you familiar with the term Deflationary Asset?

Yes. I also believe BTC will outperform gold over the next 10 years (both of those are deflationary assets).

Right. They are paying more for the same thing. This is inflation and it's not something we like. You get less BTC for your money.

Where is the growth?

> You get less BTC for your money.

Or, you get more USD for your BTC.

> Where is the growth?

In the amount of USD one can purchase with their bitcoins? Literally, that's what this whole subthread is about where someone used their long held bitcoin to do a downpayment. The growth in USD price of a bitcoin is what helped them do that.

I think we need to look at this from the perspective of a society and ask ourselves what else we could have done. Obviously there are a whole lot of people in society completely lacking in common sense and critical thinking skills, while at the same time mass rudeness seems normalized too. Is this a failure of education, or parenting? Or has it always been this way, and the only difference is the way we communicate with each other now naturally results in mass failures of common sense? It's a complex topic, but these rude people are also victims so we need to analyze it and at least learn something from it.

There’s obviously a super complex web of things involved, but I personally think that the nature of the post-2008 economic recovery (in the US) has had an impact on this at a societal level.

I think people perceive that the opportunity to have a comfortable life doing a “regular job” is slipping away in favor of an upper middle class of professionals who enjoy stability, and an enlarged sub-middle class who are finding the traditional trappings of middle class stability hard to come by.

This widening class gap leaves many realizing that lifestyle improvements will require a significant step change, not just a bit more effort. So we see people gambling. Someone might be working hard and saving all they can and still only have $5k in savings. They look at the price of houses doubling and realize they’d need to save for another 50 years at this rate just for a down payment, so they say fuck it and buy some call options and NFTs instead.

But people were gambling and making bad financial decisions before the 2008 crisis too.

The crypto schemes are very often rehashing of old scams and mistakes, they are not qualitatively different from penny stocks pump and dumps, pyramids and MLM schemes, ponzi schemes, tulip/cabbage patch/whatever mania, etc.

The crypto thing has always been about front running regulation and overall awareness of the grift. Whereas most people understood that traditional ponzis and gambling often end with criminal charges and/or financial losses, in 2021 crypto could still tout "line go up" since the other shoe hadn't dropped yet. The layers of obfuscation involved in crypto schemes meant that normal users had essentially no way to comprehend the real risks, other than to rely on a more general truism (like "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch").

GP post is suggesting that demand for this kind of speculation was up, and if that's the case, many of these people in the "market" for scams and gambling might have been more attracted to crypto because it still had some veneer of safety/legitimacy about it.

Nobody could plausibly claim that now that the failures are finally coming to light, of course.

Edit: I would suggest this is largely a failure of the media, which had long treated crypto as legitimate by default despite having the resources to pay real experts to actually cover it critically. Of course, even had traditional media outlets been sounding the alarm, who knows if it would have mattered much - faith in media is very low right now (exactly because they so often get this sort of thing wrong).

There is also, particularly post 2008, an exaggerated sense of criminality in our financial system that made people who otherwise would have moral qualms about what they’re doing embrace or even work in crypto/web3 because, in their minds, everyone else is scamming anyway.

That would still have been appropriate for... I think the previous bubble was in 2017 ?

This time, as the FTX mess shows, the blame is on """regulators""" and """sophisticated""" investors completely failing to do their job.

They're not saying it's different, but that people are more desperate to latch onto get rich quick schemes now than they would've been pre-2008. Which is why crypto was huge. If this movement happened in 2005, maybe there wouldn't have been enough desperation for it to hit critical mass and blow up in popularity.

Well, the thing is that bitcoin happened as a reaction to 2008...

> in favor of an upper middle class of professionals who enjoy stability, and an enlarged sub-middle class

I cannot remember where I read it but the gist essentially was that you are either mastering the software or the software is mastering you. It jives with what you are saying.

I mean, the historical solution to this type of stuff is just hardline regulation right? There isn't a general solution against bad decision making. Your toddler will drink that liquid under the sink -> you put that liquid in a really high place and now everybody will complain and have to find that stepladder every time they want to clean the drains.

The best non-regulatory fix I can think of would be socially enforcing that people stop profitting from convincing others into doing bad decision making.

It's not very easy though, since fraudsters only need to convince people once to make off with their profits, unlike a tradesman or manufacturer who needs to stay in business long-term.

Well, the "get rich fast" things should be regulated as you say. The problem begins when such schemes become "get rich at all", with nothing in terms of viable alternative. The best way to deal with it is not to make people that desperate in the first place...

Certainly, if we lived in a world with a very robust financial safety net, then people would be less inclined to make risky financial decisions. The main question is how do we get there?

It's not obvious to me that the currently popular web3/crypto approach of widely promoting these risky gambles gets us there.

What happened is that crypto is very cool. There's a not unwarranted perception amongst people in the United States at least that banking regulators are conspiring (or prospiring) to create the financial meltdowns we see, and give people with the right connections privileged seats at the table when it comes to markers.

This is, to some degree, true - Quant traders in finance work with data that is literally unavailable to regular traders or amateurs but when it comes to crypto sophisticated quants and Joe Bogsly are operating on a level playing field when it comes to access.

Additionally, countries that are not the United States have chronic bank instability problems that make the current crypto collapse look like a joke. Large percentages of bitcoin transactions are conducted in Vietnam.

When a new cool thing is happening, the next step to maturity and adoption is gift.

How many rent a bike startups have you seen in your city?

Same deal, not a terrible idea, pretty cool, people flock in but there will very likely only be one to three of those companies left standing.

> but when it comes to crypto sophisticated quants and Joe Bogsly are operating on a level playing field

Pretty sure Tether isn’t operating on a level field with Joe Schmoe.

You misunderstood what I am saying. I am suggesting that quants and financiers have no special, privileged access to information. You can make spooky suppositions about Tether fraud, but if millions of documents disclosed didn't reveal a fraud after the whole community pored over them - it's at least as good as any other financial product.

> if millions of documents disclosed didn't reveal a fraud after the whole community pored over them - it's at least as good as any other financial product

Every time Tether has disclosed anything, it’s been caught lying [1]. That anyone thinks Tether has anything close to standard financial disclosure, or is anything but a fraud, is a testament to the ongoing problem of mainstream American financial illiteracy.

[1] https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2021/attorney-general-james-...

That is not what I wrote. I wrote that the NY State courts made literal millions of these internal documents public. The community as a whole has had collectively more than a year to pore over them, with billions of dollars of risk including from major real hedge funds.

I did not say that these are "standard financial disclosures". I said that they were forced by the courts to reveal all this documentation and that so far, Tether has for the most part maintained its peg.

This should indicate to you that everyone from Wall St to Main St thinks that Tether is doing things "well enough".

Tether has issued multiple audit reports by independent accountants, and sure- they may be suspect but the way in which they are suspect is the same way every other company's financial are suspect - which, last I checked, didn't stop Lehman Bros.

> Or has it always been this way, and the only difference is the way we communicate with each other now naturally results in mass failures of common sense?

I don't think we're living in a particularly unique time this way. The book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds was written in 1841 and was already then packed full of stories not dissimilar to the current crypto bubble.

I don't mean to sound defeatist, though. We could do more to financially educate people in general, which would provide a better defense against such manias.

> The book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds was written in 1841

It feels worth noting that this book, as well as the wider idea of an abstract idea of crowd-induced mania in general it reinforces, is pseudoscientific with little credible evidence to support it.

It's origins lie much more in the political motivations and historical context of the authors: It is no coincidence that this book was written by a wealthy scotsman against the backdrop of the idea was first floated by an aristocrat during the upheavals and riots surrounding the introduction of capitalism, and that the idea was initially proposed by an aristocrat during the french revolution. They were both times where it was extraordinarily convenient to be able to dismiss engaging with the things the crowd was being driven by.

I'd urge against making the same mistake today. To me, it is impossible to separate the web3 mania from the historical context it happened in: Like 2008, it is a time of job insecurity, financial anxiety and distrust in systems with governments doing little to help. They are prime times for wishful thinking and people who want to take advantage of it.

Well, let's also not ignore the immense greed involved and its power to overcome run-of-the-mill common sense.

Doesn't take much to spot the bullshit in: "Risk-free 7% APY in a time when every single noteworthy financial institution is offering less than 0.5%!"

Only 7%? At the height of the bubble, there were a number of major crypto schemes offering interest rates of 20% or more. Sometimes even much more; some of the shadier "investments" offered >100% APY.

Unsurprisingly, most of those schemes have since collapsed.

It’s easy to give 100% APR in a token you’ve created, it’s very hard to keep the market value increasing at a similar rate to offset coin price dropping. Initial hype will support you for a few months but it’s all tears in the end :)

I’m still sort of sad the focus hasn’t been on decent remittance systems, the true useful tool of crypto IMO.

Or even simpler: if you put barriers in the way of users cashing out their "earnings", you can keep a naked pyramid scheme running for quite a while. Some schemes have done this by making it difficult for users to cash out their earnings, e.g. by enforcing a lockup period, or requiring users to sell their tokens to another new investor, or even by simply declaring that withdrawals are a feature "under development".

One notable example of such a scheme was OneCoin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OneCoin), which wasn't even based on a blockchain.

My feelings exactly. I knew NFTs were doomed to not live up to their hype on the quality of my interactions with NFT enthusiasts alone. Huge pivots to needless hostility during what is ostensibly a sales pitch.

I think you likely encounter the rude people on twitter hiding behind anon. accounts. My step dad lost ~30k in what he thought was a relatively safe investment (earning APY). I did tell him to be very careful as most of crypto to the uninitiated is a scam. He ended up being able to put Ethereum in but not able to take it out. Obviously if the returns appear to good to be true they probably are but this is an older guy with limited financial experience and virtually no technical knowledge. These people sit there on the sidelines approaching a tough retirement watching people get rich or "earning" 15% APR and start to panic that they are missing a once in a life time opportunity and jump in. Its sad.

> pproaching a tough retirement watching people get rich or "earning" 15% APR and start to panic that they are missing a once in a life time opportunity and jump in. Its sad.

New clothes on an age old story.

Just a heads up, if he's staking the Ethereum directly then the money is still safe. The Ethereum team hasn't implemented staking withdraws yet, which should happen this year: https://ethereum.org/en/staking/

What concerns me about these scams is the ever increasing velocity. Old timey gambling required cash or collateral. So there was a physical limitation.

Day trading and crypto and freemium games fleece people digitally. It's all ephemeral. What holds people back?

It pains me to buy a lottery ticket, so I've never been tempted by these scams. But I imagine having everything online hacks player's inhibitors. eg I've read rants about how Robinhood and the like weaponize "dark patterns" to loot their players.

There was a drop indeed, but the price for both Bitcoin and Ethereum is still pretty high. And these are not the only things that dropped this year, you could tell the same to people investing in stocks.

I must say though that I don't and didn't own any crypto assets, and am not really well-versed in the web3.0 world, which might be why I am confused by your comment.

Bro, you literally just did the pool thing the comment above was talking about

You can say the same about options traders who got wiped during the tech stock decimation last year or plain old gamblers. Ultimately they are making a prediction and many have gotten rich over crypto but just like stocks you buy in a downturn like now not when it is all hyped up.

Even a dollar would have lost use ~20% loss over the past few years just sitting in a bank. The best place to store wealth is in assets not currency. People who stored their wealth in crypto are as silly as people who put savings in a bank except with more volatility like this. Crypto isn't a fad that has gone away, there is still demand for it except now all the exchange crashes will introduce regulation that will make it a safer bet than before. Trial by fire and all I guess.

You shouldn't bet or risk money either in stocks or crypto that you aren't prepared to lose. That's like the first-ish rule of investment isn't it?

And retail traders should not trade options. It is a terribly stupid thing to do and is almost guaranteed to lose them money. If a sophisticated financial actor wants to trade in options or crypto, then I don't think it is terribly productive but that is their business.

There are also people who fly airplanes and cliff dive, but if my acquaintance Joe the whitecollar sales associate who lives two houses down from me starts telling me he is going to go solo flying or cliff diving for the first time with no experience, I will warn him off it in no uncertain terms.

As well, if he is talking about how much he is making on the side doing options trading, do you think I wouldn't tell him that it is a bad idea and he is going to end up most likely losing a great deal of money?

People who make these comparisons like you have are acting as if crypto is being marketed to wall street and not people like Joe.

It all depends on how much they are spending. If joe has $1k disposable income he can play the lottery,crypto,options whatever. I personally only ever bought a few hundred dollars at a time only to sell at 5-10% profit. Even right now you can make a few bucks on the normal turbulence.

You seem to have overlooked my statement about rule #1 it has to be money you can afford to lose and of course people will tell you the risk is tol high, you have to learn the hard way if you think you know better.

You seem to overlook the fact that you are comparing sophisticated financial instruments to 'investments' marketed at moms & pops sometimes as de facto bank accounts with FDIC markings on the marketing materials.

Did I know people who made out well playing the crypto market? One. Did I tell him to not do it? Nope, because he knows what he is doing.

The flipside of this is the 5 or so people in my direct personal sphere and hundreds if not thousands (if you count the lurkers who followed conversations I was having with individuals) online who have advocated for or expressed direct involvement or interesting in playing in crypto markets that I have advised against doing so, with a rare few heeding my warning but the overwhelming majority using circular logic, fallacies, personal attacks, and 'not-even-wrong' economic theories to justify putting a large portion of their income (sometimes even taking out loans) on it.

Please understand that the perspective I am trying to show the readers of my comments is my own.

I'd ask them "you rich yet" at this point.

That doesn’t help the needless hostility.

Hostility is the point.

I don't know that I'd want to spend the energy to engage in this kind of behavior.

“Have fun becoming poor!”

>I would feel bad for people who lost money in crypto if every time I tried to warn them during the bubble they wouldn't have said 'have fun staying poor'

Not everyone that lost money did this to you though, seems unfair to judge most people who are just trying to get by because of a few assholes on the internet

This is the most important point in my humble opinion: we keep confounding the most extreme and vocal and annoying minority for the moderate whole. It keeps happening and happening. Together with the corolary of confounding twitter and "The Internet" with real life.

I have been told “have fun staying poor” on HN.