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Comment by confoundcofound | Hacker News Reader

The biggest lie in crypto is that tokens are bought for utility and not speculative gains. I don't know if it's delusion or intentional deception. I have friends who are "thought leaders" in the space, who opine on the disruptive potential of crypto yet spend their days tweeting about the latest memecoin that just 100x'd.

The entire concept of crypto "value" rests upon the marriage of token utility and economic value. Financial gain is baked into the mechanic. And between the two, people care far more about financial gain. It's a fundamental misalignment of incentives.

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> The biggest lie in crypto is that tokens are bought for utility and not speculative gains. I don't know if it's delusion or intentional deception.

It's an attempt to avoid the scope of US securities law: https://www.taftlaw.com/news-events/law-bulletins/utility-to...

Ironically, the only tokens with any actual utility have stable prices - stablecoins.

Aside from BTC, which has so much utility that governments are securing some, and in some cases, are settling international trade with it to avoid sanctions from nations they aren't allies with.

Is that the reason why BTC transaction volume was trending slowly downwards for years?

It took the stupidity of those Ordinals to push the volume up, and all of that was inorganic speculative BS.

What does this have to do with what I said?

Transaction volume doesn't mean a fiddly-fuck, unless you're measuring network effects, and even then, context can become pretty important.

No, if one thing should be clear to someone reading this thread, it should be that there's only one thing that matters: liquidity.

Huh? If transaction volume is immaterial, what utility are you talking about?

Because we were talking about utility, and that "governments were buying it" - not liquidity.

The quality or condition of being useful; usefulness.

A useful article or device.

The most glaring example is the one I already posted above - countries hanging onto it for the times they need to settle outside of more traditional finance channels.

Ask a different question.

The crypto phase only ended up strengthening institutions, because it showed everyone that you do need a central authority. Until enough public internet infrastructure exists to realistically pull off a fully peer-to-peer Internet, we will need trusts, exchanges, and platforms.

Even in competitive sports, you want a referee. If anything, this whole phase has shown me that private platforms, banks, and governments will always have a place in public societies.

To be fair the same thing happens in the regular world. e.g. look at a list of the richest people in the USA and see how they made their money.

Elon, Bezos, Bill Gates, Ellison, Buffet, Paige, Brin, Ballmer, Bloomberg, Walton --- which of those billion/trillion dollar companies do you think in any way compares to the shambolic crypto world?

I mean, we joke that Oracle is a legal company with an engineering department... but at least they build things.

Right. I don't like most of the people on that list and e.g. Oracle is a mess of a company that is actively hostile to the software world -- but they still sold $42 billion worth of goods/services to willing customers last year. Nothing at all like crypto trading.

The 20 richest people in the USA all make their wealth via profitable companies that have returned value to shareholders.

My problem is with the collective gaslighting the crypto industry is doing with respects to utility vs speculation. I never thought I would find myself on the side of the SEC, but I have enough experience in the space with investors to builders to confidently say the vast majority of the industry is about speculative gain. Specious claims of utility are often just a means to that end.

All of the 10 richest people in the US, with the exception of Warren Buffett (and even that I wouldn't really call an exception, more on that below), built real businesses with real products that are used by millions of people and companies. I think wealth inequality is a major problem of our time but I despise this painting everything with a (factually incorrect) bad brush.

Re: Buffett is the only "pure investor" in the top 10, but even then Berkshire Hathaway is pretty famous for having a portfolio of some of the best managed companies in the business. It's not like Buffet is a day trader.

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