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Comment by Roark66 | Hacker News Reader

As someone who made lots of money on crypto early on, then didn't touch it for many years, made lots of money again and haven't touched it since I can tell you (and others) what is a winning strategy for "investing" in crypto.

Consider it a VC investment. First, you gave to either understand the underlying technology, or someone you trust have to understand it sufficiently to be able to say "this is bullshit", or "this is a great novel idea that makes a lot of sense".

Then you invest a bit of your really disposable income in it and don't touch it for a couple of years. Eventually you sell once you're happy with the price, or you forget about it and check few years later.

Edit: also, it really is down to luck too. An idea might be great, but the people behind it can be scammers. Etc. Crypto is(or was) a very high reward, very high risk game.

And for God's sake don't invest your life's savings in crypto!

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It's not an investment. You are gambling. And even worse, you are gambling by robbing the less informed. Make no mistake: every cent you made is a cent someone else lost -- even if they haven't realized their loss yet, it's there. And even worse, it's not a cent, it's a bit more because bitcoin is not even a zero sum game but a negative sum game and those are inherently scam. But, I guess, good for you?

It's effectively a pyramid scheme in which the potential marks are everyone in the world. It's not that much of a surprise that crypto continues to have money pumped into it - there's an almost never ending supply of greater fools.

Arguably the entire monetary system is also kind of like that - but it's got the benefit of true utility outside of speculation. It's a shame that most of the interesting crypto-as-money stuff - smart contracts, accessible to everyone financial APIs, pseudo-anonymous payments etc, has been completely dwarfed by the crypto-as-investment situation. Maybe it'll shake itself out long term, but I suspect the fundamental problems of unregulated "money" will be inescapable.

It turns out there's a reason we have financial regulation.

> It's effectively a pyramid scheme in which the potential marks are everyone in the world.

That's about as big as it gets, and pretty well explains the long legs this con continues to have. A lot of marks out there.

The only thing bigger would be an interstellar "galactic-coin". God. I can only imagine the carnage. Seems like a great premise for a sci fi story.

It has real value for as long as there are people who need a currency that isn't controlled by a government. In other words, it's an investment in the working capital of the criminal underworld. (and tinfoil-hatters) The money you put in is probably used to commit crimes of some sort, and the money you take out was probably the result of some crime. But with coins like Bitcoin that have a distributed trust in all miners to maintain the algorithm, I don't think you can say it's a scam.

The ones I think are truly scams are the "stablecoins" and "exchange tokens", which are nothing more than a fiat currency offered by an entity smaller than a government with less accountability than a government, and no way to ensure the value/supply/demand of their coin. So yes, I think FTX was a scam to the extent that they traded FTT while printing or consuming it however they liked.

Very funny, did you loose BTW? Every "investment" is a gamble of sorts. And how can it be gambling and a ponzi scheme at the same time?

Also I did put investment in quotes. I don't consider it an investment like stocks of a well established company, but if you put money in a security and you can reasonably expect some return at some risk it is an investment.the main difference is that with gambling you play against "a house". A single entity that controls "the market". With crypto, you can take your security and sell it to anyone, or buy stuff with it.

And no, I haven't robbed anyone, I haven't forced anyone into it to buy at gunpoint. I haven't bought in by using secret knowledge. And If you think crypto is both a gamble and a ponzi I wonder what do you think about forex. If anything that looks a lot more like betting as 99% of forex "brokers" don't actually buy/sell for you, but you bet against them.

On Forex I lost £3500 when the UK brexit referendum went the other way than I predicted. Was I "robbed". No, I made a bad "investing" decision.

Have you never lost at a stock market either?

> First, you gave to either understand the underlying technology, or someone you trust have to understand it sufficiently to be able to say "this is bullshit", or "this is a great novel idea that makes a lot of sense".

> Then you invest a bit of your really disposable income in it

Sorry, but I find it a bit funny that in your "winning strategy" you seem to invest on the second step regardless if you in the first step ended in the "this is bullshit" or not. (full disclosure, so far, every crypto thing I have seen has fallen to the "this is bullshit" bucket in my opinion. But I guess my "if it looks, walks and smells like bullshit, don't touch it with a ten foot pole" is not a winnig strategy.)

Well, yeah: If it's bullshit, you invest and then make sure you spread the word so there are enough people under you in the pyramid to keep you solvent.

Haha, very funny. I thought its obvious you don't invest if its bullshit. Also the whole point of using disposable income is that even if it tanks you stay "solvent". And no, look through my decade long comment history and you'll see not a single instance of me promoting crypto to anyone. In fact I actively discourage people who are looking for real investment from it.

>Sorry, but I find it a bit funny that in your "winning strategy" you seem to invest on the second step regardless if you in the first step ended in the "this is bullshit" or no

Perhaps this is my failure to express this clearly, but I thought it obvious you don't invest if you think it's bullshit.

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