Comment by ephbit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ephbit | Hacker News Reader

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The way you write makes it clear you spend at least a bit of time thinking about these things.

And you're apparently reading quite specific info about details of currently happening events, not just headlines.

Your post contains a theory about what's going on behind the scenes and what the acting parties' motives are.

Your theory that fraudsters want their victims to think that the government is to blame instead of the Ponzi scheme so they can continue sounds conclusive.

There's one thing about your post that intrigues me. I did not look at your post history (maybe you wrote about this), you don't seem to make a distinction between "crypto" and "Bitcoin".

Are there countless bad actors and scammers in the "crypto" space? 100 % yes, don't even have to look for evidence, it's just there.

But no matter how many shady exchanges in the crypto space rip off their customers, that doesn't change the structural properties of Bitcoin one bit.

What is your view on "plain" Bitcoin, without the Binances and FTXs? Also fraud?

The first comparison that came to my mind is (yeah, I know Bitcoin critics will say I'm brain washed):

IMO scammers and shady exchanges in the "crypto" space are to Bitcoin what the large food companies (those that sell unhealthy, made from cheap raw materials, addictive "foods") and sectors like the sweets industry are to food.

There's a legit base (food/Bitcoin) and greedy businesses wringing money from building on top of it. Just because there are countless companies making money by selling doubtworthy sugary stuff (and there will always be, because sugar just works, letting people release neurotransmitters whenever they want), doesn't make food as a whole a scam.

I believe that fraudsters have been pumping up bitcoin because they know that it attracts attention to the whole market.

Most people trading bitcoin don't buy it with a money transfer. They go to an exchange. And most people on the exchange who are buying it will be exchanging stablecoins that the exchange accepts as worth the same as dollars. The problem is that most of the exchanges and all of the stablecoins are fraudulent. So the market price of bitcoin represents what fraudsters want it to be, and not a true market price.

Remember that the total money that can be extracted from the bitcoin ecosystem is the money put in minus the money extracted from the system to pay for mining. Currently, a lot of the money put in came out of fraud. And a lot of money has gone out for mining. As the fraud is unwound, we'll wind up with people trying to convert bitcoin to money to pay off as much of the Ponzi schemes as possible. When that happens, the bitcoin ecosystem will wind up in a world of pain.

Anyone who has studied bubbles and market crashes will recognize that this won't be a slow process. Nobody wants to be the last to hit the exits. So once it is clear that people are hitting the exits, everyone tries to at once.

That said, the economics of bitcoin are essentially this. It is a painfully slow, expensive, and inefficient way to transfer money. But, structurally, it is an artificially limited resource whose value comes from what people think it will be in the future. This provides inherent incentives to try to make the price go up if you have some. (Which is what drew the fraudsters in.)

So at some point I expect the price of bitcoin to crash hard. I couldn't tell you if that is in 3 months or 3 years. And after that, well, it's perfectly designed to create bubbles.

> I believe that fraudsters have been pumping up bitcoin because they know that it attracts attention to the whole market.

Yep, sounds plausible.

> Most people trading bitcoin don't buy it with a money transfer. They go to an exchange.

True as well I guess, p2p exchanges exist but aren't as widely used as exchanges.

> As the fraud is unwound, we'll wind up with people trying to convert bitcoin to money to pay off as much of the Ponzi schemes as possible. When that happens, the bitcoin ecosystem will wind up in a world of pain.

Yes, this may well happen to a certain degree.

But the thing you're maybe underestimating might be: there are (at least it seems to me with my biased world view) quite a few, let's call them "believers/hodlers", who won't try to get rid of their coins but who'll rather try to buy more, when the price drops due to such an "unwinding" event. It depends upon how many Bitcoin suddenly get offered on the market for whether potential buyers will be able to soak it up and thus keep the BTC price from crashing all that radically (say below 10k USD).

I'd guess such a group of stubborn "believers" exist in some way in many other speculative assets/bubbles, so they're of course not exclusive to Bitcoin. Yet something makes me think that many of the Bitcoin "believers/hodlers" might be significantly more stubborn in their belief that just continuing to DCA all the way through such an "unwinding" event is the best option, compared to, say, the tulip bubble believers (whom I know nothing about, except they existed .. I'm just a fool who has thoughts about things).

> Anyone who has studied bubbles and market crashes will recognize that this won't be a slow process. Nobody wants to be the last to hit the exits. So once it is clear that people are hitting the exits, everyone tries to at once.

This may be the case for the bigger part of people who own Bitcoin. But as I wrote, I think there's a significant share of people who just won't hit the exits, even at 5k or less.

> It is a painfully slow, expensive, and inefficient way to transfer money. But, structurally, it is an artificially limited resource whose value comes from what people think it will be in the future. This provides inherent incentives to try to make the price go up if you have some. (Which is what drew the fraudsters in.)

Again, I don't disagree.

But I think people who're interested in Bitcoin due to its key properties ("artificially limited resource" ..), will collectively learn through the repeated unwinding of fraudulent businesses _on top_ of Bitcoin, that the long-term way to go and not get burned is without these _on top_ services and just stick to plain Bitcoin.

I think one USP property of Bitcoin in the financial world is: the possibility to stick to the plain asset, without any intermediaries who basically make the rules for you accessing your assets (arbitrage, changing conditions, embezzlement, ..). Many people in the space already made the decision to not trust any intermediaries but do self custody instead. With the next unwinding, more will likely follow.

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