Crypto Crashed and Everyone's in Jail. Investors Think It's Coming Back Anyway | Hacker News Reader

Crypto Crashed and Everyone's in Jail. Investors Think It's Coming Back Anyway

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16 pointselsewhen25 comments

I don't get it...cryptocurrencies were meant to facilitate the transfer of money not to make people rich. Use it for what it's meant to be used - to make payments. Generate a wallet using python, deposit a small amount of cash at the nearest crypto ATM and use it like a normal bank account. And make small payments because it's volatile and your money might get lost on the way to its destination.

With stable coins and ethereum l2 like arbitum having broad support to transfer them, the payment experience isn't all that different from something like zelle.

Stablecoins and L2 chains have the problem of being unregulated and usually centralized, though. At least L1 chains are fairly transparent and usually Open Source; sending your money over an L2 bridge is a game of trust. Stablecoins struggle in much the same way to lower volatility.

Monerium/EURe fully complies with EU e-money regulations. There's lots of similar products coming out in EU land, and more and more globally (e.g. euroe.com)

Most regulations apply to financial institutions, if your blockchain is provably decentralized (as in, nobody can rug/fraud you from your money), then a lot of regulations do not apply.

> And make small payments because it's volatile

Why would anyone accept payments in this if it's volatile?

They accept payments in a USD/EUR or other FIAT pegged token, such as USDC, USDT, EURe, etc.

They already do that by eliminating the middle step and accepting in USD, EUR etc.

So why would you want to have a volatile currency to make small payments to people who don't accept it?

sure they were meant for that and it'd be neat if people ignored the possible upside of hoarding/hodling, but the economics satoshi chose made it inevitable that the coins would start worthless and become 10e9x more valuable as they were adopted by a global economy. You would be a fool to spend. basic marshmallow test.

It’s been 15 years and they’ve cycled through quite a few alleged usecases without ever arriving at one that’s convincing.

But the incentives are in place to keep the search going for quite a long time, even if it’s mostly aimed at unlocking supplies of greater fools.

It took paper money hundreds of years before a use case was found. 15 years is very short for a new technology. I suspect that the generation that comes of age after its creation will find a use. My guess is that after 2028 we will start to see the true use cases. In any case, they are not going away.

One case that's happening now, which is very useful, is the burning of stray methane to create bitcoins. Companies are creating bitcoin rigs that can be placed near wellheads that are spewing methane into the environment since there is no profitable way to stop it or use the fuel. Bitcoin is the way to use the fuel that's being released into the atmosphere.

> were meant to ...

Many inventions "were meant to" to do one thing, but wound up doing something else far more valuable.

The value of a tool has little to do with the original intent of its inventor.

The big issue is that these "currencies" are treated as assets. People accumulate them in hopes of them going up. They need to have an expiration associated with the coin so it becomes a currency for payments, not an asset to accumulate. Something like an expiration date of 6 months after you receive them. People will need to use them or lose them. I would propose that they have a shorter expiration time during recessions and longer during expansions.

BTC is over 2x from what it was a year ago. Granted, a year ago it was at the local minimum, after crashing almost 4x from the peak, but isn't this exactly what "coming back" is accurately describing? It crashes 2021 to 2022, and came back (not to the prior levels, but still) in 2023.

Also, "everyone's in jail"? Really? Sure, there were a number of fraudsters that got what was coming to them. It's not exactly a new thing, while certainly a welcome one. But it's hardly "everyone". Very low quality reporting, saying a lot of things, some of which are clearly not true, some of which may or not may be true, but the article provides nothing but flat statements without any support.

Crypto investors? The same ones who predicted 29 out of the 0 de-dollarization and absolute meltdown of fiat economy, those investors?

Better trust them this time, then! It’s not like they have anything to gain from spreading this news (read rumor), right?

And that somehow those events would mean that governments or anyone really would decide to jump to crypto. And not just default on debt and roll a new fiat instead. Which is the proven track-record.

The only other asset class whose value is greater than it's practical use is gold. Even silver is losing that status. In the last 10,000 years many things have been used as a store of value, but the only one that's maintained it is gold. Wars, famine, and whole civilizations falling have not dented humanity's faith in gold's value.

Will bitcoin and ethereum be the next gold? I don't know, but seems like a big assumption and more a question of mass psychology than finance.

Ironically, I suspect the worst thing for crypto is not being in the news at all.

I've done questionable things in my life. I am a sinner who does not expect forgiveness. But at least I never got into cryptocurrencies.

BS article. Richard Heart still not in jail.

It will never crash because everything is a scam. Crypto is a scam, fiat system is a scam, stock market is a scam... It's just a matter of investors deciding which scam is the safest place to keep their easy-earned money... Money which they likely obtained via a scam to begin with.

I've been into crypto since 2012. It always crashes and comes back. Bitcoin halving is next year, so expect a massive pump.

Where does the liquidity come from? Inflation and debt burdened retail schmucks? Or institutions who won't touch an unregulated asset with a ten-foot pole?

Massive •attempt• of a pump. The number of fools supporting it is dwindling

Yup: A nice breakdown here: https://blog.dshr.org/2023/11/desperately-seeking-retail.htm...

when your neighbor that’s dumber than you is getting richer than you, you’ll all come back to crypto

so might as well learn this time how to build with it, how to cater to audiences within that ecosystem

these are development platforms

It is. It's a new asset class that can't be ignored. All assets crash. Look at real estate in 2008. Real estate is as solid as an asset can be yet we saw what happened in 2008. As far as fraud, that's one of the curses of finance. If money is involved there will always be someone that wants to steal it. It happens with all asset classes.

The idea that you can create your own coin and become a rich person is probably gone but Bitcoin and Ethereum are here to stay. But like everything it won't go up forever but 100 years from now they will still be an asset you can buy and sell.

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