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Comment by crypt1d | Hacker News Reader

Happy to see this whole thing finally coming to an end, its a nice wrap to the dead market we've had for the past 2 years. I'm excited for 2024 in crypto!

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What makes you think this is the end of anything?

The rumour about Binance indictment by DoJ has been going around for 1-2 years now. Its one of the last remaining pieces of major news that could have potentially negatively affected the industry. After two years of prosecutions, regulatory uncertainty and general poor market conditions, its only now starting to feel like there's light at the end of the tunnel.

Pay no attention to those stablecoins over in the corner.

The name implies they are stable, what more could anyone want?

Your optimism is fascinating & inspiring. Perhaps one day it would mature enough for GNU Taler and the like.

do the recent Kraken charges change this sentiment at all?

Coinbase has been charged with more or less the same thing since this summer. The SEC is grasping at straws at this point.

Not really. SEC investigations are civil, not criminal. They might end up paying a fine, but there is no risk of jail time or anything similar. Also, while I like Kraken as an exchange, its market share is not significant enough for it to matter in the big picture.

> SEC investigations are civil, not criminal.

SEC investigations address both aspects, when it gets past investigation to litigation, they do civil litigation themselves and refer to DOJ for potential criminal prosecution.

Light to final blow against crypto the horrible CO2 production and the annoying get rich apps.

Let's hope it dies sooner than later.

Yes, it's so nice how the traditional finance system has no CO2 emissions

The classical financial system has much less CO2 per transaction and more features.

It's the perfect finetuned and still optimized PoS system.

There are now lots of efficient cryptos and some that can run on a single wind turbine. But I am with you, hoping the energyvore ones die as fast as possible.

The efficient ones are still outright scams if not blatantly illegal. All cryptocurrencies should die. After more than a decade it's clear by now that blockchains are a useless technology and the investors are getting more and more desperate to pass the bag.

> Its one of the last remaining pieces of major news that could have potentially negatively affected the industry

Lol. Tether imploding anyone?

That’s pretty unlikely to happen at the moment though. I’m far from a Tether fanboy, but in this interest rate environment they are likely making boatloads of money just by sitting on a nice chunk of T-bills.

> Its one of the last remaining pieces of major news that could have potentially negatively affected the industry.

What, is the giant ticking timebomb of the USDT money printer not likely to 'negatively affect the industry'?

Tether is the last domino

The current crypto market activity has nothing to do with crypto news. The macro-economic state of the world is one where everything is going up.

More specifically now you can get actual real money by putting your savings in a bank account (and most people are struggling to pay the increased cost of living), there's less incentive to throw it away in a casino.

I suggest spending some time understanding why the cost of living went up. Clearly you live in a place with a relatively stable currency (for now).

What's that got to do with it driving people away from speculative assets?

A lot of the inflation seen in the U.S. is corporate profit-taking such as when the automakers used the chip shortages to steer buyers towards the highest-end models they prioritized for production while less profitable models were back ordered.

That matters because cryptocurrencies don’t help at all with the inflation consumers are seeing, while adding more personal risk and an exchange rate to arbitrage.

That's not how inflation works.

That's _part_ of how inflation works. The current inflation cycles is numerous different issues compounded (corporate profit seeking, money printing, supply chain issues, extremely high employment rate, pay increases). I know crypto bros like to say it's only money printing, so they can point to their fake money and say "you can't print money here", but the world isn't so simplistic.

It is. If you’ve never learned economic except from cryptocurrency marketing material, inflation simply refers to the prices of goods and services increasing, not any one specific cause. That can happen due to real changes in demand or supply, government policy changes, or other factors like changes in the labor market. It’s key to understand why inflation is happening because that tells you both whether it’s a problem - almost all serious economists think modest inflation is good for keeping the economy moving – and what kinds of fixes might be needed. For example, a crop failure will cause a spike in prices but if you don’t have reason to expect a late frost to happen again you probably don’t need to make structural changes; if some industrial component costs more because mines are running out, you might need a larger intervention.

In this case, prices went all over the place during the pandemic and the question is how they recover – companies are a lot quicker to raise prices than lower them and if you look at the business press there were a lot of record profits reported - the most since the 1950s when American companies were reaping the profits of uninterrupted production capacity selling to post-WWII Europe:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-25/us-corpor...

The St. Louis Fed estimated 60% of the inflation in 2021 was profit-taking:

https://www.npr.org/2023/05/19/1177180972/economists-are-rec...

The story in Europe is similar with roughly half:

https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/06/26/europes-inf...

You have an interesting worldview. Corporations take profits to pay their employees. They do this with or without inflation and always have.

How would a crypto "help" with inflation? In the same way the Dollar "helps" with the inflation of the Euro?

Cryptos don't add to personal risk, people do that. If you think cryptos are making an impact, you should understand that the entire crypto economy is a rounding error in inflationary impact.

I think you misunderstood the point: when a large portion of the cost increases are due to companies raising their profit margins, changing how you pay for it won’t affect that.

Unless you're planning to pay for it with an asset whose value fluctuates wildly.

That’s a separate factor, though. It’s definitely one of the reasons why cryptocurrencies never became popular but in the case we’re talking about it’d just be making a bad situation worse rather than the cause for it being bad.

Profit is not taken to pay employees by definition. Profit is gross less all liabilities. Liabilities include payroll. Payroll is revenue.

5% annualized on 4% inflation is a joke. I don't consider "high yield" savings to be any kind of strategy.

If you have a mortgage, it ain’t half bad

Real rates in the US are at the highest level since before the GFC, they’ve basically gone from negative to >2%.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/REAINTRATREARAT10Y

I'm curious to see how BTC will fare. We've only seen the 4 year halving cycle play out during a secular bull market so far.

There were reward halvings in 2012, 2016, and 2020. I thought the 2012 halving was the most uncertain, as it was the first and the market had little liquidity.

https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/trading-investing/b...

This is how the greater fool market continues to flourish.

FTT to the moon! Oh wait.

Actually ... since the trial ended, FTT went from ~$1.2 to ~$3.5 and has stayed up. I have no idea how these people expect it to pay out. Even if FTX restarts, they will almost certainly cast off such liabilities with the approval of the bankruptcy court.

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