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Comment by B-Con | Hacker News Reader

This is incoherent nonsense.

Vanguard is a service that manages your portfolio so you don't have to. Literally the definition of providing an economic service.

Owning the portfolio does come with risk, but it's not fixed odds, rather the odds track the literal economy. If you buy index funds, your ballot tracks the value of the country you invested in. When society does well, so do you. And guess what? Everyone, including the government, spends their life trying to generate value and wealth.

It isn't a casino. Likening the US economy to a casino is perhaps the most disingenuous nonsense I've heard from the church of crypto.

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> Vanguard is a service that manages your portfolio so you don't have to. Literally the definition of providing an economic service.

How is it different from Bitcoin conceptually? Bitcoin reflects financial markets overall just as well as any Vanguard-managed fund. It does not matter that Vanguard intention is precisely that while Bitcoin's isn't if the outcome is the same.

Just in case I'll explain what I mean by an analogy: Imagine we are sailing an ocean in a small ship, and consequentially the ship rocks really hard. There's a table with two straight sticks on it in everyone's room, and the sticks constantly slide around the table due to rocking. And for whatever reason the parent comment author is tasked with keeping them as parallel as possible, while not stopping their movement alltogether. To do so he makes a contraption with electric motors attached to one end of each stick and sensors that detect when sticks are not parallel, which causes motors to align them. In the mean time in my room I took my sticks from the table and attached them to the ceiling instead because they look nice there. Here despite the lack of intention on my part my sticks will tend to stay parallel without much effort.

> Bitcoin reflects financial markets

No it doesn't.

Bitcoin has no intrinsic tie to the financial markets.

The financial markets are all based on goods, services, and economic value. They build meta layers on top of it and sometimes those layers are bad, but nonetheless they are based on value.

Bitcoin is based on speculation. It offers no inherent value. No one needs or wants Bitcoin. People do want or need food, shelter, health, entertainment, education, human connection, etc, that the rest of the financial markets are based on.

I think a lot of crypto advocates don't understand that the stock market isn't made up. Yes there is volatility, yes it isn't perfect. But it isn't a pure casino.

Bitcoin has sometimes* correlated with the broader financial markets, but not because it was an indicator of the markets but because it was accidentally caught up in them as an inconsequential side thought. It got treated as an investment commodity by some big asset managers and thus followed the same trading patterns. When the asset managers thought outlook was poor, they sold a bit of everything, and everything would go down.

> Bitcoin has no intrinsic tie to the financial markets.

Not an obvious one for sure.

> The financial markets are all based on ...

> Bitcoin is based on ...

I don't understand why people consider this to be any kind of argument. The very same one also applies to AI discussions and comparing hardware used to run it to brains.

What does it matter what the thing "is based" on? Gas turbines, photovoltaics, and nuclear reactors are based on completely different phenomenon, and yet they all generate electricity.

I think you missed the whole point of my previous comment. Maybe the analogy was unclear? What do you think I was trying to say?

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