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Comment by flmontpetit | Hacker News Reader

Baffles me how this industry is basically speedrunning through the troubled history of regular finance, and every piece of legislation and every institution has to be rebuilt from scratch even though the mechanisms and the problems are almost exactly the same.

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I always found the idea of a free, unregulated financial market being a positive thing amusing. Many of these regulations were made because more or less complex loopholes got exploited and many less wealthy people lost their money. And quite a few of these people with practical experience in these various exploits are still around.

You can always opt into security by being the customer of a bank.

Not sure if people who opted out of security expected to be doused in gasoline. There is something to say about whether this state of no security is generally desirable by society. Everywhere else this happened was eventually regulated.

So thinking crypto will be an outlier is wishful thinking since it will never be allowed to be more powerful than governments. At most, new world orders will be created, but they will settle and be like the old ones, with some new more crypto native rules. They will always know who you ar and who you’re transacting with and where either of you are.

Current crypto fanatics are assuming they will all be part of this club. This road will be filled with poor old men with fewer fingers and lots of regret.

I want crypto to succeed, but I don’t expect it will be unregulated. You’ll pay the same taxes, you’ll go to jail if you try to avoid them or if you send crypto to entities banned by governments. Eventually the things that make crypto so valuable will be hammered out so it’s more like fiat.

Maybe the value will crash or wealthy people of today will find a way to freeze it into reserve currencies (like the newly minted federal crypto reserve), but after some point it will stop being a source of wealth just by holding it at the right time. You will need to exchange it with value you create.

The math of crypto wealth by HODLing is unsustainable.

And that's only because of deposit insurance and heavy regulations on fractional banking.

There is no reason to trust any bank implicitly. As a matter fact that have proven not to be deserving of it as recently as 2008.

I've always liked this analogy because it accidentally implies something I believe to be true - the crypto industry will eventually overtake transitional finance while moving at great speed. It says a lot about how bad the traditional finance industry is that this is the easiest path forward that the market found.

You assume it won’t just hit the same problems and stall or that traditional finance won’t learn and comes up with its own solutions.

Bad money drives out good money, which explains why crypto is moving so fast.

"Bad money drives out good" because when they have both, people will prefer paying (getting rid of) the bad while keeping the good for themselves. That has nothing to do with what's happening with cryptocurrency.

> I've always liked this analogy because it accidentally implies something I believe to be true - the crypto industry will eventually overtake transitional finance while moving at great speed.

It isn't implying that. It is implying that it will end up at the same place as the traditional finance.

> It says a lot about how bad the traditional finance

What is so bad about traditional finance that crypto fixes?

problems are the same but decentralized. You can't give a mortgage to an anonymous user, can you?

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