Hacker News Reader

Comment by hshdhdhj4444 | Hacker News Reader

The only buyers are criminals, sanction evaders, and probably the dumbest people in the world given that the entire crypto ecosystem is focused on one thing and one thing only. Creating the most deflationary monetary system in history.

View on HN

And also the most unerasable, and hence traceable, system. You can't delete records from a blockchain.

The entire crypto ecosystem is hardly all about deflation these days. If anything, I'd argue the opposite. Stablecoins, yield, perpetual futures etc. are hardly what Satoshi had in mind.

>criminals, sanction evaders

The definition of both may vary depending on where you are. Being not controlled by governments is the original purpose of cryptocurrencies.

Be honest, don't whitewash. You mean perpetrating fraud and crimes and laundering illegal money is the original purpose of cryptocurrencies.

I'm living in a reality very different from yours, I don't think you can understand. In my country, actual journalism and speaking about certain things are crimes that will put you into the jail for the rest of your life, get you tortured and likely murdered. Access to the knowledge about certain things is blocked. To be able to do journalism or to circumvent the censorship, one essentially has to commit crimes in another (supposedly free) country as well, because there it's considered to be sanctions evading and/or illegal money laundering.

So yeah, of course you can frame it in your way and that would be valid. That was the original ideal of cryptocurrencies - to have a financial system not controlled by the governments. Of course it can be used for fraud and other things we probably both consider bad, by design. Just like gold.

There are a lot of places in the world where crypto payments are now prevalent, not because users are the "dumbest people in the world" but because they have no better alternative for electronic finance. Either conventional banking is nonexistent/abysmal for this purpose or their national currencies are in such bad condition that it's better for them to hold and use cryptocurrencies.

Name one, and provide evidence to support that assertion.

Nigeria, Argentina, Venezuela, all prime examples because they faced especially severe problems with hyperinflation and traditional banking. You can also find widespread use in developing economies like Brazil, Indonesia, Philippines, but of course to a lesser degree since the problems with traditional finance are not as severe there. I will gladly provide more in-depth information, if someone provides some evidence to support that crypto users are the dumbest people on Earth. If not, feel free to use your own time instead of mine for your education.

You've mentioned some places in the world that have economic problems. You've provided zero evidence to support the idea that "crypto payments are now prevalent" in any of those places.

As a counterexample, El Salvador adopted bitcoin as an official currency, provided state-subsidized infrastructure for citizens to adopt it, and still achieved only minimal usage:

> The October 2022 “Encuesta Dinámica Empresarial” from FUSADES registered that 97¾ percent of business have not made even one sale in Bitcoin. NBER and Chamber of Commerce and Industry surveys show similar results.

https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/002/2025/068/arti...

I’m shocked it’s even that high

Crypto is not prevalent in the Philippines or Indonesia. Except maybe in the scam centres in the Philippines run by Chinese gangsters that are operating pig butchering and other scams, and threatening to undermine the Philippine government. See The Economist, which estimates that these crypto scammers rake in some $500bn a year.

https://www.economist.com/audio/podcasts/scam-inc

https://www.economistgroup.com/press-centre/the-economist/fr...

So it was dumb of me to buy my bitcoins back when they were less than $100 a coin just in the slim chance that it completely blew up? I don't see what was dumb about a decision to put less than $1000 into 10 coins just in case. Worked out really well for me in the end and a less than $1000 gamble doesn't seem like that crazy of a gamble, at least to me.

That wasn't dumb but thinking this a meaningful rebuttal is

You can't evaluate a decision in a stochastic process based on a single outcome, you need to look at the expectation over all outcomes.

You basically just confirmed that, from beginning, it's just gambling.

Being lucky on your bet doesn't make it a wise investment. I wouldn't call you dumb. I don't know how gamblers feel about their moves.

And the stock market isn't gambling? I view it as such.

Was this more or less risky than buying $1000 in scratch offs, or lottery tickets, or spending $1000 in Vegas?

In my opinion, crypto when I bought it had a lot more "potential" than any of those more "traditional" forms of gambling which is why I was willing to give it a try with a sum of less than 1% of my yearly income...

I am not saying it was a smart choice, just that I don't think it was a particularly stupid choice.

Putting money in a company because you reviewed its business, the way it operates and add value to the society is more of an investment than gambling. Now things happens and I agree there is always a part of luck, called risk.

BTC isn't really adding value to the society, except the shady parts of it. I can't assess the part of luck in BTC gambling. Many lost money, many betted on the wrong coin. Did you bet on it because of the impact on dark economy or because you believed in unlocking the economy, blockchain everything which didn't happen?

I bet on it because in 2009 when I bought the coins for about $100 each I thought that maybe blockchain could do something unique that would cause the value to rise an appreciable amount. Or at the very least that it sounded like something that would get the tech sector excited and that alone would be enough to build enough hype around it that many more people would buy it causing the price to go up.

In my mind it seemed cheap enough to try a $1000 gamble and just hold long, long term ignoring the fluctuations and either this will be worth 0 or it will maybe be worth a boatload in the far future. That was always my idea and goal from day 1.

I mean I invest tens of thousands in the stock market and real-estate every year. This was just a tiny and wild gamble, but I don't think it was a dumb or foolish decision at the time given my financial position at the time and the amount involved.

I shoved £500 down in Sept 2017 knowing full well it was a gamble, and still have a roughtly £500 balance now -- having skimmed enough off the top over the years to buy a couple of iPhones and whatever else. I 100% consider this profit to be literal dumb luck.

Unironic congratulations on being self-aware enough to take your profits without it affecting your reasoning. Anecdotally, not many seem to come out of crypto net positive with that mindset.

Suggest you put $1000 each into all the other 28m of cryptos tracked by coinmarketcap, "in the slim chance that it completely blew up".

I don't see how you jump form this to that.

I made a singular choice once to put less than 1% of my yearly income into 1 thing that seemed to have some potential.

Back then it was the only crypto. I put in knowing full well it could go to 0, but the potential of where it could possibly go seemed well worth the tiny risk to an essentially insignificant sum of money to me.

There are other cryptos but they aren't the original or anywhere near the biggest, so they are not the same in my eyes. So those are actual legitimate reasons why I would not choose to perform that same risk again with a different crypto.

Whether you made a profit, especially just once, is indeed not indicative of the quality of your decisionmaking either way.

You don't think a $1000 gamble on this new paradigm of blockchain crypto was a sound decision? When the sum I was putting in was otherwise an insignificant sum to me.

I bought in fully knowing it could go to 0, or maybe it could be worth a ton in 10+ years. To me it seemed like the chance it would blow up was well worth the tiny risk of losing a pretty meaningless amount of money to me.

I am not even otherwise a gambler. I have never gambled at a casino or on sports or anything like that. And my stock investing is all index funds. This was the only singular "crazy gamble" I had ever made and I knew full well it was crazy. But the potential in my mind around the tech and the potential hype around it seemed to greatly outweigh the tiny risk.

You had a positive outcome, but yes, despite that, I don't know if that was based on a sound decision. It's possible to vastly misjudge the expected value of a trade and still come out ahead.

> This was the only singular "crazy gamble" I had ever made and I knew full well it was crazy.

The only thing that matters is whether it's positive EV (and whether your methodology of coming up with the EV itself is sound). If you didn't have any explicit or implicit notion of the EV at the time you made it... It was probably not a sound investment decision, despite being profitable.

I mean I thought that there was a potential in blockchain tech back when I bought it. I also thought that there was also potential in the hype around blockchain to explode the value simply from hype and how humans behave alone.

At least WAY more of a chance than what I would get spending $1000 on a lottery ticket or at a casino.

Then maybe it was sound! To know for sure, you'd have to repeat the experiment a few dozen times, though ;)

"So it was dumb of me to buy my lottery tickets just in the slim chance that I won? Worked out really well for me in the end and a less than $1000 gamble doesn't seem like that crazy of a gamble, at least to me."

(See also: https://xkcd.com/1827/)

I don't see how that relates to me. I made a singular choice. I am going to put in $1000 one time and leave it alone because there seems to be some potential here.

I made the choice basically saying OK this $1000 I am putting in will either be worthless in 10+ years or it will be worth a lot.

I am not continuing to buy, I am not dumping loads of money into it. I spent less than 1% of my yearly salary one time knowing full well it could go to 0. The potential seemed well worth the tiny risk.

The point is that, your "investment" was pure gambling. See how I can replace bitcoin with lottery ticket.

> I am going to buy $1000 in lottery tickets one time and leave it alone because there seems to be some potential here. > I made the choice basically saying OK this $1000 I am putting in will either be worthless in 10 hours or it will be worth a lot.

But it's more than just a binary. Do you not think that the chance that bitcoin blew up big was more or less than my chance at winning a million on a $1000 lottery gamble?

I bought bitcoin because I perceived more potential around blockchain tech becoming either useful or at least drawing hype to explode the value. I wouldn't buy a lottery ticket because the odds of winning are astronomically low. I perceived there to be a far greater chance in bitcoin blowing up than winning the lottery, or even winning big at a casino.

Do you think I really over-estimated bitcoin's odds early on? At least with blockchain there were some potential real-world possibilities to it and that was a big factor in my choice to gamble on it. Is that kind of thought not at least somewhat more sound than buying a simple lottery ticket? To me it was.

Why didn't you buy $1000 of NVDA instead? It would have paid off better. Clearly, NVDA shares are the future of currency.

No it wouldn't have.

I bought 10 bitcoin for about $1000 in late 2013. It's currently worth about 900K and was a peak of about 1.2M.

$1000 in NVDA shares in late 2013 was about 35 cents per share, so about 2850 shares. That's currently worth 521K with a peak of 590K.

And why? Because in 2013 I thought there was a greater potential for bitcoin blowing up substantially due to the new concept of blockchain and what it could potentially do, or at least the hype around what people perceived that it could potentially do. Compared to what I thought the potential for NVDA to do.

I mean it was a lucky guess but still just a guess.

Nobody is saying it's not luck... But people are comparing it to buying a lottery ticket. I am pretty sure the odds of this gamble are way better than the odds of winning this big in a lottery. Probably by more than an order of magnitude.

You are the lottery winner, extolling the virtues of the lottery. There are many other people who also made singular choices, that — by pure chance — did not pan out.

It's good that you were in a financial position such that you could easily spend $1000 on a dumb investment, but that doesn't make it less of a dumb investment.

I guess my argument is that turning $1000 into 1 million was probably a significantly more probable outcome than winning 1 million in a lottery which is specifically why I decided to put my money into bitcoin instead of lottery tickets.

I just don't see the equivalence in comparing it to buying a lottery ticket.

There are way way way more bitcoin winners than there are lottery winners.

The lottery analogy is reductio ad absurdum analogy — like, yeah, your odds of doing basically anything are better than winning the lottery (that's why the comic is funny). The point is that the positive outcome doesn't retroactively make your risky investment decision less risky. That's survivorship bias!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com