16 ms·

Maybe everything is in an economic bubble right now. If you work in a big city and look around; there are tall office buildings everywhere; packed with million

Maybe everything is in an economic bubble right now. If you work in a big city and look around; there are tall office buildings everywhere; packed with millions of people. But what do these people actually do? Is that an efficient use of their time in terms of creating value for each other? Maybe cryptocurrency is a bubble, but maybe also everything else is a bubble. Companies like Snapchat are worth billions of dollars, but they lose billions of dollars each year. At least most cryptocurrencies don't lose money (except some of them due to electricity costs). Even companies like Facebook which are themselves profitable are deriving most of their profits by providing services to companies that are unprofitable. Maybe the total value of all cryptocurrencies isn't actually going up, maybe it's the value of everything else around it that's hyperinflating. Maybe the current system is just begging to be dismantled.

realPubkey 9y ago
'But what do these people actually do?' Awesome. Thats exactly what is in my head for so long. I myself go to one of these offices, and yes I do sh1t which produces no value, only money for my company. We get paid by another company doing sh1t. I spend half my live learning to code. And now I code shitty forms and buttons which will get thrown away and replaced in 5 years by the next guy doing the same.
- teekert 9y ago
  That's pretty negative. If someone is willing to pay you money, by definition your work has value for someone. Keep in mind that value is subjective. Creating anti AIDS medicine would probably be considered work of value by you? But it's not to me, at least not now.
  - realPubkey 9y ago
    I don't know. If you pay Sisyphos to roll a stone uphill once a day, does he create value just because you pay him doing it? My definition of value may be opinionated, but recreating the same software again and again, based on an outdated stack and thrown into garbage has no value for me. Maybe it's different somewhere else. But where I live most coders do exactly this.
    - ilikerashers 9y ago
      The central concern of The Myth of Sisyphus is what Camus calls "the absurd." Camus claims that there is a fundamental conflict between what we want from the universe (whether it be meaning, order, or reasons) and what we find in the universe (formless chaos).
    - Chris2048 9y ago
      > If you pay Sisyphus to Why would you? This example isn't realistic. It just shows value isn't precise to any single example, but an expected outcome over time; individual value judgments aggregate over the population to give a "true" metric of value. What value isn't created directly by Sisyphus, could be created in the fact that Sisyphus is willing to provide a service without finding any personal value in it. The freedom to do things without demonstrating its value, itself has value. > has no value for me Inefficiencies are opportunities. Can you sell the same stack over and over again?
    - jstanley 9y ago
      > If you pay Sisyphos to roll a stone uphill once a day, does he create value just because you pay him doing it? If he's not creating any value for you, why are you paying him to do it? If you pay him to do work that creates no value for you, you're the irrational one, not him.
      - virtualized 9y ago
        Who pays Sisyphos? Another Sisyphos who is just doing his job or following societal norms once created by Sisyphoses who are now long dead. Every individual Sisyphos is rational, but the whole system is not. I am not saying that such a system is objectively bad or anything, but it's an interesting observation and worth keeping in mind when making decisions or arguing.
      - zaccus 9y ago
        >why are you paying him to do it? Because I want to demonstrate "growth" to investors by hiring as many employees as I can afford, whether or not I actually have something for them to do.
  - osrec 9y ago
    It's negative, but it's true. The fact that you get paid is a poor way to assess the value of your work. In my opinion, the real question is, what positive societal impact does your work bring about? Are you forgoing the opportunity to make a better contribution to society for the comfort of a steady salary (albeit with little personal satisfaction)?
    - IanPBann 9y ago
      My priorities are to ensure the health and comfort of myself and my family. If "the comfort of a steady salary" appears to be the best way to achieve that, then I will be happy "forgoing the opportunity to make a better contribution to society". If my work can help society at the same time then that's fantastic, but as long as it allows me to provide for those closest to me then, for me and my family, my work is the most valuable use of my time possible.
      - teekert 9y ago
        FWIW, keeping you family happy and healthy is a pretty big contribution to society ;)
        osrec 9y ago
        The nominal value of your contribution is high (my original comment was not meant as an insult), but imagine a world where it can be higher still. And you get personal satisfaction, and you contribute towards a higher goal, rather than just ever growing cycles of consumption. Surely you would prefer that option if it was made available to you, no?
        teekert 9y ago
        Absolutely and I do see the value of anti AIDS drugs, that was not the point. I'm saying value is a subjective thing. Something does not have intrinsic value, things have value to people, and sometimes something is valued so broadly that it is of value to society at large indeed. It is of course nice to have work of which you personally value the output. But in your case, someone else values your output and pays you to produce it. Calling your work "without value" is thus a bit strange to me.
  - exit 9y ago
    my definition of value isn't hopelessly myopic
  - moccachino 9y ago
    I must say I find it very hard to wrap my head around that you would say that the creation of a medicine to cure a real disease is not a work of value.
    - malteof 9y ago
      Not what he said though... He said it has no value for him - presumably since he doesn't have AIDS.
      - mick87 9y ago
        But there is value for him as he would have quick access to medicine if he ever gets AIDS. Of course someone who as AIDS values the medicine more but saying there is no value for him seems very short sighted.
        vasilipupkin 9y ago
        The point is, everyone cannot be working on creating AIDS medicine. Someone has to be working on things that, say, cheer up the person working on aids medicine when she hits a wall.
        dwild 9y ago
        Sure but these all have values then. His point was to show that AIDS medicine has no value for him, but it actually does. He can't use that argument to prove that value is subjective considering that it actually does have value for everyone.
- geezerjay 9y ago
  > I myself go to one of these offices, and yes I do sh1t which produces no value, only money for my company. Don't you notice the contradiction?
lmm 9y ago
> But what do these people actually do? Is that an efficient use of their time in terms of creating value for each other? There's a lot of work in everything: https://xkcd.com/1741/ https://xkcd.com/1741/ I've worked in industries I had no idea even existed until I worked there. But they made sense once I found them, and I created value, as did most of my colleagues. Maybe you're in a bad job at the moment and need to look a bit wider? > Companies like Snapchat are worth billions of dollars, but they lose billions of dollars each year. At least most cryptocurrencies don't lose money (except some of them due to electricity costs). All cryptocurrencies are burning money on electricity costs. And what do they have to show for it? I've got plenty of fun out of Snapchat, so even if their investors don't get a return it's not like the money was completely burned, whereas cryptocurrencies spend electricity with nothing to show for it except some numbers that hash to other numbers.
- amelius 9y ago
  > I've worked in industries I had no idea even existed until I worked there. But they made sense once I found them, and I created value, as did most of my colleagues. Value is relative. You may have created value in the reference frame of a particular industry, but perhaps that industry is not of value. As e.g. Ponzi schemes show, people pay for things that have no value, so money is not a reliable indicator. Another example is the entertainment industry. A lot of money is being spent, orders of magnitude more per minute of content than say, 40 years ago. But are people more entertained now per minute of content than back in the old days?
  - lmm 9y ago
    > Value is relative. You may have created value in the reference frame of a particular industry, but perhaps that industry is not of value. As e.g. Ponzi schemes show, people pay for things that have no value, so money is not a reliable indicator. It has its flaws but on the whole it works. Certainly in the cases I'm thinking of my industry was producing value and I was producing value to the industry. > Another example is the entertainment industry. A lot of money is being spent, orders of magnitude more per minute of content than say, 40 years ago. But are people more entertained now per minute of content than back in the old days? Yes, much more. Try watching old films, playing old games. There are a few gems but there's a lot of awfulness, and even more than that, even in the good ones everything's so slow.
tim333 9y ago
I guess as the necessities of providing food and shelter require a progressively smaller percentage of the workforce more people will occupy themselves with less fundamentally necessary things like building websites, apps and cryptocurrencies for each other.
perseusprime11 9y ago
Except that Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc are making tons of money partly justifying their valuations. There is definitely crypto bubble.
csomar 9y ago
> If you work in a big city and look around; there are tall office buildings everywhere; packed with millions of people. But what do these people actually do? Is that an efficient use of their time in terms of creating value for each other? Thank you. The whole system is people running in empty circles. Most people are not doing anything useful or out of value for regular folks (housing, utilities and transportation). Even worse, we are consuming lots of resources and human time and yet (many countries) still can't solve the basic problems: decent food, affordable and acceptable housing, functioning transportation. I'm in a city block where there is lots of "call centers". Their target is stupid, old, or ill people from the developed world. They make money "legally" from getting these people to call them on expensive lines. It's a multi-million euros business. It's fueling the whole block (real estate, food joints, coffee shops, accountants, retailers, etc...) Many of these are relying on these call centers. The whole block is a scam. Albeit a legal one. And albeit some guys (like a food joint) has nothing to do with it. The whole economy is something like that. Universities, hospitals, consulting, advertising, and the big one "Government" and its army of bureaucracy buildings and stuff. The whole system is bankrupt. Bitcoin is an open system that is showing the true color of humans and greed. We are fueling crypto because that is what we are. We are just getting more efficient at it thanks to technology.
- Justsignedup 9y ago
  Can't tell if serious but here's a reasonable way to think about things: In human civilization there are really two categories of things: Services for survival, services for comfort. Services for survival breed so much commerce: Food, Medical Research, Doctors, Medicine, etc. Suddenly you need to move the food; automotive. Suddenly you need to convince people to take chances (loans + big payout). Eventually when people have more than they need they would prefer to get comfort. This is obviously a very oversimplified view of humanity and economics, but the reality is that we're not just running around in circles. Bigger population #s breeds bigger logistical problems. Some see problems and inefficiencies and try to improve upon them. Etc. Seriously imagine getting rid of all these logistical services and supporting services, you wouldn't be able to feed, cloth, or heal a giant population well. We have examples, hell look at India and their structures. Look at Syria. BitCoin cannot become a currency. It is literally impossible. The ability to have many billions of transactions a day is a prerequisite for a currency. There can be no delays, no fees. Imagine if every time that I went to a store and paid a dollar for a pack of gum I also had to pay a fee associated. Note: Taxes are different, they are fees that go back into society, not a mechanism to profit off (save the corrupt government debate for later). Imagine if my friend asked for $20 I also had to pay a fee. Imagine if that also took like 1 week to process. Not practical. Cash (or currency) is important because otherwise I'd be trading raw beef for ipads because of what commodities I have. Now, not to say every industry is necessary. Call centers like you describe are a predatory commerce, but these things do happen, and hard to eliminate humans taking advantage of humans, it is in our nature. If it won't be call centers it'd be another thing.
ckastner 9y ago
> If you work in a big city and look around; there are tall office buildings everywhere; packed with millions of people. But what do these people actually do? Is that an efficient use of their time in terms of creating value for each other? If you enjoy your current standard of living, then the answer is a clear, resounding "yes". You wouldn't be able to post on HN without the time investment of the people who created your browser, or maintain HN, or provide and maintain the infrastructure you use to post. > Maybe cryptocurrency is a bubble, but maybe also everything else is a bubble. Companies like Snapchat are worth billions of dollars, but they lose billions of dollars each year. That's an arbitrary example that supports your argument, but is not representative for the general economy -- in fact, it's entirely the opposite. Now compare your sentence to one where I substituted Apple for Snapchat: > Maybe cryptocurrency is a bubble, but maybe everything else isn't a bubble. Companies like Apple are worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and they make tens of billions of dollars in profit each year.
buttershakes 9y ago
The entire system is a scam. Inflation and debt are designed to subjugate people to the state from cradle to grave, and to create an orderly and contained society that preserves the power and status of a privileged few. It doesn't just seem like people are spinning their wheels, they are doing exactly that. People who are paying off their mortgage and worrying about their student debt are literally enslaved by this system. Bitcoin is important because it has shown us that we can create value and engage in commerce without the state. I think this will be an important historical artifact, because it points to the possibility that we are rapidly developing a radical new way to organize people.
- elsewhen 9y ago
  who is it that is "creating value" in this context? holders of cryptocurrencies? miners?
- slfnflctd 9y ago
  It's sad to see this text in gray, but given that the audience here contains a disproportionate percentage of entrepreneurs, I understand why it is. Your point about crypto technology empowering decentralized trust systems to "organize people" is a valid one, and I hope to see more of it myself. The counterpoint would be that there is a huge amount of 'real life' happening within the confines of the system as you describe it, and many people are not so negatively affected as you might think. Underneath it all, yeah, a great many aspects of how we do things are arbitrary, horrifically inefficient kludges with overly externalized costs that would be replaced immediately on a more level playing field... but solving the problem of 'greed at the top' is possibly the biggest and most difficult challenge we face as a species, and I don't think it makes you a bad person to decide you're not up for spending too much of your brief existence fighting against it. Enjoy what you can while you're here, sometimes that's the most effective way to brighten the world around you.
  - buttershakes 9y ago
    "The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save." Are you a beneficiary of this system? We aren't very good at thinking on a large scale as a species, and most of us on Hacker news are in some way beneficiaries of the system, relative successes. However, there is something deeply troubling about the social and economic structures that are currently pervasive. I don't think you or anyone else is a 'bad person' for not fighting against the way things are, but I personally believe there is a better way, and we have the tools now to find it.
prklmn 9y ago
Or maybe there’s just a tech bubble that snapchat is at the forefront of. In New York for example, most of those tall buildings and millions of people have withstood the test of time, numerous decades, snapchat and cryptocurrencies have not.
wmeredith 9y ago
It’s a Brave New World.
vasilipupkin 9y ago
Apologies, but Crypto notwithstanding, your whole post about "everything" is nonsense. Just because value is not immediately obvious to you personally, it doesn't follow that this value is zero. Just because you see a bunch of tall buildings and people in them and you don't know what they do, it doesn't follow that there is no value to what they do. I'm tired of hearing this point, it's like a cockroach that keeps coming back again and again.
- cup-of-tea 9y ago
  Maybe you need some exposure to the inside of these buildings. You will understand what the parent poster is talking about before long. There are literally people employed to undo the work of other people in places like that.
- sangnoir 9y ago
  This brings to mind the quote often deployed against climate-change deniers: "Your inability to understand science is not an argument against it." The whole 'truthiness' aspect is mildly surprising to see on HN ("It feels right, so it must be true", and usually it applies to others - never the poster or their organisation.)
- prepend 9y ago
  It’s also like a cockroach staring up at people and lamenting that they aren’t scurrying about or eating feces and crumbs at all.
Tepix 9y ago
I agree somewhat. I think a lot of people feel that way - some of them perhaps only unconsciously. That's why when someone comes along and says he has something meaningful to do (be it religion or making life multi-planetary), he gets attention. It sure resonates with me as well (not the religion part ;-) ).
cup-of-tea 9y ago
This is the most plausible theory. After all, we are the only human civilisation which has not yet collapsed.
ameister14 9y ago
We are currently in an economic bubble, yes; not because of tall office buildings, though.
lee 9y ago
> Is that an efficient use of their time in terms of creating value for each other? Yes. Value is largely subjective. This underpins supply and demand. Things that are in demand are valuable to us, and what's in demand is often subjective. So although you or someone else may not value things like Snapchat or Facebook, society in the aggregate does. Much in the same way that gold, bitcoin, or a rare painting is "valuable". It's valuable because someone is willing to pay for it.

realPubkey 9y ago

'But what do these people actually do?' Awesome. Thats exactly what is in my head for so long. I myself go to one of these offices, and yes I do sh1t which produces no value, only money for my company. We get paid by another company doing sh1t. I spend half my live learning to code. And now I code shitty forms and buttons which will get thrown away and replaced in 5 years by the next guy doing the same.

teekert 9y ago
That's pretty negative. If someone is willing to pay you money, by definition your work has value for someone. Keep in mind that value is subjective. Creating anti AIDS medicine would probably be considered work of value by you? But it's not to me, at least not now.
- realPubkey 9y ago
  I don't know. If you pay Sisyphos to roll a stone uphill once a day, does he create value just because you pay him doing it? My definition of value may be opinionated, but recreating the same software again and again, based on an outdated stack and thrown into garbage has no value for me. Maybe it's different somewhere else. But where I live most coders do exactly this.
  - ilikerashers 9y ago
    The central concern of The Myth of Sisyphus is what Camus calls "the absurd." Camus claims that there is a fundamental conflict between what we want from the universe (whether it be meaning, order, or reasons) and what we find in the universe (formless chaos).
  - Chris2048 9y ago
    > If you pay Sisyphus to Why would you? This example isn't realistic. It just shows value isn't precise to any single example, but an expected outcome over time; individual value judgments aggregate over the population to give a "true" metric of value. What value isn't created directly by Sisyphus, could be created in the fact that Sisyphus is willing to provide a service without finding any personal value in it. The freedom to do things without demonstrating its value, itself has value. > has no value for me Inefficiencies are opportunities. Can you sell the same stack over and over again?
  - jstanley 9y ago
    > If you pay Sisyphos to roll a stone uphill once a day, does he create value just because you pay him doing it? If he's not creating any value for you, why are you paying him to do it? If you pay him to do work that creates no value for you, you're the irrational one, not him.
    - virtualized 9y ago
      Who pays Sisyphos? Another Sisyphos who is just doing his job or following societal norms once created by Sisyphoses who are now long dead. Every individual Sisyphos is rational, but the whole system is not. I am not saying that such a system is objectively bad or anything, but it's an interesting observation and worth keeping in mind when making decisions or arguing.
    - zaccus 9y ago
      >why are you paying him to do it? Because I want to demonstrate "growth" to investors by hiring as many employees as I can afford, whether or not I actually have something for them to do.
- osrec 9y ago
  It's negative, but it's true. The fact that you get paid is a poor way to assess the value of your work. In my opinion, the real question is, what positive societal impact does your work bring about? Are you forgoing the opportunity to make a better contribution to society for the comfort of a steady salary (albeit with little personal satisfaction)?
  - IanPBann 9y ago
    My priorities are to ensure the health and comfort of myself and my family. If "the comfort of a steady salary" appears to be the best way to achieve that, then I will be happy "forgoing the opportunity to make a better contribution to society". If my work can help society at the same time then that's fantastic, but as long as it allows me to provide for those closest to me then, for me and my family, my work is the most valuable use of my time possible.
    - teekert 9y ago
      FWIW, keeping you family happy and healthy is a pretty big contribution to society ;)
      - osrec 9y ago
        The nominal value of your contribution is high (my original comment was not meant as an insult), but imagine a world where it can be higher still. And you get personal satisfaction, and you contribute towards a higher goal, rather than just ever growing cycles of consumption. Surely you would prefer that option if it was made available to you, no?
        teekert 9y ago
        Absolutely and I do see the value of anti AIDS drugs, that was not the point. I'm saying value is a subjective thing. Something does not have intrinsic value, things have value to people, and sometimes something is valued so broadly that it is of value to society at large indeed. It is of course nice to have work of which you personally value the output. But in your case, someone else values your output and pays you to produce it. Calling your work "without value" is thus a bit strange to me.
- exit 9y ago
  my definition of value isn't hopelessly myopic
- moccachino 9y ago
  I must say I find it very hard to wrap my head around that you would say that the creation of a medicine to cure a real disease is not a work of value.
  - malteof 9y ago
    Not what he said though... He said it has no value for him - presumably since he doesn't have AIDS.
    - mick87 9y ago
      But there is value for him as he would have quick access to medicine if he ever gets AIDS. Of course someone who as AIDS values the medicine more but saying there is no value for him seems very short sighted.
      - vasilipupkin 9y ago
        The point is, everyone cannot be working on creating AIDS medicine. Someone has to be working on things that, say, cheer up the person working on aids medicine when she hits a wall.
        dwild 9y ago
        Sure but these all have values then. His point was to show that AIDS medicine has no value for him, but it actually does. He can't use that argument to prove that value is subjective considering that it actually does have value for everyone.
geezerjay 9y ago
> I myself go to one of these offices, and yes I do sh1t which produces no value, only money for my company. Don't you notice the contradiction?

lmm 9y ago

> But what do these people actually do? Is that an efficient use of their time in terms of creating value for each other? There's a lot of work in everything: https://xkcd.com/1741/ https://xkcd.com/1741/ I've worked in industries I had no idea even existed until I worked there. But they made sense once I found them, and I created value, as did most of my colleagues. Maybe you're in a bad job at the moment and need to look a bit wider? > Companies like Snapchat are worth billions of dollars, but they lose billions of dollars each year. At least most cryptocurrencies don't lose money (except some of them due to electricity costs). All cryptocurrencies are burning money on electricity costs. And what do they have to show for it? I've got plenty of fun out of Snapchat, so even if their investors don't get a return it's not like the money was completely burned, whereas cryptocurrencies spend electricity with nothing to show for it except some numbers that hash to other numbers.

amelius 9y ago
> I've worked in industries I had no idea even existed until I worked there. But they made sense once I found them, and I created value, as did most of my colleagues. Value is relative. You may have created value in the reference frame of a particular industry, but perhaps that industry is not of value. As e.g. Ponzi schemes show, people pay for things that have no value, so money is not a reliable indicator. Another example is the entertainment industry. A lot of money is being spent, orders of magnitude more per minute of content than say, 40 years ago. But are people more entertained now per minute of content than back in the old days?
- lmm 9y ago
  > Value is relative. You may have created value in the reference frame of a particular industry, but perhaps that industry is not of value. As e.g. Ponzi schemes show, people pay for things that have no value, so money is not a reliable indicator. It has its flaws but on the whole it works. Certainly in the cases I'm thinking of my industry was producing value and I was producing value to the industry. > Another example is the entertainment industry. A lot of money is being spent, orders of magnitude more per minute of content than say, 40 years ago. But are people more entertained now per minute of content than back in the old days? Yes, much more. Try watching old films, playing old games. There are a few gems but there's a lot of awfulness, and even more than that, even in the good ones everything's so slow.

tim333 9y ago

I guess as the necessities of providing food and shelter require a progressively smaller percentage of the workforce more people will occupy themselves with less fundamentally necessary things like building websites, apps and cryptocurrencies for each other.

perseusprime11 9y ago

Except that Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc are making tons of money partly justifying their valuations. There is definitely crypto bubble.

csomar 9y ago

> If you work in a big city and look around; there are tall office buildings everywhere; packed with millions of people. But what do these people actually do? Is that an efficient use of their time in terms of creating value for each other? Thank you. The whole system is people running in empty circles. Most people are not doing anything useful or out of value for regular folks (housing, utilities and transportation). Even worse, we are consuming lots of resources and human time and yet (many countries) still can't solve the basic problems: decent food, affordable and acceptable housing, functioning transportation. I'm in a city block where there is lots of "call centers". Their target is stupid, old, or ill people from the developed world. They make money "legally" from getting these people to call them on expensive lines. It's a multi-million euros business. It's fueling the whole block (real estate, food joints, coffee shops, accountants, retailers, etc...) Many of these are relying on these call centers. The whole block is a scam. Albeit a legal one. And albeit some guys (like a food joint) has nothing to do with it. The whole economy is something like that. Universities, hospitals, consulting, advertising, and the big one "Government" and its army of bureaucracy buildings and stuff. The whole system is bankrupt. Bitcoin is an open system that is showing the true color of humans and greed. We are fueling crypto because that is what we are. We are just getting more efficient at it thanks to technology.

Justsignedup 9y ago
Can't tell if serious but here's a reasonable way to think about things: In human civilization there are really two categories of things: Services for survival, services for comfort. Services for survival breed so much commerce: Food, Medical Research, Doctors, Medicine, etc. Suddenly you need to move the food; automotive. Suddenly you need to convince people to take chances (loans + big payout). Eventually when people have more than they need they would prefer to get comfort. This is obviously a very oversimplified view of humanity and economics, but the reality is that we're not just running around in circles. Bigger population #s breeds bigger logistical problems. Some see problems and inefficiencies and try to improve upon them. Etc. Seriously imagine getting rid of all these logistical services and supporting services, you wouldn't be able to feed, cloth, or heal a giant population well. We have examples, hell look at India and their structures. Look at Syria. BitCoin cannot become a currency. It is literally impossible. The ability to have many billions of transactions a day is a prerequisite for a currency. There can be no delays, no fees. Imagine if every time that I went to a store and paid a dollar for a pack of gum I also had to pay a fee associated. Note: Taxes are different, they are fees that go back into society, not a mechanism to profit off (save the corrupt government debate for later). Imagine if my friend asked for $20 I also had to pay a fee. Imagine if that also took like 1 week to process. Not practical. Cash (or currency) is important because otherwise I'd be trading raw beef for ipads because of what commodities I have. Now, not to say every industry is necessary. Call centers like you describe are a predatory commerce, but these things do happen, and hard to eliminate humans taking advantage of humans, it is in our nature. If it won't be call centers it'd be another thing.

ckastner 9y ago

> If you work in a big city and look around; there are tall office buildings everywhere; packed with millions of people. But what do these people actually do? Is that an efficient use of their time in terms of creating value for each other? If you enjoy your current standard of living, then the answer is a clear, resounding "yes". You wouldn't be able to post on HN without the time investment of the people who created your browser, or maintain HN, or provide and maintain the infrastructure you use to post. > Maybe cryptocurrency is a bubble, but maybe also everything else is a bubble. Companies like Snapchat are worth billions of dollars, but they lose billions of dollars each year. That's an arbitrary example that supports your argument, but is not representative for the general economy -- in fact, it's entirely the opposite. Now compare your sentence to one where I substituted Apple for Snapchat: > Maybe cryptocurrency is a bubble, but maybe everything else isn't a bubble. Companies like Apple are worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and they make tens of billions of dollars in profit each year.

buttershakes 9y ago

The entire system is a scam. Inflation and debt are designed to subjugate people to the state from cradle to grave, and to create an orderly and contained society that preserves the power and status of a privileged few. It doesn't just seem like people are spinning their wheels, they are doing exactly that. People who are paying off their mortgage and worrying about their student debt are literally enslaved by this system. Bitcoin is important because it has shown us that we can create value and engage in commerce without the state. I think this will be an important historical artifact, because it points to the possibility that we are rapidly developing a radical new way to organize people.

elsewhen 9y ago
who is it that is "creating value" in this context? holders of cryptocurrencies? miners?
slfnflctd 9y ago
It's sad to see this text in gray, but given that the audience here contains a disproportionate percentage of entrepreneurs, I understand why it is. Your point about crypto technology empowering decentralized trust systems to "organize people" is a valid one, and I hope to see more of it myself. The counterpoint would be that there is a huge amount of 'real life' happening within the confines of the system as you describe it, and many people are not so negatively affected as you might think. Underneath it all, yeah, a great many aspects of how we do things are arbitrary, horrifically inefficient kludges with overly externalized costs that would be replaced immediately on a more level playing field... but solving the problem of 'greed at the top' is possibly the biggest and most difficult challenge we face as a species, and I don't think it makes you a bad person to decide you're not up for spending too much of your brief existence fighting against it. Enjoy what you can while you're here, sometimes that's the most effective way to brighten the world around you.
- buttershakes 9y ago
  "The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save." Are you a beneficiary of this system? We aren't very good at thinking on a large scale as a species, and most of us on Hacker news are in some way beneficiaries of the system, relative successes. However, there is something deeply troubling about the social and economic structures that are currently pervasive. I don't think you or anyone else is a 'bad person' for not fighting against the way things are, but I personally believe there is a better way, and we have the tools now to find it.

prklmn 9y ago

Or maybe there’s just a tech bubble that snapchat is at the forefront of. In New York for example, most of those tall buildings and millions of people have withstood the test of time, numerous decades, snapchat and cryptocurrencies have not.

wmeredith 9y ago

It’s a Brave New World.

vasilipupkin 9y ago

Apologies, but Crypto notwithstanding, your whole post about "everything" is nonsense. Just because value is not immediately obvious to you personally, it doesn't follow that this value is zero. Just because you see a bunch of tall buildings and people in them and you don't know what they do, it doesn't follow that there is no value to what they do. I'm tired of hearing this point, it's like a cockroach that keeps coming back again and again.

cup-of-tea 9y ago
Maybe you need some exposure to the inside of these buildings. You will understand what the parent poster is talking about before long. There are literally people employed to undo the work of other people in places like that.
sangnoir 9y ago
This brings to mind the quote often deployed against climate-change deniers: "Your inability to understand science is not an argument against it." The whole 'truthiness' aspect is mildly surprising to see on HN ("It feels right, so it must be true", and usually it applies to others - never the poster or their organisation.)
prepend 9y ago
It’s also like a cockroach staring up at people and lamenting that they aren’t scurrying about or eating feces and crumbs at all.

Tepix 9y ago

I agree somewhat. I think a lot of people feel that way - some of them perhaps only unconsciously. That's why when someone comes along and says he has something meaningful to do (be it religion or making life multi-planetary), he gets attention. It sure resonates with me as well (not the religion part ;-) ).

cup-of-tea 9y ago

This is the most plausible theory. After all, we are the only human civilisation which has not yet collapsed.

ameister14 9y ago

We are currently in an economic bubble, yes; not because of tall office buildings, though.

lee 9y ago

> Is that an efficient use of their time in terms of creating value for each other? Yes. Value is largely subjective. This underpins supply and demand. Things that are in demand are valuable to us, and what's in demand is often subjective. So although you or someone else may not value things like Snapchat or Facebook, society in the aggregate does. Much in the same way that gold, bitcoin, or a rare painting is "valuable". It's valuable because someone is willing to pay for it.