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What's more concerning to me is the cryptocurrency market as a whole. Perhaps there is an argument to Bitcoin being a kind of "digital gold" even if it is all b

What's more concerning to me is the cryptocurrency market as a whole. Perhaps there is an argument to Bitcoin being a kind of "digital gold" even if it is all but useless as a currency. But events like Dogecoin hitting a $50B market cap are very unsettling to me. I used to take part in "Dogecoin Socks for the Homeless" events. It was wonderful, everyone was trying to make something good out of what we all knew to be a meme. I am shocked now to look back on those wallet addresses which once held ~$1,500 and see they'd be worth $285,000 (had I held). Of course, it might be that I'm just angry I wasn't the one to become rich, but the mania right now is really, seriously, insane. Many people who are FOMO-ing in thinking this will make them millions with a few hundred dollars invested will be hurt when the "number go up, number go down" cycle turns to "number go down."

GoldenMonkey 6y ago
This is more a mania with dogecoin. Of course set off by robinhood traders and elon musk tweets.
- dole 6y ago
  Also a Conagra Foods Slim Jim cross promotion announcement.
- baq 6y ago
  blame musk all you want, he knows doge is a joke and treated it as such. same for doge creator. there's simply so much money looking to be put to work that people throw it around to see what sticks. i don't believe that anyone trading doge isn't aware this is a ponzi. the only question may be if it's by design or by accident. or maybe memes have value after all...
  - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
    Memes are influencing presidential elections.
throw0101a 6y ago
> Perhaps there is an argument to Bitcoin being a kind of "digital gold" even if it is all but useless as a currency. Gold is less useful than most people think: > In a 2012 paper entitled "The Golden Dilemma",[1] Claude Erb and Campbell Harvey examined some common assumptions about gold. First they looked at gold as an inflation hedge, analyzing gold returns from 1975 (the year the U.S. came off of the gold standard), through March 2012. They found that, due to its real-price volatility, gold had not been a good inflation hedge over the short- or long-term. * https://www.pwlcapital.com/will-gold-save-the-day/ https://www.pwlcapital.com/will-gold-save-the-day/ It's only of note because of historical accident and it's use in certain cultures (along with silver as well). The Incas had piles of gold, but only used it for jewelry and such, and not as a currency. * https://www.tourinperu.com/blog/inca-gold-culture-invasion-role https://www.tourinperu.com/blog/inca-gold-culture-invasion-r... If we didn't have the culture references of the Gold Standard, I don't think most people would accept a shiny rock as anything special. Or at least gold (Au) specifically, and not any other Period 6 element: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Period_6_element https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Period_6_element Is there perhaps something special about Group 11 element (Cu, Ag, Au) that they should be treated as "currency"? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_11_element https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_11_element They are certainly useful from a tooling perspective in some ways, but beyond that?
- bcrl 6y ago
  Silver is quite useful as wire. It's a better conductor than copper, but because of cost is only used rarely. It was used in WW2 for making magnets for uranium processing.
  - matkoniecz 6y ago
    It is really an amazing story! > But copper—used in shell casings—was a high-priority commodity during the war. So Marshall and Nichols struck on the idea of using silver as a substitute. Congress had authorized the use of up to 86,000 tons of Treasury Department silver for defense purposes. (...) > Nichols met with Undersecretary of the Treasury Daniel Bell on August 3, 1942, to inquire about borrowing 6,000 tons of silver from Treasury vaults. In his memoirs, Nichols relates that Bell indignantly informed him that the Treasury’s unit of measure was the troy ounce—though not all present at that meeting recall any unpleasantness. (...) > Scrap recovery and cleanup operations were so successful that over the course of processing, more than 1.5 million pounds of silver were collected and returned to Treasury, much of it likely originating from earlier and unrelated silver processing. That more than offset a much smaller amount—11,000 pounds—of borrowed Treasury silver that was unaccounted for. (...) > The busbars were massive conductors about a foot square that carried current to the magnet coils. During their manufacture, armed guards again stood by, this time with pieces of paper positioned to catch drill dust as workmen bored holes in pieces of silver in preparation for fastening them together. https://www.americanscientist.org/article/from-treasury-vault-to-the-manhattan-project https://www.americanscientist.org/article/from-treasury-vaul...
rvz 6y ago
'Investing' at an all time high, is going to upset lots of late comers. Signalling a great big crash, waiting to happen.
- entropic88 6y ago
  This isn't even close to what will be the all time high. I know HN has a significant aversion to cryptocurrency (which absolutely befuddles me for the foundational societal concepts it modernizes) but love it or hate it if you think this is close to the peak you've been in a cave the last decade. *Edit: speaking about crypto as a whole not specifically doge coin. BTC and ETH first to market with digital solutions to antiquated economic problems. But I'm not joking when I say the cut of Musk's jib puts a significant non-zero chance that he announces Doge will be the official martian currency. PT Barnum or not, I wouldn't completely discard the idea.
  - Crye 6y ago
    I don't know if we're there yet or not, but I remember last peak I started to here about crypto in my non crypto media feeds, aka comedy podcasts. I just saw my disc golf feeds talk about crypto. I think that's a strong signal.
    - entropic88 6y ago
      Last peak was pretty much 100% retail investors like your disc golf gang. The amount of institutional investment this round offer legitimacy and absolute scale of potential that can't be overlooked by anyone that's been paying attention. Honestly, for the amount of forward thinking technologists that call this nook of the internet home, there is a ridiculous blind spot for cryptocurrency. It's actually ridiculous to me that such forward thinkers could be such luddites. Will it take another decade before you realize we're there - or if not yet, where this is going?
      - sebmellen 6y ago
        I have been around in the crypto space for a significant amount of time (think $700 BTC) and have started two startups which use blockchain tech to a significant degree. But I am very disappointed in BTC and ETH. BTC did not become “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” and we haven’t seen the explosion of uses-cases I hoped to see from ETH (like tokenization and trading of real-world assets). There’s a ton of froth and solutionism in this space, which is OK, but it also understandably puts off a lot of people who see it as a scam-ridden wasteland. That’s to say nothing of the Tether black swan to come.
senojretep356 6y ago
Money only works because we all agree to believe in it. The book Money by Jacob Goldstein is the best thing I have read on this. It covers the useful fiction that is money and how it has has shaped societies. From the inception of coins in ancient Greece, the first stock market to current day cryptocurrencies. When people first came up with coins and paper money, don't you think people questioned their value? "At the heart of the story are the fringe thinkers and world leaders who reimagined money. Kublai Khan, the Mongol emperor, created paper money backed by nothing, centuries before it appeared in the west. John Law, a professional gambler and convicted murderer, brought modern money to France (and destroyed the country's economy). The cypherpunks, a group of radical libertarian computer programmers, paved the way for bitcoin. One thing they all realized: what counts as money (and what doesn't) is the result of choices we make, and those choices have a profound effect on who gets more stuff and who gets less, who gets to take risks when times are good, and who gets screwed when things go bad." For the record I am in on crypto including Dogecoin, just as I am in on FAANG, just as I am in on index funds, just as I am in on property. I honestly people not diversifying would be hubris.
- sebmellen 6y ago
  No disagreement. Here’s my beef, though: Dogecoin, BTC, etc. have failed to replace cash money or be used for any sort of significant, regular, money-like use-case. Monero is maybe the most legitimate cryptocurrency at the moment, as it allows for (and is really used for) darknet purchases. That’s a real use-case. This is the point Taleb is making too.
  - diragon 6y ago
    I've happily paid for legal things in BTC in the past. Actually the biggest thing that blocks me from doing so now is the fear that the tax man might come to haunt me later for some bogus reason. So it's mostly about its legal status of "something that's not legal tender" that makes it unusable. And also that established payment services have kept improving their services enough that BTC's superior agility isn't that pronounced anymore.
- kqr 6y ago
miohtama 6y ago
> But events like Dogecoin hitting a $50B market cap are very unsettling to me. It's the sign of the peak of the bull market. There is going to be hangover.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  It's the sign that no crypto has really found the right value-add yet. They are all struggling with poor transaction throughput/high fees, huge bandwidth for nodes, deflationary money supply, etc...
  - undersuit 6y ago
    I only had Doge because I could use it for cheap exchanges between hard to find currency pairs when I was mining. Those pennies of left over coin became thousands of dollars worth and I sold at $.04 when the Diamond Hands on WSB pumped it during the start of the GME squeeze. It all makes no sense and yet I participate.
CTDOCodebases 6y ago
One way to look at crypto is that each coin is a digital version of a casino chip and you need these chips to gamble in the casino. At the end of the day it’s just another phenomenon. Cryptocurrencies are many things to many people. You may lament for the person that looses a few hundred dollars but what about all the people who spent money on Pokémon Go just because they wanted to get involved in an activity with their friends. There’s nothing wrong with getting hurt if you chose to ignore the risks and risked more than you were willing to lose.
cblconfederate 6y ago
There is the fallacy that "real" markets are somehow super-efficient in moving peoples money exactly where they need to go to achieve tangible effect. This is just a myth, however in the crypto ecosystem it becomes entirely transparent. There's probably a lot more than $1T worth of money which is allocated randomly in regulated markets (i.e. gambling money). Part of this is moving to crypto because it's easier to handle.

GoldenMonkey 6y ago

This is more a mania with dogecoin. Of course set off by robinhood traders and elon musk tweets.

dole 6y ago
Also a Conagra Foods Slim Jim cross promotion announcement.
baq 6y ago
blame musk all you want, he knows doge is a joke and treated it as such. same for doge creator. there's simply so much money looking to be put to work that people throw it around to see what sticks. i don't believe that anyone trading doge isn't aware this is a ponzi. the only question may be if it's by design or by accident. or maybe memes have value after all...
- read_if_gay_ 6y ago
  Memes are influencing presidential elections.

throw0101a 6y ago

> Perhaps there is an argument to Bitcoin being a kind of "digital gold" even if it is all but useless as a currency. Gold is less useful than most people think: > In a 2012 paper entitled "The Golden Dilemma",[1] Claude Erb and Campbell Harvey examined some common assumptions about gold. First they looked at gold as an inflation hedge, analyzing gold returns from 1975 (the year the U.S. came off of the gold standard), through March 2012. They found that, due to its real-price volatility, gold had not been a good inflation hedge over the short- or long-term. * https://www.pwlcapital.com/will-gold-save-the-day/ https://www.pwlcapital.com/will-gold-save-the-day/ It's only of note because of historical accident and it's use in certain cultures (along with silver as well). The Incas had piles of gold, but only used it for jewelry and such, and not as a currency. * https://www.tourinperu.com/blog/inca-gold-culture-invasion-role https://www.tourinperu.com/blog/inca-gold-culture-invasion-r... If we didn't have the culture references of the Gold Standard, I don't think most people would accept a shiny rock as anything special. Or at least gold (Au) specifically, and not any other Period 6 element: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Period_6_element https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Period_6_element Is there perhaps something special about Group 11 element (Cu, Ag, Au) that they should be treated as "currency"? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_11_element https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_11_element They are certainly useful from a tooling perspective in some ways, but beyond that?

bcrl 6y ago
Silver is quite useful as wire. It's a better conductor than copper, but because of cost is only used rarely. It was used in WW2 for making magnets for uranium processing.
- matkoniecz 6y ago
  It is really an amazing story! > But copper—used in shell casings—was a high-priority commodity during the war. So Marshall and Nichols struck on the idea of using silver as a substitute. Congress had authorized the use of up to 86,000 tons of Treasury Department silver for defense purposes. (...) > Nichols met with Undersecretary of the Treasury Daniel Bell on August 3, 1942, to inquire about borrowing 6,000 tons of silver from Treasury vaults. In his memoirs, Nichols relates that Bell indignantly informed him that the Treasury’s unit of measure was the troy ounce—though not all present at that meeting recall any unpleasantness. (...) > Scrap recovery and cleanup operations were so successful that over the course of processing, more than 1.5 million pounds of silver were collected and returned to Treasury, much of it likely originating from earlier and unrelated silver processing. That more than offset a much smaller amount—11,000 pounds—of borrowed Treasury silver that was unaccounted for. (...) > The busbars were massive conductors about a foot square that carried current to the magnet coils. During their manufacture, armed guards again stood by, this time with pieces of paper positioned to catch drill dust as workmen bored holes in pieces of silver in preparation for fastening them together. https://www.americanscientist.org/article/from-treasury-vault-to-the-manhattan-project https://www.americanscientist.org/article/from-treasury-vaul...

rvz 6y ago

'Investing' at an all time high, is going to upset lots of late comers. Signalling a great big crash, waiting to happen.

entropic88 6y ago
This isn't even close to what will be the all time high. I know HN has a significant aversion to cryptocurrency (which absolutely befuddles me for the foundational societal concepts it modernizes) but love it or hate it if you think this is close to the peak you've been in a cave the last decade. *Edit: speaking about crypto as a whole not specifically doge coin. BTC and ETH first to market with digital solutions to antiquated economic problems. But I'm not joking when I say the cut of Musk's jib puts a significant non-zero chance that he announces Doge will be the official martian currency. PT Barnum or not, I wouldn't completely discard the idea.
- Crye 6y ago
  I don't know if we're there yet or not, but I remember last peak I started to here about crypto in my non crypto media feeds, aka comedy podcasts. I just saw my disc golf feeds talk about crypto. I think that's a strong signal.
  - entropic88 6y ago
    Last peak was pretty much 100% retail investors like your disc golf gang. The amount of institutional investment this round offer legitimacy and absolute scale of potential that can't be overlooked by anyone that's been paying attention. Honestly, for the amount of forward thinking technologists that call this nook of the internet home, there is a ridiculous blind spot for cryptocurrency. It's actually ridiculous to me that such forward thinkers could be such luddites. Will it take another decade before you realize we're there - or if not yet, where this is going?
    - sebmellen 6y ago
      I have been around in the crypto space for a significant amount of time (think $700 BTC) and have started two startups which use blockchain tech to a significant degree. But I am very disappointed in BTC and ETH. BTC did not become “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” and we haven’t seen the explosion of uses-cases I hoped to see from ETH (like tokenization and trading of real-world assets). There’s a ton of froth and solutionism in this space, which is OK, but it also understandably puts off a lot of people who see it as a scam-ridden wasteland. That’s to say nothing of the Tether black swan to come.

senojretep356 6y ago

Money only works because we all agree to believe in it. The book Money by Jacob Goldstein is the best thing I have read on this. It covers the useful fiction that is money and how it has has shaped societies. From the inception of coins in ancient Greece, the first stock market to current day cryptocurrencies. When people first came up with coins and paper money, don't you think people questioned their value? "At the heart of the story are the fringe thinkers and world leaders who reimagined money. Kublai Khan, the Mongol emperor, created paper money backed by nothing, centuries before it appeared in the west. John Law, a professional gambler and convicted murderer, brought modern money to France (and destroyed the country's economy). The cypherpunks, a group of radical libertarian computer programmers, paved the way for bitcoin. One thing they all realized: what counts as money (and what doesn't) is the result of choices we make, and those choices have a profound effect on who gets more stuff and who gets less, who gets to take risks when times are good, and who gets screwed when things go bad." For the record I am in on crypto including Dogecoin, just as I am in on FAANG, just as I am in on index funds, just as I am in on property. I honestly people not diversifying would be hubris.

sebmellen 6y ago
No disagreement. Here’s my beef, though: Dogecoin, BTC, etc. have failed to replace cash money or be used for any sort of significant, regular, money-like use-case. Monero is maybe the most legitimate cryptocurrency at the moment, as it allows for (and is really used for) darknet purchases. That’s a real use-case. This is the point Taleb is making too.
- diragon 6y ago
  I've happily paid for legal things in BTC in the past. Actually the biggest thing that blocks me from doing so now is the fear that the tax man might come to haunt me later for some bogus reason. So it's mostly about its legal status of "something that's not legal tender" that makes it unusable. And also that established payment services have kept improving their services enough that BTC's superior agility isn't that pronounced anymore.
kqr 6y ago

miohtama 6y ago

> But events like Dogecoin hitting a $50B market cap are very unsettling to me. It's the sign of the peak of the bull market. There is going to be hangover.

koheripbal 6y ago
It's the sign that no crypto has really found the right value-add yet. They are all struggling with poor transaction throughput/high fees, huge bandwidth for nodes, deflationary money supply, etc...
- undersuit 6y ago
  I only had Doge because I could use it for cheap exchanges between hard to find currency pairs when I was mining. Those pennies of left over coin became thousands of dollars worth and I sold at $.04 when the Diamond Hands on WSB pumped it during the start of the GME squeeze. It all makes no sense and yet I participate.

CTDOCodebases 6y ago

One way to look at crypto is that each coin is a digital version of a casino chip and you need these chips to gamble in the casino. At the end of the day it’s just another phenomenon. Cryptocurrencies are many things to many people. You may lament for the person that looses a few hundred dollars but what about all the people who spent money on Pokémon Go just because they wanted to get involved in an activity with their friends. There’s nothing wrong with getting hurt if you chose to ignore the risks and risked more than you were willing to lose.

cblconfederate 6y ago

There is the fallacy that "real" markets are somehow super-efficient in moving peoples money exactly where they need to go to achieve tangible effect. This is just a myth, however in the crypto ecosystem it becomes entirely transparent. There's probably a lot more than $1T worth of money which is allocated randomly in regulated markets (i.e. gambling money). Part of this is moving to crypto because it's easier to handle.