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Sometimes I wonder if this is how Michael Burry and others felt before the housing crash. Right before the housing crash, most the in-industry folks were fully

Sometimes I wonder if this is how Michael Burry and others felt before the housing crash. Right before the housing crash, most the in-industry folks were fully aware it was unsustainable, but they felt it would continue long term. Same goes for tether, majority of those involved in crypto know what they are doing, and the pump-up effect it's had to crypto.

whatanorigtht 5y ago
Oh so brave! Another hackernews commenter who hates bitcoin and thinks the price is too high! You're going to get so many upvotes!
- swarnie 5y ago
  I think its more that Tether, the coin which provides the most liquidity in the market is an obvious scam. I know too many people are too deeply involved now to accept it...
  - whatanorigtht 5y ago
    Sure thing. The rise in bitcoins price certainly has nothing to do with the actions of central bankers. Have fun staying poor. Never leave your hackernews echo chamber.
    - shlant 5y ago
      I'm all for pushing back a bit against the usual HN crypto hate-fest, but you are really going about it in the most insufferable way possible. Maybe leave the crypto twitter level discourse out of it.
      - whatanorigtht 5y ago
        Oh, I used to bother trying. Then eventually you realize any wrong think simply gets down voted into oblivion, your posting throttled, and eventually shadowbanned. So now I basically enjoy just telling the community to gfy.
        shlant 5y ago
        what a sad way to get enjoyment... go back to twitter if that's the kind of discourse you want to engage in
        whatanorigtht 5y ago
        No less sad than your typical elitist hn commenter. Gfy.
      - chaostheory 5y ago
        It’s no longer a fully rational argument for some people since they’ve bet everything on crypto. A large enough portion of the argument is now emotional. Tbf certain subjects on HN trigger me as well
    - chaostheory 5y ago
      You have a valid point, but so do the other commenters. The difference is with you it dangerously verges on religion. Everyone is betting on an outcome but no one knows the future unless they are a fly on wall in various political offices. Imo ignoring everything about crypto, all I know is historically government’s will take drastic measures to protect their currency. Gold ownership was banned for decades in the 20th century. Of course, this revelation doesn’t matter for crypto that’s truly decentralized. The problem is that the major ones aren’t decentralized. To make matters worse, transactions are neither fast or cheap, which makes a reliance on brokers a necessity, which is also another vector that governments can use for attack. There’s no near guarantee on anonymity either unless it’s Monero Tether’s very existence helps bolster my point.
      - TomSwirly 5y ago
        > no one knows the future If you read history, you have a pretty good idea of what happens to a "market" like tulips or the South Sea Bubble where there is no actual products or cashflow.
    - NikolaNovak 5y ago
      "have fun staying poor" I don't understand the notion that bitcoin is making all people rich. It is a transactional system at best. If you cash out you are taking somebody else's money who decided to buy it at higher price. It has no fantastic democratizing magic which will make all people rich. It is. It building new things. I can understand people who are invested in it wanting to perpetuate the positive story so they can eventually cash out. But the pretense it somehow helps the world / others, let alone those not well off , strikes me as callous or insencere or both.
      - repomies69 5y ago
        > It has no fantastic democratizing magic which will make all people rich. It is. It building new things. If you prefer to hold bitcoin instead of fiat and are willing to spend a little bit effort on that and digest some transaction costs, I think it is very likely you will become wealthier. However the promise to get rich is something entirely different. Not many people in the world can be rich. You have to take out-of-normal type of risk. The more common bitcoins gets, the more normal it is and less riskier. The later you get into btc, the less likely it is that you will get risk. However it still makes sense financially.
        foepys 5y ago
        How does everybody become wealthier? The money to put more Bitcoin (or any other popular crypto currency) into the system is not distributed among investors, it is literally burned. Mining Bitcoin requires energy and hardware and new Bitcoins are the way to pay for those. Next to all money from mined Bitcoins goes to energy providers and hardware manufacturers. That is how these systems are designed in their respective whitepapers.
        paulgb 5y ago
        To put some numbers on it, at a price of $60k and in the current mining epoch, Bitcoin miners rake in ~$20 billion per year in the aggregate (not even counting transaction costs). All that money comes from diluting hodlers.
    - adrr 5y ago
      You literally stated the problem with crypto. They are get rich schemes.
      - tromp 5y ago
        Nearly all are. Due to premines, insta-mines, fast-mines, and taxes, benefiting the creators/founders, and early adopters.
  - RealityVoid 5y ago
    I think a part of the liquidity is provided by Tether, but the "most of the liquidity" rhetoric rings false. Honestly, crypto might crash now, sure, but long term I am confident we will see a crypto currency emerge as the global reserve currency. It just fits too well for it not to.
    - tw04 5y ago
      > It just fits too well for it not to. It prevents governments from controlling their own fiscal policy. It doesn’t fit AT ALL with the way any solvent government currently runs their country. The only place it fits are countries with unstable or nonexistent financial markets.
    - WalterSear 5y ago
      70% of *all* crypto trades involve Tether. How is this not 'most of the liquidity'?
  - FDSGSG 5y ago
    >the coin which provides the most liquidity in the market is an obvious scam. But what does that actually imply? What's the scam? This isn't a black and white thing. Tether might not have sufficient assets to be able to redeem any USDT for USD, or Tether might actually have sufficient assets and willingness to redeem all USDT and then some... or anything in between. Tether being dishonest is one thing, Tether not being able to maintain the USD peg is another.
    - riffraff 5y ago
      But that's the point: the assets they have are not safe as treasury bills, and in a significant part they are backed by risky assets, including other stuff that depends on crypto, so if ever there is a bank run they will not be able to keep up with the redemptions. The fun bit is that few can actually redeem, and most of those who could have a vested interest in never doing it anyway!
    - chaostheory 5y ago
      The scam is Tether owns a brokerage that they used buy other crypto with their barely backed, worth much less than advertised stable coin which they falsely claim is worth exactly the same as USD. (Tether also pretended that they weren’t affiliated with Bitfinex, the aforementioned brokerage) Consequently, they’re artificially pumping the cryptos that they are buying. Once they artificially pump crypto, they then dump it. They’ve probably pumped and dumped several times now People are guessing that they’re doing this to regain reserves that were stolen by an untrustworthy bank that they previously used. Ie they were probably telling the truth in the past before their money was stolen. It’s similar to what happened with Mt Gox. What’s impressive to me is how the people at Tether are somehow 8 steps ahead of regulators, whereas Mt Gox just failed overnight. Imo regardless of Tether fuckery, I believe that the Ethereum platform has utility beyond speculation
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- 0xdeadb00f 5y ago
  I've seena crapload more commenters on here putting crypto in a positive light. It's only recently I've started to see some genuine opposition.
  - TigeriusKirk 5y ago
    It's very easy to search and see HN has been heavily anti-crypto since the beginning, over a decade ago.
    - smt88 5y ago
      It seems that those early skeptics have been proven correct so far. We haven't seen crypto meaningfully improve anyone's life outside of the small minority of people who exited to fiat and made a lot of real money. The very mixed Bitcoin rollout in El Salvador by an authoritarian govt should also tell us that the fantasy of crypto enabling freedom from oppressive govt is also still unrealized.
    - 0xdeadb00f 5y ago
      Alright.. So then there must've been a time in between now and before where HN was accepting of it. Because I know for a fact I've seen posts and comments more so hyping up crypto currencies
WalterSear 5y ago
> Same goes for tether, majority of those involved in crypto know what they are doing, and the pump-up effect it's had to crypto. Not at all. While those at the executive level have some awareness, the rank and file that I interact with at crypto companies barely understand the tech, and have no knowledge at all of the environment. It's flabbergasting.
- chaostheory 5y ago
  Can you give examples of their lack of knowledge?
  - WalterSear 5y ago
    It feels a little sneer-clubby to complain about people in this way online, but FFS, they really are obliged to understand their profession. * Anything about Tether, other than "it's the largest stablecoin." * That the primary users of their product in China are engaged in capital flight, rather than entrepreneurial speculation. * That the people yelling 'To the moon' on Twitter and Discord are excited about making easy money, not about developing projects on their platform. And that the swag and meme competitions they were running were doing little to nothing to advance them with the audience their product actually needed to court.
    - chaostheory 5y ago
      These are developers? I’m a bit shocked, but this confirms my gut feeling that crypto is a huge bubble driven by Tether. It only takes government regulation to burst it, which imo is inevitable.
      - WalterSear 5y ago
        Arguably worse, but slightly less shocking? People who are developing corporate strategy for their companies - ie: everything other than the code, but including some doing product development and (omgwtf) market research (!!)
knownjorbist 5y ago
Michael Burry recently took out a massive short position on BTC and is likely very deeply in the red at this point. Just like he is with Tesla. People who call once-in-a-lifetime events don't do it more than once, it's in the name.

whatanorigtht 5y ago

Oh so brave! Another hackernews commenter who hates bitcoin and thinks the price is too high! You're going to get so many upvotes!

swarnie 5y ago
I think its more that Tether, the coin which provides the most liquidity in the market is an obvious scam. I know too many people are too deeply involved now to accept it...
- whatanorigtht 5y ago
  Sure thing. The rise in bitcoins price certainly has nothing to do with the actions of central bankers. Have fun staying poor. Never leave your hackernews echo chamber.
  - shlant 5y ago
    I'm all for pushing back a bit against the usual HN crypto hate-fest, but you are really going about it in the most insufferable way possible. Maybe leave the crypto twitter level discourse out of it.
    - whatanorigtht 5y ago
      Oh, I used to bother trying. Then eventually you realize any wrong think simply gets down voted into oblivion, your posting throttled, and eventually shadowbanned. So now I basically enjoy just telling the community to gfy.
      - shlant 5y ago
        what a sad way to get enjoyment... go back to twitter if that's the kind of discourse you want to engage in
        whatanorigtht 5y ago
        No less sad than your typical elitist hn commenter. Gfy.
    - chaostheory 5y ago
      It’s no longer a fully rational argument for some people since they’ve bet everything on crypto. A large enough portion of the argument is now emotional. Tbf certain subjects on HN trigger me as well
  - chaostheory 5y ago
    You have a valid point, but so do the other commenters. The difference is with you it dangerously verges on religion. Everyone is betting on an outcome but no one knows the future unless they are a fly on wall in various political offices. Imo ignoring everything about crypto, all I know is historically government’s will take drastic measures to protect their currency. Gold ownership was banned for decades in the 20th century. Of course, this revelation doesn’t matter for crypto that’s truly decentralized. The problem is that the major ones aren’t decentralized. To make matters worse, transactions are neither fast or cheap, which makes a reliance on brokers a necessity, which is also another vector that governments can use for attack. There’s no near guarantee on anonymity either unless it’s Monero Tether’s very existence helps bolster my point.
    - TomSwirly 5y ago
      > no one knows the future If you read history, you have a pretty good idea of what happens to a "market" like tulips or the South Sea Bubble where there is no actual products or cashflow.
  - NikolaNovak 5y ago
    "have fun staying poor" I don't understand the notion that bitcoin is making all people rich. It is a transactional system at best. If you cash out you are taking somebody else's money who decided to buy it at higher price. It has no fantastic democratizing magic which will make all people rich. It is. It building new things. I can understand people who are invested in it wanting to perpetuate the positive story so they can eventually cash out. But the pretense it somehow helps the world / others, let alone those not well off , strikes me as callous or insencere or both.
    - repomies69 5y ago
      > It has no fantastic democratizing magic which will make all people rich. It is. It building new things. If you prefer to hold bitcoin instead of fiat and are willing to spend a little bit effort on that and digest some transaction costs, I think it is very likely you will become wealthier. However the promise to get rich is something entirely different. Not many people in the world can be rich. You have to take out-of-normal type of risk. The more common bitcoins gets, the more normal it is and less riskier. The later you get into btc, the less likely it is that you will get risk. However it still makes sense financially.
      - foepys 5y ago
        How does everybody become wealthier? The money to put more Bitcoin (or any other popular crypto currency) into the system is not distributed among investors, it is literally burned. Mining Bitcoin requires energy and hardware and new Bitcoins are the way to pay for those. Next to all money from mined Bitcoins goes to energy providers and hardware manufacturers. That is how these systems are designed in their respective whitepapers.
        paulgb 5y ago
        To put some numbers on it, at a price of $60k and in the current mining epoch, Bitcoin miners rake in ~$20 billion per year in the aggregate (not even counting transaction costs). All that money comes from diluting hodlers.
  - adrr 5y ago
    You literally stated the problem with crypto. They are get rich schemes.
    - tromp 5y ago
      Nearly all are. Due to premines, insta-mines, fast-mines, and taxes, benefiting the creators/founders, and early adopters.
- RealityVoid 5y ago
  I think a part of the liquidity is provided by Tether, but the "most of the liquidity" rhetoric rings false. Honestly, crypto might crash now, sure, but long term I am confident we will see a crypto currency emerge as the global reserve currency. It just fits too well for it not to.
  - tw04 5y ago
    > It just fits too well for it not to. It prevents governments from controlling their own fiscal policy. It doesn’t fit AT ALL with the way any solvent government currently runs their country. The only place it fits are countries with unstable or nonexistent financial markets.
  - WalterSear 5y ago
    70% of *all* crypto trades involve Tether. How is this not 'most of the liquidity'?
- FDSGSG 5y ago
  >the coin which provides the most liquidity in the market is an obvious scam. But what does that actually imply? What's the scam? This isn't a black and white thing. Tether might not have sufficient assets to be able to redeem any USDT for USD, or Tether might actually have sufficient assets and willingness to redeem all USDT and then some... or anything in between. Tether being dishonest is one thing, Tether not being able to maintain the USD peg is another.
  - riffraff 5y ago
    But that's the point: the assets they have are not safe as treasury bills, and in a significant part they are backed by risky assets, including other stuff that depends on crypto, so if ever there is a bank run they will not be able to keep up with the redemptions. The fun bit is that few can actually redeem, and most of those who could have a vested interest in never doing it anyway!
  - chaostheory 5y ago
    The scam is Tether owns a brokerage that they used buy other crypto with their barely backed, worth much less than advertised stable coin which they falsely claim is worth exactly the same as USD. (Tether also pretended that they weren’t affiliated with Bitfinex, the aforementioned brokerage) Consequently, they’re artificially pumping the cryptos that they are buying. Once they artificially pump crypto, they then dump it. They’ve probably pumped and dumped several times now People are guessing that they’re doing this to regain reserves that were stolen by an untrustworthy bank that they previously used. Ie they were probably telling the truth in the past before their money was stolen. It’s similar to what happened with Mt Gox. What’s impressive to me is how the people at Tether are somehow 8 steps ahead of regulators, whereas Mt Gox just failed overnight. Imo regardless of Tether fuckery, I believe that the Ethereum platform has utility beyond speculation
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
0xdeadb00f 5y ago
I've seena crapload more commenters on here putting crypto in a positive light. It's only recently I've started to see some genuine opposition.
- TigeriusKirk 5y ago
  It's very easy to search and see HN has been heavily anti-crypto since the beginning, over a decade ago.
  - smt88 5y ago
    It seems that those early skeptics have been proven correct so far. We haven't seen crypto meaningfully improve anyone's life outside of the small minority of people who exited to fiat and made a lot of real money. The very mixed Bitcoin rollout in El Salvador by an authoritarian govt should also tell us that the fantasy of crypto enabling freedom from oppressive govt is also still unrealized.
  - 0xdeadb00f 5y ago
    Alright.. So then there must've been a time in between now and before where HN was accepting of it. Because I know for a fact I've seen posts and comments more so hyping up crypto currencies

WalterSear 5y ago

> Same goes for tether, majority of those involved in crypto know what they are doing, and the pump-up effect it's had to crypto. Not at all. While those at the executive level have some awareness, the rank and file that I interact with at crypto companies barely understand the tech, and have no knowledge at all of the environment. It's flabbergasting.

chaostheory 5y ago
Can you give examples of their lack of knowledge?
- WalterSear 5y ago
  It feels a little sneer-clubby to complain about people in this way online, but FFS, they really are obliged to understand their profession. * Anything about Tether, other than "it's the largest stablecoin." * That the primary users of their product in China are engaged in capital flight, rather than entrepreneurial speculation. * That the people yelling 'To the moon' on Twitter and Discord are excited about making easy money, not about developing projects on their platform. And that the swag and meme competitions they were running were doing little to nothing to advance them with the audience their product actually needed to court.
  - chaostheory 5y ago
    These are developers? I’m a bit shocked, but this confirms my gut feeling that crypto is a huge bubble driven by Tether. It only takes government regulation to burst it, which imo is inevitable.
    - WalterSear 5y ago
      Arguably worse, but slightly less shocking? People who are developing corporate strategy for their companies - ie: everything other than the code, but including some doing product development and (omgwtf) market research (!!)

knownjorbist 5y ago

Michael Burry recently took out a massive short position on BTC and is likely very deeply in the red at this point. Just like he is with Tesla. People who call once-in-a-lifetime events don't do it more than once, it's in the name.