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We keep expecting crypto to die but then again, we still have antivirus software that is spyware (avast), a scammy vpn industry, and a thriving anti vax movemen

We keep expecting crypto to die but then again, we still have antivirus software that is spyware (avast), a scammy vpn industry, and a thriving anti vax movement. No matter how absurd it is, it might stick around for a long time now

ur-whale 5y ago
> We keep expecting crypto to die Is that the royal "we", or do you mean to include other people that may or may not share your opinion?
- amalcon 5y ago
  Probably he means to include other people who do share his opinions, and not those who don't? "We" doesn't mean "everyone", or even "everyone who reads this"; it means "some contextual set of people of which I am a member".
avrionov 5y ago
This all true, but avast and the vpn industry are 2 orders of magnitude smaller than the crypto.
- astoor 5y ago
  And anti-virus and VPN industry problems don't pose a systemic risk to the Western economy (I say Western because China etc. have cracked down on cryptocurrency schemes).
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    Neither does crypto.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  Crypto sure has a vested intrerest in making it seem that way: https://www.investopedia.com/news/are-cryptos-high-trading-volumes-scam/ https://www.investopedia.com/news/are-cryptos-high-trading-v...
  - gentleman11 5y ago
    > But there's a problem here: Some cryptocurrency exchanges have been faking their volume numbers in order to raise the visibility of their businesses and bring in more customers. That's easy to do in the less-than-transparent world of global crypto trading. > Now, an effort is underway to force the exchanges to report real numbers. I can’t believe this isn’t fraud of some sort already
    - bhouston 5y ago
      It is fraud, it is called wash trading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wash_trade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wash_trade
WFHRenaissance 5y ago
I'm not a huge fan of the the current cryptocurrency scene, but I think it will remain very useful as a medium of exchange and store of value in unstable parts of the globe for years to come.
- criddell 5y ago
  It will remain a very useful medium of exchange? Are you saying that today it is a very useful medium of exchange? Are you using it that way?
  - abacadaba 5y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29496915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29496915
  - exdsq 5y ago
    It's better than trading pre-paid phone credit plans!
    - netcan 5y ago
      Have you ever paid for a sandwich with pre-paid phone credit? In places where it's used, it's surprisingly usable.
      - exdsq 5y ago
        Yes! But, you do get some bonuses with cryptocurrencies. Access to credit, ability to build an account history, etc. At the very least cryptocurrencies are a superset to M-Pesa etc. Plus some other geo-political perks like not being centralised around Chinese technologies (M-Pesa might not be, but its competitors are & underlying mobile tech is predominately Chinese).
  - agleason 5y ago
    If I need to move money between countries, it certainly is by far the easiest. Traveling in India trying to get my friend money has been an awful headache. With cryptocurrency, it's quite simple
UnpossibleJim 5y ago
I look at it like the lottery or casinos. I'm not a gambler exceptthe occasionalpoker game with friends, and I abhor casinos, but they make billions(?) Of dollars. Everyone has got Crypto figured out! They've read all the reports, and keep up with the graphs and this time! This time! The funny thing is, I clicked on a few articles about NFT's and the metaverse because I was interested in the programming behind it and now my morning feed is filled with articles about "How to invest in crypto!", "We can tell you how to beat th crypto market!", "Check out these super looking graphs of crypto prices!".
- astoor 5y ago
  I sometimes liken cryptocurrency coins and tokens to casino chips. They have no intrinsic value, but they do serve a purpose for some people, and drive a multi-billion industry. There are even some people who collect casino chips (exonumismatists). This analogy also suggests that they might not ever completely go away.
  - nraf 5y ago
    You could say (almost) the same thing about fiat money though...
    - astoor 5y ago
      Fiat can be used pretty widely, whereas casino tokens can only be used in casinos and cryptocurrency can only be used within the cryptocurrency ecosystem (noting that casinos and the cryptocurrency ecosystem both need fiat on and off ramps to function).
- skeeter2020 5y ago
  except the business model for casinos and lotteries is pretty simple: straight-forward mariginal odds that favour the house and maximize throughput. This is not the case with crypto.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
vadansky 5y ago
That's the takeaway from "Betting on Zero". I kept watching to see the moment when the Ponzi scheme falls apart and Bill Ackman comes out vindicated, and it never came. It really is the case that "The market can stay irrational longer then you can stay solvent". There might be an escape velocity of irrationality where a Ponzi schemes can become legitimate.
- lostmsu 5y ago
  The funny thing is that you assume crypto enthusiasts are the irrational ones.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Ensorceled 5y ago
    They are spending $$$ for pictures of anthropomorphic monkies and pizzas that are small variants of similar pictures; that's pretty irrational.
    - lostmsu 5y ago
      That is no different from expensive picture collectors. That's a minority of participants.
      - Ensorceled 5y ago
        Expensive picture collectors may also be irrational ...
        lostmsu 5y ago
        The point is not that they are rational, but that you can't deem the whole crypto market irrational (what the parent does) just because it has NFTs, because then you'd have to deem the regular market irrational too because it has picture collectors. Both markets have some degree of irrationality, and the parent did not show that cryptos have more of it to justify preference of the regular market over crypto.
PhileinSophia 5y ago
[dead]
claaams 5y ago
Im naive, can you explain the scammy VPN industry to me?
- gentleman11 5y ago
  Well, the biggest example is when Facebook made a vpn to protect privacy but used it to data mine all your internet activity. There are a dozen or two dozen other companies doing this on a smaller scale https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/29/facebook-project-atlas/?guccounter=1 https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/29/facebook-project-atlas/?gu... https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/21/facebook-removes-onavo/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/21/facebook-removes-onavo/ https://www.pcmag.com/news/7-vpn-services-found-recording-user-logs-despite-no-log-pledge https://www.pcmag.com/news/7-vpn-services-found-recording-us...
tata71 5y ago
Yes, billionaires and little people will suddenly forget the easiest, fairest, securest way they've done finance on the internet.
api 5y ago
This phenomenon itself could be here to stay and even grow in the future if world GDP continues to increase. There's just less and less downward pressure on things as the economy grows, less "natural selection" so to speak. Scammy or outright broken things can stumble along for a long time. Look at all the startups stumbling along for years and years with almost $0 revenue and a poor or nonexistent product. I wouldn't have a problem with this if there wasn't so much inequality at the human level. A schoolteacher should not be struggling to pay their rent when obvious bullshit NFTs are selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars and startups with barely a product and no revenue are raising A rounds.
time_to_smile 5y ago
> it might stick around for a long time now This is the most important financial lesson of the pandemic for me. There is something deeply wrong with many parts of our economy and financial system, any one who is an expert in any specific area will tell you that things seem weird and don't make sense. A great example of this is ad tech. I've worked in ad tech for many years and strongly agree with Tim Hwang's Subprime Attention Crisis. Everything is a house of cards, fraud (intentional or not) is wide spread. However one thing that Hwang (or anyone pointing out that our systems are houses of cards, scams, or otherwise unsound) fails to answer is the question "what makes it fall apart?" I'm a huge fan of at least the film version of the Big Short, which does a great job exploring the 2008 financial crisis and how unstable our financial system can be. But it's important to recognize that a key part of everyone's discovery isn't just realizing "this is all bullshit" it's realizing precisely when and why reality will come crashing in. There's even a great scene where Michael Burry calls the major banks and realizes that they essentially won't let the market collapse until they get their piece, that they can essentially push back reality a bit until they get theirs. So crypto may be unquestionably a ponzi scheme, but what will make that scheme fall apart? ad tech might be mostly bs, but what will make everyone stop paying into it? stock prices maybe completely out of line with reality (with inflation and cash injections who even knows) but what will force them to face reality? We may all be living in la la land, a wild fever dream, but pointing out you're in a dream doesn't always make you wake up. The question is "what precisely will wake us up". And for all the things that seem very wrong with our current world, I have yet to hear anyone give a concise answer or even guess as to what this is. If the pandemic didn't knock over our house of cards, I'm not entirely sure what will or when it will happen. If Wile E. Coyote never looks down after running of a cliff, will he still fall?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
asdfsd234234444 5y ago
tell me you don't understand crypto without telling me you don't understand crypto

ur-whale 5y ago

> We keep expecting crypto to die Is that the royal "we", or do you mean to include other people that may or may not share your opinion?

amalcon 5y ago
Probably he means to include other people who do share his opinions, and not those who don't? "We" doesn't mean "everyone", or even "everyone who reads this"; it means "some contextual set of people of which I am a member".

avrionov 5y ago

This all true, but avast and the vpn industry are 2 orders of magnitude smaller than the crypto.

astoor 5y ago
And anti-virus and VPN industry problems don't pose a systemic risk to the Western economy (I say Western because China etc. have cracked down on cryptocurrency schemes).
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Neither does crypto.
marginalia_nu 5y ago
Crypto sure has a vested intrerest in making it seem that way: https://www.investopedia.com/news/are-cryptos-high-trading-volumes-scam/ https://www.investopedia.com/news/are-cryptos-high-trading-v...
- gentleman11 5y ago
  > But there's a problem here: Some cryptocurrency exchanges have been faking their volume numbers in order to raise the visibility of their businesses and bring in more customers. That's easy to do in the less-than-transparent world of global crypto trading. > Now, an effort is underway to force the exchanges to report real numbers. I can’t believe this isn’t fraud of some sort already
  - bhouston 5y ago
    It is fraud, it is called wash trading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wash_trade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wash_trade

WFHRenaissance 5y ago

I'm not a huge fan of the the current cryptocurrency scene, but I think it will remain very useful as a medium of exchange and store of value in unstable parts of the globe for years to come.

criddell 5y ago
It will remain a very useful medium of exchange? Are you saying that today it is a very useful medium of exchange? Are you using it that way?
- abacadaba 5y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29496915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29496915
- exdsq 5y ago
  It's better than trading pre-paid phone credit plans!
  - netcan 5y ago
    Have you ever paid for a sandwich with pre-paid phone credit? In places where it's used, it's surprisingly usable.
    - exdsq 5y ago
      Yes! But, you do get some bonuses with cryptocurrencies. Access to credit, ability to build an account history, etc. At the very least cryptocurrencies are a superset to M-Pesa etc. Plus some other geo-political perks like not being centralised around Chinese technologies (M-Pesa might not be, but its competitors are & underlying mobile tech is predominately Chinese).
- agleason 5y ago
  If I need to move money between countries, it certainly is by far the easiest. Traveling in India trying to get my friend money has been an awful headache. With cryptocurrency, it's quite simple

UnpossibleJim 5y ago

I look at it like the lottery or casinos. I'm not a gambler exceptthe occasionalpoker game with friends, and I abhor casinos, but they make billions(?) Of dollars. Everyone has got Crypto figured out! They've read all the reports, and keep up with the graphs and this time! This time! The funny thing is, I clicked on a few articles about NFT's and the metaverse because I was interested in the programming behind it and now my morning feed is filled with articles about "How to invest in crypto!", "We can tell you how to beat th crypto market!", "Check out these super looking graphs of crypto prices!".

astoor 5y ago
I sometimes liken cryptocurrency coins and tokens to casino chips. They have no intrinsic value, but they do serve a purpose for some people, and drive a multi-billion industry. There are even some people who collect casino chips (exonumismatists). This analogy also suggests that they might not ever completely go away.
- nraf 5y ago
  You could say (almost) the same thing about fiat money though...
  - astoor 5y ago
    Fiat can be used pretty widely, whereas casino tokens can only be used in casinos and cryptocurrency can only be used within the cryptocurrency ecosystem (noting that casinos and the cryptocurrency ecosystem both need fiat on and off ramps to function).
skeeter2020 5y ago
except the business model for casinos and lotteries is pretty simple: straight-forward mariginal odds that favour the house and maximize throughput. This is not the case with crypto.
- ceejayoz 5y ago

vadansky 5y ago

That's the takeaway from "Betting on Zero". I kept watching to see the moment when the Ponzi scheme falls apart and Bill Ackman comes out vindicated, and it never came. It really is the case that "The market can stay irrational longer then you can stay solvent". There might be an escape velocity of irrationality where a Ponzi schemes can become legitimate.

lostmsu 5y ago
The funny thing is that you assume crypto enthusiasts are the irrational ones.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Ensorceled 5y ago
  They are spending $$$ for pictures of anthropomorphic monkies and pizzas that are small variants of similar pictures; that's pretty irrational.
  - lostmsu 5y ago
    That is no different from expensive picture collectors. That's a minority of participants.
    - Ensorceled 5y ago
      Expensive picture collectors may also be irrational ...
      - lostmsu 5y ago
        The point is not that they are rational, but that you can't deem the whole crypto market irrational (what the parent does) just because it has NFTs, because then you'd have to deem the regular market irrational too because it has picture collectors. Both markets have some degree of irrationality, and the parent did not show that cryptos have more of it to justify preference of the regular market over crypto.

PhileinSophia 5y ago

[dead]

claaams 5y ago

Im naive, can you explain the scammy VPN industry to me?

gentleman11 5y ago
Well, the biggest example is when Facebook made a vpn to protect privacy but used it to data mine all your internet activity. There are a dozen or two dozen other companies doing this on a smaller scale https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/29/facebook-project-atlas/?guccounter=1 https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/29/facebook-project-atlas/?gu... https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/21/facebook-removes-onavo/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/21/facebook-removes-onavo/ https://www.pcmag.com/news/7-vpn-services-found-recording-user-logs-despite-no-log-pledge https://www.pcmag.com/news/7-vpn-services-found-recording-us...

tata71 5y ago

Yes, billionaires and little people will suddenly forget the easiest, fairest, securest way they've done finance on the internet.

api 5y ago

This phenomenon itself could be here to stay and even grow in the future if world GDP continues to increase. There's just less and less downward pressure on things as the economy grows, less "natural selection" so to speak. Scammy or outright broken things can stumble along for a long time. Look at all the startups stumbling along for years and years with almost $0 revenue and a poor or nonexistent product. I wouldn't have a problem with this if there wasn't so much inequality at the human level. A schoolteacher should not be struggling to pay their rent when obvious bullshit NFTs are selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars and startups with barely a product and no revenue are raising A rounds.

time_to_smile 5y ago

> it might stick around for a long time now This is the most important financial lesson of the pandemic for me. There is something deeply wrong with many parts of our economy and financial system, any one who is an expert in any specific area will tell you that things seem weird and don't make sense. A great example of this is ad tech. I've worked in ad tech for many years and strongly agree with Tim Hwang's Subprime Attention Crisis. Everything is a house of cards, fraud (intentional or not) is wide spread. However one thing that Hwang (or anyone pointing out that our systems are houses of cards, scams, or otherwise unsound) fails to answer is the question "what makes it fall apart?" I'm a huge fan of at least the film version of the Big Short, which does a great job exploring the 2008 financial crisis and how unstable our financial system can be. But it's important to recognize that a key part of everyone's discovery isn't just realizing "this is all bullshit" it's realizing precisely when and why reality will come crashing in. There's even a great scene where Michael Burry calls the major banks and realizes that they essentially won't let the market collapse until they get their piece, that they can essentially push back reality a bit until they get theirs. So crypto may be unquestionably a ponzi scheme, but what will make that scheme fall apart? ad tech might be mostly bs, but what will make everyone stop paying into it? stock prices maybe completely out of line with reality (with inflation and cash injections who even knows) but what will force them to face reality? We may all be living in la la land, a wild fever dream, but pointing out you're in a dream doesn't always make you wake up. The question is "what precisely will wake us up". And for all the things that seem very wrong with our current world, I have yet to hear anyone give a concise answer or even guess as to what this is. If the pandemic didn't knock over our house of cards, I'm not entirely sure what will or when it will happen. If Wile E. Coyote never looks down after running of a cliff, will he still fall?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

asdfsd234234444 5y ago

tell me you don't understand crypto without telling me you don't understand crypto