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This is a great perspective and I largely agree with it. There needs to be a "return to sanity" market-wide. That said, regarding your perspective on crypto's

This is a great perspective and I largely agree with it. There needs to be a "return to sanity" market-wide. That said, regarding your perspective on crypto's limited utility, I just want to point out there's a crypto few folks have paid attention to which actually addresses your issues head-on: Nano is a feeless and PoW-less crypto which has been around for a few years and was started by one of the early contributors to Bitcoin. Nano is not a "hot coin." It's seen little market speculation and it's not programmable and riding the smart contract wave; it does one thing well: transacting. It's free (as in truly and completely free, fee-less, zero cost), near-instant (<1 second transactions/validations), and green a(~0.1Wh per transaction, or for context about 1/6 millionth of the energy cost of a single Bitcoin transaction). It's also decentralized, without being mined/staked, so it's not controlled according to the interests of miners/whales. This seems to me the holy grail, so I'm always surprised that discussions of crypto on HN don't mention it or even that that veterans like yourself don't seem to know about it. Maybe it's still too young/obscure? But I think it will see significant interest post-crash as it fulfills the initial promise of crypto—it's money you can by a coffee with, send across borders at zero cost, make micro-micro payments with, etc... you know, like real money, just better.

honkdaddy 4y ago
But it's not money you can buy coffee with... In April it spiked up to more than 5x what it's trading at now. In the last few weeks it seems to be trending down, isn't this just as speculative as any other coin?
- ordinaryradical 4y ago
  It will need to become more stable, certainly, but I think that's a function of how the market interacts with it. If the majority of Nano is being priced based on speculation through exchanges, it will continue to have this kind of volatility. But if money continues to enter the system via other use-cases, aka its actual utility, volatility will diminish. Pricing becomes less about speculating on it as an asset and more about utility as a means of transaction. The reason you don't see this with other cryptos, by the way, is that their utility is severely limited (in a technical sense) and therefore the underlying value is entirely speculative.

honkdaddy 4y ago

But it's not money you can buy coffee with... In April it spiked up to more than 5x what it's trading at now. In the last few weeks it seems to be trending down, isn't this just as speculative as any other coin?

ordinaryradical 4y ago
It will need to become more stable, certainly, but I think that's a function of how the market interacts with it. If the majority of Nano is being priced based on speculation through exchanges, it will continue to have this kind of volatility. But if money continues to enter the system via other use-cases, aka its actual utility, volatility will diminish. Pricing becomes less about speculating on it as an asset and more about utility as a means of transaction. The reason you don't see this with other cryptos, by the way, is that their utility is severely limited (in a technical sense) and therefore the underlying value is entirely speculative.