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Crypto has boom and bust cycles. It will be back again, and mania will happen again.
by AviationAtom 4y ago
Crypto has boom and bust cycles. It will be back again, and mania will happen again.
- paulryanrogers 4y agoPast booms are no guarantee of future booms. Fundamentals of crypto don't appear sound to me. So I wouldn't put much stock in them.
- mlyle 4y agoYah. I think distributed ledgers are here to stay, as are some tokens of stored value. But I don't think the insane bidding up of many tokens will ever happen again.
- la_fayette 4y agoHaha, I lived through so many of these cycles im crypto, e.g., the ICO scams of 2017 and yet everybody said, now crypto is dead...
- geerlingguy 4y agoHow many of those cycles were decades-long?
- paraph1n 4y ago> I think distributed ledgers are here to stay What exactly makes you think that? As far as I can tell, it's still unclear if distributed ledgers are really effective tools for much of anything. What real problems have they solved?
- st34m 4y agoIt's quite useful for buying drugs.
- AviationAtom 4y agoDon't hear of as many murder for hire plots involving it these days though
- mlyle 4y agoNon-repudiation is an important problem. Some things we can rely upon trusted third parties, but all kinds of things we rely on imperfect systems with notaries and trusted third parties can be more effectively solved with ledgers. A whole lot of the interesting applications are non-monetary-- proving that a record was produced and made available before a certain time and has not been tampered with since. As a world economy, we spend like $100B/year on notarizing things and related kinds of non-repudiation record keeping. If it was really cheap, we'd do much more. And a big fraction of this could be done cheaper and with a higher agree of assurance by distributed ledgers than notaries.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hiq 4y ago> big fraction of this could be done cheaper and with a higher agree of assurance by distributed ledgers than notaries These theoretical benefits have been around for 10+ years with little to show for it. Ledger-based solutions tend to focus on a tiny technical step of a big process without considering whether that's a bottleneck or even a non-negligible part and whether improving it actually results in a better solution. I used to sympathize and engage with the theoretical arguments; but at this point a more productive approach is: if the advantages are such and such, where are the companies benefiting from this competitive advantage? Maybe this competitive advantage doesn't exist at all?
- mlyle 4y ago> I used to sympathize and engage with the theoretical arguments; but at this point a more productive approach is: if the advantages are such and such, Distributed ledgers are being used for real business cases in banking. Realizing these full benefits will take a very slow process of societal adoption and legal/evidentiary recognition. I said "not going away". These use cases are going to slowly grow and become ubiquitous, but it will be a very slow process. It isn't some overnight disruption where notaries vanish and banking is dis-intermediated in the next 5 years. > where are the companies benefiting from this competitive advantage E.g. JP Morgan and Liink are quietly connecting hundreds of banks and using it to more robustly and quickly move payment-related information between banks.
- rvz 4y agoI don't know, maybe Stripe, Moneygram, TransferGo, Namecheap, Porkbun, etc seem to think otherwise? These distributed ledgers are here to stay in fact. Unless in less than 5 years or so, they are all going to go away 100% totally guaranteed?
- AviationAtom 4y agoIt'll happen again. It will just be a new set of coins/tokens, with new promises of new utility, and a new set of gullible people being takem advantage of. The sad part is schemes of the sort damage the image of actual future usefulness of blockchain technology. For now the crypto winter sets in, until the next thaw.
- DonHopkins 4y agoPaperclips are here to stay, but would you invest in a company that only makes paperclip maximizers? https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/paperclip-maximizer https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/paperclip-maximizer
- mlyle 4y agoNowhere did I suggest investing in crypto (indeed, I have a track record of the opposite, and I was mostly agreeing with someone who was suggesting the opposite), so your comment is unhelpful.
- burnished 4y agoBe the paperclip maximizer, instead https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/ https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/
- junofan 4y agoGeneral sentiment is too many people made too much money not to give it another go.
- unicornmama 4y agoPyramids don't resolve upside down.
- baby 4y agoYet everyone will tell you that the stock market only goes up
- cjf4 4y agoThe stock market does two things crypto doesn't: - generates consistent cash flows - produces real economic value
- jcranmer 4y agoThe Japanese stock market peaked December 29, 1989. It has yet to reach those heights again, 32 years later.
- brokencode 4y agoThe stock market goes up because the world economy goes up, allowing companies to make more profit. Someday that might stop, but it’s been going strong since the industrial revolution. Cryptocurrencies don’t have that kind of track record. They also provide dubious value to society at best currently.
- bobthepanda 4y agoAlso this is true of the American stock market, where companies * represent a broad swathe of the diverse American economy and more or less correlate with it as a whole * have to issue regular, public, audited statements about their balance sheets Crypto is none of those things.
- AviationAtom 4y agoThe next will be the same as this one, s*tcoins will lose most value, while Bitcoin and Ethereum will retain a reasonable amount of value. The problem is suckers think the altcoins are going to be their ticket to riches. Those that get in early do indeed gain, but those that are late to the scheme end up holding the bag.
- tempsy 4y agoat this point there’s so much investment and attention dedicated to it that it will be willed into continued relevancy as much as anything happening organicly
- tootie 4y agoThe fundamental unit of value backing crypto is mania.
- dehrmann 4y agoHow are those beanie babies doing?
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y agoBeanie babies and pokemon cards actually did quite well in this last mania.
- thebrain 4y agoBeanie babies are actually a tangible object though. :)
- opportune 4y agoStill waiting on the next gold rush to unload all my shovels
- sgt101 4y agoJust like tulips!
- maxwell 4y agoEvery pyramid scheme eventually runs out of new suckers.
- BonoboIO 4y agoLike tulips. Still waiting for the bull market there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
- carlivar 4y agoYes, I referenced tulip mania to the Coinbase recruiter. It's probably going to collapse worse.
- BonoboIO 4y agoLosing everything ... what a nightmare „Taiwanese Ends His Life After Losing $2 Million Luna Investment„ https://coinquora.com/taiwanese-ends-his-life-after-losing-2-million-luna-investment/ https://coinquora.com/taiwanese-ends-his-life-after-losing-2...
- anonporridge 4y agoFun fact, Tulip mania is mostly a myth. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-tulip-fever-180964915/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-... > So if tulipmania wasn’t actually a calamity, why was it made out to be one? We have tetchy Christian moralists to blame for that. With great wealth comes great social anxiety, or as historian Simon Schama writes in The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, “The prodigious quality of their success went to their heads, but it also made them a bit queasy.” All the outlandish stories of economic ruin, of an innocent sailor thrown in prison for eating a tulip bulb, of chimney sweeps wading into the market in hopes of striking it rich—those come from propaganda pamphlets published by Dutch Calvinists worried that the tulip-propelled consumerism boom would lead to societal decay. Their insistence that such great wealth was ungodly has even stayed with us to this day.
- ProjectArcturis 4y ago"merchants really did engage in a frantic tulip trade, and they paid incredibly high prices for some bulbs. And when a number of buyers announced they couldn’t pay the high price previously agreed upon, the market did fall apart and cause a small crisis—but only because it undermined social expectations."
- Animats 4y agoMaybe not. Crypto has never been through a general recession. A lot of net-loss stuff, from Uber to WeWork, was propped up by zero interest rates. That's over. There will be other bubbles in future, but probably in other areas.
- nikhilsimha 4y agoThat logic didn’t apply to tulip bulbs
- BonoboIO 4y agoThe next wirecard?
- anonporridge 4y agoThe problem for Coinbase, is that on the next boom cycle, a significant number of traditional stock exchanges will be slurping their milkshake. Coinbase has only gotten as big as it is because they were effectively the most legit American exchange selling crypto. With Robinhood, Square, Paypal, and even legacy exchanges getting in the game, they won't have that advantage next time around.